On December 19, 2024, the first-year seminarians of our College visited Marc Chagall’s renowned painting, White Crucifixion, exhibited at Palazzo Cipolla on Via del Corso. Marc Chagall, a Russian-born French painter of Hasidic Jewish origin, was born in Lëzna, a city in Belarus, in 1887 and died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1985. He painted White Crucifixion in 1938, immediately after the infamous night between November 9 and 10, known as the “Night of Broken Glass.” This event marked a salient and programmatic escalation of Nazi anti-Semitic terror and violence, which deeply influenced Chagall’s work.
The painting vividly portrays scenes of destruction and exile. Synagogues burn, refugees flee with the Torah, and biblical patriarchs and a matriarch observe from the periphery, grounding the tragedy in Jewish tradition. At its center is Jesus, depicted as a crucified Jew adorned with a prayer shawl, symbolizing the righteous man who bears humanity’s collective suffering. Influenced by 14th-century Italian art, Chagall uses rich colors and symbolic imagery to create a profound visual narrative of persecution, resilience, and hope. At its heart, the cross shines with white light, symbolizing purity and the eternal interplay of life, death, and redemption.
For the seminarians, encountering this masterpiece was both a cultural and spiritual experience.
