Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Since 1598 Ferrara had been ruled by the popes. In 1620 this altarpiece was taken down from the city's church of the Porta di Sotto, known as the Madonnina, and a copy by the local painter Giulio Cromer went up on the altar instead. By 1622 the original was in Rome, getting a gilded frame for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V.

Ortolano painted it around 1515 to 1520. The mourners gather round Christ's body on a white sheet, the crown of thorns on the ground in front. Behind them Saint Christopher wades a stream with the Child on his shoulders, and on a rocky hill far back stand the crosses of Golgotha, a ladder still propped against one. A bearded man in a dark cap is thought to be Antonio Costabili, a Ferrarese nobleman and the church's founder.

In the 1970s restorers moved the paint layer off its wooden panel onto aluminium. The altarpiece hangs in the Room of Dido.