Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Bellini painted this around 1475 for the high altar of the Franciscan church in Pesaro, on the Adriatic coast. It was never meant to hang at eye level. It crowned a tall, many-part altarpiece, sitting as a lunette high above a large Coronation of the Virgin, which is why the three mourners and the dead Christ are tilted toward us and seen from below. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, the two men who buried Christ, hold the body upright while Mary Magdalene grieves beside them. Centuries later the panel left Pesaro under a different pressure. French troops took it to Paris during the Napoleonic campaigns in Italy, and it returned to the Vatican in 1816, where it now hangs apart from the altarpiece it once crowned.