Pietà

This scene isn't in the Bible. There is no passage where Mary cradles her dead son at the foot of the cross while John and a kneeling donor look on. It grew instead out of a way of praying that spread through the Low Countries in the 1400s, the devotio moderna, which urged ordinary people to picture Christ's suffering vividly enough to feel it themselves. Van der Weyden built this small panel around 1441 to do exactly that: the pale body, the mother's grief, the bare hill behind. So many copies came out of his workshop and others that versions reached London, Madrid and Naples. This one, in Brussels, is the one he painted himself.