Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Three metres tall, for a church the public could barely enter. Garofalo painted this in 1527 for Sant'Antonio in Polesine in Ferrara, a Benedictine house whose nuns lived enclosed and heard mass from behind a screen. The man who kept him in work through those years was Antonio Costabili, who ran Ferrara's civic government as giudice dei savi from 1510 until 1527, the year on this panel. Garofalo gives the scene almost no depth. The mourners are pressed into the front of the picture and lined up strictly to either side of Christ and his mother, so the whole weight of the thing falls on the body in the middle. Behind them the land opens out bright and clear, painted with the sharp colour Ferrara liked, and Christ's skin is the palest thing in it.