What Our Saviour Saw from the Cross

Tissot's revolutionary watercolour imagines the Crucifixion from Christ's perspective - looking downward from the cross - so that the viewer occupies the visual position of the crucified Christ looking down at the mocking crowd, soldiers, weeping women, and gaping soldiers described in Luke 23:27-38 and John 19:25-27. The painting is a meditation on John 3:16 ('For God so loved the world') and Luke 23:34 ('Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing'), placing the theology of divine love-in-suffering in the first person: this is what love sees. Tissot's reversal of the standard spectator's viewpoint is among the most theologically provocative compositional decisions in the history of Christian art.