Man of Sorrows with the Mourners and Symbols of the Passion

Along the step at the bottom runs a line of Latin that gives the year of Christ's Incarnation as 1404, and that date is why this panel matters so much to anyone following Lorenzo Monaco. Around then his painting changed quickly, from sturdy figures to the nervous, rippling line of late Gothic, and nobody has fully explained the speed of the turn.

The dead Christ stands upright in his tomb, held by the Virgin and John the Evangelist. Around them, against the gold, float fragments of the Passion, heads and hands without bodies, each acting out one moment. Judas leans in for the kiss, and Peter denies knowing his master. This kind of image, the Man of Sorrows, was made for slow devotion, one insult and one wound at a time.

The panel, painted with the help of assistants, stands about 2.7 metres high in its original pointed frame. In 1871 it was bought by William Blundell Spence, an English painter and dealer living in Florence, who sold it to the Uffizi in 1882 for 3,000 lire. It moved to the Accademia in 1933.