Rembrandt's The Three Crosses is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest prints ever made, and its transformation across four states of reworking on a single copper plate is one of the most radical artistic decisions in the history of printmaking. Executed as a large-format etching with drypoint measuring 38.5 by 45 centimeters, the print depicts the Crucifixion of Christ as described in Luke 23:33-49, with the three crosses of Christ and the two thieves rising against a charged, turbulent sky. But it is the dramatic difference between the first three states and the heavily reworked fourth state - in which Rembrandt burnished away much of the composition and introduced a shaft of apocalyptic darkness descending from the upper left - that makes the work one of the most theologically concentrated images in Western art.
The first state of the print (begun around 1653) shows the Crucifixion in conventional Baroque terms: the three crosses, the crowd of witnesses below, the centurion on horseback to the right, and - most remarkably - a great cone of light radiating from the center cross downward onto the figures below, representing the divine radiance that accompanied Christ's death. The scene has the quality of theatrical illumination: the darkness surrounds it, but the light is ordered and purposive, focused on the event's significance. The crowd reacts with appropriate gestures of grief, recognition, and conversion.
The fourth state - reworked perhaps ten years after the first, around 1660 - is almost a different image. Rembrandt burnished away the carefully depicted crowd, replacing recognizable figures with ghostly, barely legible forms. The ordered cone of light from the first state is replaced by a dense shaft of dark that descends from the upper left and falls across the scene in a sweeping diagonal, almost obscuring the crosses themselves. The dramatic clarity of the original has been replaced with turbulence and obscurity. Only the central cross - Christ's - and the centurion on horseback at the right are still clearly legible.
The theological significance of this transformation cannot be overstated. Rembrandt was responding, with extraordinary precision, to Luke 23:44: 'It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining.' The synoptic Gospels - Matthew 27:45, Mark 15:33, Luke 23:44 - all record this darkness, which theologians from the early church onward interpreted as a cosmic response to the death of the Son of God: creation mourning its Creator, divine judgment falling on the sin that required the cross, or the hiding of God's face at the moment of his Son's forsakenness (Matthew 27:46: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'). By reworking the plate to introduce dense, graphic darkness that obscures the scene, Rembrandt was not making an aesthetic decision but a theological one: he was making visible what the Gospels describe as visible - a darkness so profound that it reorganized the visual field of the event.
The centurion at the lower right, still legible in the fourth state, is the figure who in Luke 23:47 declares 'surely this was a righteous man.' Rembrandt's positioning of this confession within the context of the reworked darkness transforms its meaning: the centurion's recognition of Christ's righteousness happens not in ordinary perceptual conditions but in a darkness that announces divine judgment and grief simultaneously. The confession emerges from chaos as the only clear voice.
The commission context is unknown; the Three Crosses was almost certainly a self-initiated work, reflecting Rembrandt's sustained private meditation on the Passion. By the 1650s he had been producing biblical etchings for twenty-five years and had developed a technical and theological sophistication that allowed him to use the material constraints of printmaking - the irreversibility of marks on copper, the variable results of drypoint burr wear - as expressive tools.
The print exists in approximately 150-180 known impressions across all states, distributed among the world's major print collections. The Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Bibliotheca Hertziana hold important impressions. The differences between states are most dramatically visible when first- and fourth-state impressions are displayed together, as occasionally happens in major Rembrandt exhibitions.
The legacy of the Three Crosses extends beyond printmaking into theological reflection on the nature of divine judgment and grace. Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God (1972), which meditates at length on the darkness of Golgotha as a revelation of divine solidarity with human suffering, belongs to a tradition of reflection that Rembrandt's print visualized three centuries earlier.
Further reading: Christopher White, Rembrandt as an Etcher; Erik Hinterding and Jaco Rutgers, Rembrandt: The New Hollstein; Kenneth Clark, An Introduction to Rembrandt; Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God; H.W. Janson, History of Art (for comparative context).
The radical transformation between the third and fourth states of The Three Crosses is, among other things, a meditation on how theological understanding changes over time. The third state shows what any observer at Golgotha would have seen: crosses, crowds, grief, confusion. The fourth state shows what the event meant - not historically but cosmically - with a darkness that erases easy perception and forces the viewer to see from within the event's own spiritual conditions rather than from the comfortable distance of historical description. Rembrandt's willingness to destroy his own achieved composition in order to paint the theological truth he had come to understand is itself a form of artistic theology: the work must change because the understanding has changed, and the copper plate - unlike a finished painting - allowed him to make that change visible as a process rather than hiding it under a new composition.
The Three Crosses also illuminates the theological significance of Rembrandt's medium. Etching is a medium of irreversibility: marks bitten into copper by acid cannot be unbitten. The decision to rework the plate in the fourth state - to burnish away achieved composition and introduce new, darker marks - was therefore an act of artistic self-mortification, a deliberate destruction of what had been accomplished. In this respect Rembrandt's treatment of the plate mirrors the theological content it now depicts: the fourth-state darkness is not simply painted but enacted through the destruction of the earlier, lighter composition. The medium becomes the message in a way that painting on canvas could never achieve.