Christ Bearing the Cross, with a Dominican Friar

Christ, robed in deep red, shoulders the cross on the road to Calvary and turns his gaze back toward a tiny Dominican friar kneeling in prayer at the lower left. The friar's miniature scale is a convention marking him as the devout patron who paid for the panel, drawn into Christ's own path of suffering. Attributed to the shadowy Barna da Siena - a painter known mostly through later tradition - the intimate work fuses the gold-ground splendor of the Sienese school with a current of private, ardent devotion, the worshipper following his Lord step for step.