The Lamentation

On the back of this panel is an old paper label in Latin. It records that on 26 August 1709, in Brno in Moravia, a Count Franz Anton Liechtenstein presented the picture to Countess Josepha Paar, born a Countess of Oettingen, for eternal memory, and the museum admits that the exact sense of the inscription has not been worked out. A second label carries the arms of two noble families, Desfours and Walderode, and the words Lucas Kranach. How it reached America is not recorded. Its last private owner was Charles Sumner, the anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts who in 1856 was beaten unconscious with a cane on the floor of the Senate by a congressman from South Carolina. Sumner left the panel to the Museum of Fine Arts when he died in 1874. Cranach dated it 1538 on a rock at the lower left, beside his winged serpent. The scene comes from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. Nicodemus holds the Magdalene's ointment jar, Joseph of Arimathea carries the crown of thorns and comforts the Virgin, Saint John supports the dead Christ, and Mary Magdalene kneels to kiss the wound in his hand.