Rembrandt's large drypoint etching known as The Three Crosses, produced in multiple states between 1653 and around 1660, is widely considered the greatest single religious print in the history of Western art. It is also among the most technically adventurous: in its third and fourth states, Rembrandt reworked the plate so dramatically - cutting new lines directly into the copper, creating violent dark passages - that the image was transformed from a crowded narrative of the Crucifixion into something approaching an apocalyptic vision. The four states document not merely a technical evolution but a theological deepening of extraordinary intensity.
The Biblical Source
The scene draws primarily on Luke 23:44-47 and Matthew 27:45: the darkness that covered the land from the sixth to the ninth hour of the Crucifixion, the tearing of the temple curtain, and the centurion's declaration. Matthew 27:45 - 'From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land' - is the text that the final states of the print make visible: not the historical scene of three crosses with a crowd, but the cosmic darkness of the moment when, in Paul's language, God 'made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God' (2 Corinthians 5:21).
The Four States
The first state (c. 1653) shows the Crucifixion with remarkable compositional richness: the three crosses, the crowd below including horsemen, weeping women, soldiers casting lots, and in the center a shaft of divine light falling on Christ's body. The second state refines this composition. The third and fourth states - made perhaps in the late 1650s - are transformed: Rembrandt burnished away large areas of the first composition and reworked the plate with deep, rough drypoint lines that create a darkness unlike anything in printmaking before or since. Most of the crowd disappears. The centurion on horseback at left is replaced by a figure in a broad hat that many scholars have identified (controversially) as an allusion to Philip II of Spain in a borrowed device from a Venetian medal. The shaft of light now isolates Christ with a severity that makes the scene cosmic rather than historical.
Theological Resonance
The evolution from states one to four has been read as a spiritual autobiography: the young mature Rembrandt's confident narrative vision giving way to the late, ruined, bereaved Rembrandt's confrontation with the existential darkness of the Cross. The theology of the late states is not comforting: it does not show redemption achieved or resurrection anticipated but rather the absolute desolation of Matthew 27:46 - 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' - made visible as literal darkness. The light that remains falls on Christ alone; everything else is shadow. This is the theology of Holy Saturday, the silence between Crucifixion and Resurrection that has become a persistent concern of 20th-century theologians from Hans Urs von Balthasar to Jurgen Moltmann.
Technical Mastery
Drypoint - drawing directly on the copper plate rather than through an acid-etched ground - creates 'burrs' of raised copper around each line that hold extra ink and print as velvety, rich shadows. These burrs wear rapidly, so early impressions of the third and fourth states are far darker and more atmospheric than later ones. The Rembrandt House Museum possesses the copper plate itself, one of very few surviving Rembrandt plates.
Good Friday Darkness as Cosmic Event
The darkness that Matthew 27:45 describes ('from noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land') has been interpreted variously as a solar eclipse, a sandstorm, a miraculous darkness, or a theological symbol. For Rembrandt - and for the Reformed tradition in which he was formed - the darkness of Good Friday was not primarily a meteorological event but a theological one: the moment in which the full weight of human sin was taken on by the one who bore it ('he made him who had no sin to be sin for us,' 2 Corinthians 5:21) and in which the judgment that sin deserved fell on the innocent one who stood in its place. The final states of the Three Crosses make this darkness visible not as narrative detail but as theological reality: the chaotic dark lines that consume the crowd, the violent scratches that obliterate the sky, are not description but interpretation. They answer the question that Matthew 27:46 asks: 'why have you forsaken me?' with the only honest visual response: because this is what the forsakenness of sin looks like when the Son of God experiences it for our sake.
The States as Spiritual Journey
The evolution of the Three Crosses across its four states has been read by art historians as a visual diary of Rembrandt's spiritual biography in the 1650s. This was the decade of his bankruptcy proceedings (1656), the forced sale of his house and collection (1657-58), and the reorganization of his business under Hendrickje's name. The first state's crowded, detailed, dramatically lit narrative scene belongs to a man still in command of his world; the third and fourth states' radical darkness and compositional dissolution belong to a man who has been through the kind of stripping that mystics describe as the dark night of the soul. The Dutch Calvinist tradition in which Rembrandt was formed had no formal doctrine of mystical experience, but the tradition of the Psalms - which he illustrated in dozens of drawings and etchings - knows the experience of divine abandonment (Psalm 22, Psalm 88) as the precondition of a deeper faith. The Three Crosses, in its final state, is the etching of Psalm 88: 'darkness is my closest friend.'
Visiting
Outstanding impressions of The Three Crosses are in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the British Museum London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The Rembrandthuis (Rembrandt House Museum) in Amsterdam displays the actual copper plate among its extraordinary collection of Rembrandt prints in their original working context.