Rembrandt began his career as a printmaker around 1630 with small etchings of episodes from Christ's childhood and capped it twenty-five years later with The Three Crosses, the climactic event of the New Testament. By this date he had produced more than 250 spirited etchings, composing directly on copper plates with the same ease as drawing on paper. He was soon using a drypoint tool to raise fragile curls of copper, or burr, along the edges of his incisions to capture extra ink and print velvety black accents. Because burr wears down rapidly during printing, Rembrandt reinforced the weakening drypoint lines in The Three Crosses three times before they gave out and no longer satisfied him. Rather than abandoning his largest plate, the artist drew upon a lifetime of meditation on the Bible to create a final fourth state of unequaled pathos and power. With deeply gouged drypoint lines he drastically transformed the plate to realize an impassioned vision of the swirling dark chaos and piercing shafts of light said to accompany Christ's last moments. John Ittman, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections, 2009.