Die Beweinung Christi

Botticelli painted this around 1490, just as a Dominican friar named Girolamo Savonarola was beginning to thunder from the pulpits of Florence against luxury, vanity, and the very Medici court that had made Botticelli famous for his Venus and his springtime goddesses. Something in that preaching seems to have reached him. Here there are no graces, only raw grief, the dead Christ slack across his mother's lap, Mary Magdalene pressing her face to his feet, the others folding in around the body. He sets the whole knot of figures against the bare rock of the tomb, which blocks off the background and pushes the mourning forward at you. Along the base stand three saints, Jerome, Peter, and Paul, added for the church that commissioned it.