Francesco Francia, 'The Lamentation over the Dead Christ', about 1515-16

The Lamentation is described in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. Here, Christ’s crucified body is laid down outside the cave in which he will be entombed. The identity of the figures mourning Christ is not certain. Nicodemus or Saint Joseph of Arimathea kneels on the left with his hands clasped in prayer while Saint John the Evangelist, in red and green, supports the body of the dead Christ. The Virgin Mary stands in a gesture of sorrow and Mary Magdalene supports Christ’s feet. A veiled woman appears on the right, probably intended to be Mary Cleophas. She is now only partly visible as the right edge of the painting has been cut down.

Francia has devoted particular attention to the depiction of minute details, such as the figures' eyes, which are red with weeping, and the wounds on Christ’s forehead caused by the crown of thorns. The highlights on hair, especially on the loose rippling locks of Mary Magdalene, are painted with great delicacy. The figures are placed in an almost symmetrical arrangement, with the standing Virgin forming the apex of a broad-based triangle, giving the scene a sense of gravity and stillness. Saint John’s head echoes the angle of Christ’s, and Mary Magdalene’s echoes that of the Virgin; this repetition creates a sense of restrained but shared grief.

The landscape, which meets the pale horizon at the blue hills, is especially atmospheric: the towers of a distant ghostly city rise among bushes and wooded hills while the leaves of a sapling are outlined against the sky. The delicate sapling is similar to that in Francia’s portrait of Bartolomeo Bianchini. A sense of depth is created by aerial perspective – the way in which colours appear to change with distance when seen through the air.

In fifteenth-century Italy, paintings of the Lamentation were generally found in the predella of an altarpiece, or in its crowning element, the cimasa. It is possible that this painting was once a predella panel. The predella was the lowest part of a multi-panelled altarpiece (known as a polyptych) and would have been at eye-level when a worshipper was kneeling in prayer before the altar. Predella panels were often painted with narrative scenes from the Bible, while the altarpiece’s main panel might be an image of the Virgin and Child, a saint, or Christ on the Cross. This panel, however, dates from the early sixteenth century, by which time predella panels were less common, as altarpieces tended to be made up of only one panel or canvas rather than multiple parts. However, polyptychs were still sometimes commissioned for provincial churches.

Francia painted the Lamentation on several occasions in different formats, from predella panels to large altarpieces. Christ and the two figures at his head in the National Gallery painting are very similar to those in a late Lamentation by Francia in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Although Francia was working in Bologna, he was aware of art in Florence and Rome: the pose of Saint John the Evangelist seems to be derived from the Saint John in Fra Bartolommeo’s Lamentation of 1511 in the Galleria Palatina, Florence, and the pose of the Virgin Mary derives from a drawing by Raphael of about 1511–12. Two engravings were made from Raphael’s drawing by Marcantonio Raimondi, who trained in Francia’s workshop, and it is likely that this is how Francia knew of it.