Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Salviati arrived in Venice in 1539 with a Roman reputation and a Roman manner, bodies built like sculpture and drawn before they are coloured. Venetian painters worked the other way round, starting from colour. This altarpiece came out of that meeting. The figures have the muscular certainty of a man who had studied Michelangelo in Rome, and the reds and shot blues around them belong to the lagoon.

It was ordered by a Venetian called Bernardo Moro for the church of the Corpus Domini, a house of Dominican nuns. Salviati appears to have painted the principal figures himself and left the rest to his assistant Giuseppe Porta, who stayed on in the city afterwards and took his master's surname for his own.

The convent was closed by Napoleonic decree in April 1810, and the canvas, over three metres tall, was sent to Milan the year after.