The Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John by Hendrick ter Brugghen is an oil painting, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

When discovered in a bombed out church in South Hackney, London in 1956, it was unknown, but by the time it appeared in Sotheby's salesroom in November of that year it was recognized as an important example of Utrecht Caravaggism.

[9] The low horizon and the height at which this work, as an altarpiece would have been displayed, brings the viewer in direct confrontation with the skull and bones, telling us where we are in geographically (Golgotha, the place of a skull) and existentially (in the form of a memento mori).

[1] Perhaps the strongest indication that the picture is situated in the context of the Counter-Reformation in Utrecht, and thus would have been painted for a Catholic client, is the unnatural, archaic rendering of the blood from Christ's wounds.

Christ's blood looks like it has been painted on the picture plane, and could thus serve as a strong symbol of the Eucharist.

[1] This motif of blood was frequently employed in painting before 1400, and shortly after, such as in a Jan van Eyck Crucifixion (1430) in Berlin, but was rarely used in Ter Brugghen's time due to the iconoclasm of the Calvinists and the post-Tridentine Catholic theologians.

[9] The composition has been compared to that of a widely distributed (by Ter Brugghen's time) 1511 engraving by Albrecht Dürer, along with the Calvary of Hendrik van Rijn (1363), which the painter would have seen in St. John's Church, Utrecht, and the Crucifixions of the German Mathis Grünewald (c. 1470 – 1528).