Lamentation of Christ

The lamentation

The subject is the mourning over the body of Christ after the deposition and before the burial. It is a devotional expansion rather than a narrated gospel episode: the texts move from the taking down to the tomb without a pause, and painting inserted one. The convention gathers the Virgin, John, Mary Magdalene, and often Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus around the body.

Where it falls in the cycle

Between the Crucifixion and the Entombment, in the interval when the Passion has ended and the Resurrection has not begun. Netherlandish altarpieces used it as the closing panel of the sorrowful sequence, and its stillness is the reason it was placed there.

The record

The catalogue gives Rogier van der Weyden as the artist and 1463 as the date of creation, with the painting in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. It measures 110 by 96 centimetres. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as Flemish; the subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as ochre. No commission or ownership history appears in the record.