Lamentation of Christ

The halt before the tomb

The Lamentation is the mourning over the body between the taking down from the cross and the burial. It is a devotional expansion rather than a reported event: the gospels move from the deposition to the sepulchre without stopping, and the mourners gathered around the body in painting are assembled from the several accounts of who stood at the cross.

Its place in the sequence

Late Friday, after the Deposition, before the Entombment, and two scenes short of the Resurrection. In a Passion series it is the slowest panel, and northern workshops of the late fifteenth century often set it beneath the cross itself so that the previous episode stayed visible behind this one. Twenty-five works in this catalogue carry Lamentation in the title, the largest single cluster of any episode here.

The record

The catalogue gives Albrecht Durer, 1498, and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Germany. It measures 120 x 150 cm — horizontal, and large enough for a group. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as German; the subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as red. The entry records no patron, no church of origin and no later owner, so none is asserted.