Lamentation over the Dead Christ

When Napoleon's administration suppressed the Venetian convents in 1806, their altarpieces went into the new public gallery at the Accademia. This canvas came from Santa Maria dell'Umiltà, a convent church on the Zattere. The church did not outlast the move by much, pulled down in 1821 to enlarge the seminary garden beside it, and the name survives on a small bridge nearby. The gallery reads the painting as an answer to that name. Mary is seated directly on the ground in the pose of the Madonna of Humility, and the long body of Christ crosses hers. Tintoretto kept the cast small and the figures larger than life, lifted out of a near-black ground, with Mary Magdalene in the upper third, her arms flung wide. When it was painted is still argued over, the Accademia placing it around 1550 to 1560 and other catalogues in the late 1580s.