Beweinung Christi

Fra Angelico, a Dominican friar who painted, took this commission in 1436 from a Florentine lay brotherhood with a grim and tender job. The men of the Compagnia di Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio comforted prisoners condemned to death and walked with them to the scaffold. In their small church the condemned heard their last Mass, and this painting hung there. So many of the people kneeling before it were looking at Christ's dead body in the hours before their own end, which gives the scene its hush: Mary and the holy women pressed close around the pale corpse on its stone slab, grief kept quiet rather than cried out. The lower strip you see is a later repair, the original part lost to the Florence floods of the 1960s.