The Lamentation of Christ

The date is written on the hammer. At the lower left, among the nails and the crown of thorns, lies the tool that fixed Christ to the cross, with 1524 on it in gold letters. Next to it lies the titulus, the board from the top of the cross, reading Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

The dead Christ has been laid on his shroud in a clearing among tall firs, with pale mountains rising beyond, a setting the Louvre singles out as typical of the Danube School. The mourners gather round him, and their haloes give something away. The Virgin, John and the holy women wear them. Nicodemus, standing at the right, does not, and neither does the young woman whose face appears just behind him. In 1969 the scholar Christian Salm suggested that these two are portraits of the couple who paid for the panel, Count Nicholas of Salm-Neuburg, a nobleman in whose service Huber worked, and his wife. If so, the count, born in 1503, was about 21 at the time.

The panel may have come from the chapel of the castle of Neuburg on the Inn, not far from Passau. It was in a private collection in Stuttgart until 1967, and the Louvre bought it the following year from the dealer Otto Wertheimer.