Lamentation

When Rubens came home to Antwerp at the end of 1608, after eight years in Italy, the city was about to get a pause in its long war with the Dutch. The Twelve Years' Truce was signed in April 1609, and Antwerp's churches, many of them stripped of their altarpieces by Protestant iconoclasts in the decades before, began ordering new ones. This small oak panel, which the Berlin gallery dates to around 1610, belongs to those first years back. Christ's body lies stretched on a bier that fills almost the whole width of the picture. Behind it two women, the Virgin and Mary Magdalene, tear at their loose blond hair in the torchlight, and everything else is darkness. Rubens returned to the Lamentation several times, but this sketch is the one version he never carried any further, and it stayed a first idea on a panel about 35 centimetres high.