The Lamentation of Christ

In 1568 the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari noted this panel in Florence, in the room of one Angelo of Arezzo at the church of Santissima Annunziata. Andrea had painted it around 1519 or 1520. The mourners gather round the dead Christ in a calm, symmetrical group, and the museum points to the colours, yellow-green, pale pink and orange, as the place where the grief is sharpened. By 1622 the picture was in Paris, in the Hôtel de Villeroy. Two years later it belonged to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the favourite of James I and Charles I of England, who was buying Italian pictures in bulk. Buckingham was assassinated in 1628, and after the English Civil War his son's collection was shipped to Antwerp and sold. This panel was bought in 1649, is recorded in the imperial collection at Prague in 1685, and was in Vienna by 1733, a little narrower than Andrea left it, its sides trimmed along the way.