The Deposition

Around 1518, Florence was full of young painters taking the old sacred scenes apart and putting them back together, more crowded and more restless than their teachers had. This Deposition belongs to that moment. Francesco Bacchiacca does something the Descent from the Cross almost never shows: he keeps the two thieves in the picture. Their crosses stand on either side of Christ's, and soldiers are busy taking their bodies down while the mourners gather at the centre. A quiet devotional subject becomes a full working execution ground, bodies and ladders and effort at once. Bacchiacca made his name on small, densely peopled panels, and that taste for a crowded surface is what he brings here. Scenes of the Descent usually give us only Christ and the mourners, which is what makes those two extra crosses so unusual.