The composition is dominated by a colouristic conception of painting in which the picture's predominant dark blue, brown and red hues are pierced through with near-white flashes of light.

The cloying regions of dark hues, such as the area of browns and near-black comprising the Golgothan terrain from which the saints emerge, intensify the sadness and horror of the crucifixion.

In the late years of his life, in such works as the Ecce Homo (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), and the Saint Margaret and the Dragon (Museo del Prado, Madrid), Titian used this method of contrasting of light and colour as a key—or even pivotal—tool for rousing in the viewer a dominant emotion of one kind or another.

[1][2] But this was not a practice the artist used in all his paintings from this period, and it is indeed in sharp contrast with The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, another depiction of human suffering Titian was completing at the same time he was working on the Crucifixion.

The sparse yet skillful highlights on Saint Dominic's head and the expansive earthy tones defining Christ's feet bear a striking resemblance to the suggestive technique observed in Titian's unfinished works.

[6] The bronze and yellow tones of Christ's skin were used often in paintings of the Venetian Renaissance, but with the Crucifixion the application of this sickly hue is unusually bold, and with a high degree of contrast across the modeling.

Saint Mary stands in the indistinct and nearly blacked out bottom left corner of the canvas, but as her form rises, the dark blues of her mantle are given firm outline against the eerily glowing region to the rear.

Her face is sunken and her eyes are flecked with spots of red, a theme that would be revisited centuries later by painters such as Antoine-Jean Gros (in The Plague at Jaffa) and the colourist Eugène Delacroix (in The Massacre at Chios, and others).

The hand on the foreshortened left arm of the figure of Saint John is once again the object of an exercise in contrast, the dark fingers being delineated by traces of white light.

The Crucifixion is signed on the foot of the cross TITIANVS F. 1558, and was installed as an altarpiece in the high altar of the sanctuary of the church of San Domenico in Ancona on July 12, 1558.

Titian had previously used the same depiction of the crucified Christ on a larger scale in at least two instances in the years prior: for the Crucifixions in the Monastery at Escorial (between late 1554 and 1556) and the Church of San Domenico in Ancona (between 1556 and 1558).

Yet, overall, the painting possesses a painterly quality that contributes some visual fluency to the composition, suggesting Titian's involvement to align Orazio's promotional piece with his own contemporary works for Philip.

However, it significantly differs from the static and refined works typically created by Orazio and other pupils, like Marco and Cesare Vecellio, for local patrons in the Veneto region in subsequent years.