The Dead Christ with the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene

The episode: the body taken down

The title names three people and a moment. The Lamentation is the pause between the Deposition and the Entombment, the interval in which the body has come off the cross and has not yet gone into the tomb. The gospels give the burial but not this pause; painting invented it so that grief could be given a scene of its own. What fixes the subject is the company: the mother, and the Magdalene, who is named at the cross and again at the tomb.

Where it falls in the cycle

Between the Crucifixion and the Entombment, and therefore inside the last hours of the Friday. It is the point at which the narrative stops advancing. Nineteen titles in this catalogue name a Dead Christ and twenty-five a Lamentation, which is a fair measure of how much of the cycle collects at this one halt.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives Agnolo Bronzino as the painter, 1530 as the date of creation, and the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy, as the location. It measures 100 x 105 cm, close to square. The style is entered as Mannerism Late Renaissance and the artist as Italian. The measured palette reads as brown and red. Nothing in the entry concerns the commission, the altar it may have served, or its route to Florence, so none of that is stated here.