Dead Christ with Angels

An image assembled from the Passion

The dead Christ attended by angels is not a scene the gospels report. It is one of the devotional subjects built out of the Crucifixion after the fact: the body is present, the mourners are replaced by angels, and the hour is left unstated. Nineteen titles in this catalogue name a Dead Christ, and this is the kind that stands outside the sequence rather than inside it.

How it relates to the cycle

It shadows the Lamentation and the Entombment without occupying either position. The angels are the marker: mourners belong to a narrative, angels belong to an image. Sixteenth-century Florentine painting used the subject for altarpieces, where the body shown permanently is the point and a specific hour would work against it.

The record

The catalogue names Rosso Fiorentino, dates the work to 1526, and places it in the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, MA, US. No dimensions are recorded, so nothing is said here about scale or format. The style is entered as Mannerism Late Renaissance and the artist as Italian; the subject fields class the work as a single male figure. The measured palette reads as brown and yellow. The record carries no patron, no church of origin and no ownership history, and none is supplied.