The Deposition

Christ's body is about to be lowered into a classical sarcophagus, perhaps of the red porphyry the Romans kept for their emperors' tombs. Mary Magdalene kneels and holds his legs, a bearded man, Joseph of Arimathea or perhaps Nicodemus, takes his weight, and the Virgin grieves above them. Jacopino keeps the dead body upright and frontal, close to the way Michelangelo carved it in his late marble Pietà, the one now in the cathedral museum in Florence. The bearded man looks straight out at us. The museum links that gaze to a line from the Psalms, the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, and to the heavy slab at the bottom, seen at an angle, that will close the tomb. The panel is generally dated to the 1560s. An inventory of the Massimo family in 1677 lists a large panel by Jacopino with the same measurements, though without naming the subject, and early 20th-century descriptions of the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne in Rome still gave this picture to Francesco Salviati.