Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Andrea Solari painted this large Lamentation around 1509, during the years he spent working in France, and French owners kept it from then on. Its first recorded owner was Claude de Longwy, cardinal de Givry and bishop of Langres. By 1630 it was at the château of Tanlay in Burgundy, in the hands of the Chabot family. After 1642 it passed to Michel Particelli d'Hémery, Cardinal Mazarin's finance minister, and then came down through his daughter's descendants and the later marquis de Tanlay. In 1978 the family gave it to the state in lieu of inheritance tax, and it went to the Louvre.

The Virgin holds her dead son across her lap, Mary Magdalene kneels at his feet, and three crosses stand on the hill behind. At some point the paint was lifted from its original wooden panel onto canvas, and the canvas was later laid down on a panel again.