The Dead Christ Supported by an Angel

Antonello da Messina came from Sicily, about as far from the centre of Italian art as you could get, but he had learned something rare there: how to paint in oil with the fine, glowing detail of the Netherlandish masters. In 1475 he spent a year in Venice, and it changed him. He studied Giovanni Bellini's tender images of the dead Christ held upright, and he carried the idea home. He painted this back in Messina, and that is his own city in the background, beneath the hill of Calvary with its three crosses. An angel holds the pale body from behind and weeps against its shoulder. At their feet, half-sunk in the earth, lie the bones and skulls of the burial ground.