Lamentation of Christ

Around 1450 Rogier van der Weyden, the leading painter of the Low Countries, made a pilgrimage to Italy, and this panel carries the mark of that journey. Its layout closely follows a small Pietà by Fra Angelico that he would have seen in Florence, which is one reason scholars are sure he went. The dead Christ is held upright at the edge of the tomb, his mother pressing her face to his, John the Evangelist steadying the body, the grief kept quiet and close rather than staged. Flemish painting travelled well, and this one ended up in Medici hands. It hung in Lorenzo de' Medici's villa at Careggi and appears in the inventory taken when he died in 1492, a northern picture prized at the very centre of the Florentine Renaissance.