The Lamentation over the Dead Christ

When King Charles Albert opened his royal picture gallery in Turin's Palazzo Madama on 2 October 1832, his own birthday, he filled it with paintings from the Savoy collections, and this panel was among his gifts that year. It is a late work by Gaudenzio Ferrari, which the museum dates to about 1538 to 1540, though others have placed it in the early 1530s or a little after 1540. The museum describes its manner as powerful and theatrical, typical of his last years, and says the composition became the model that two Vercelli painters, Bernardino Lanino and Giuseppe Giovenone the Younger, followed about a decade later.

The surface carries its own history. Three earlier restorations had rubbed away the thin transparent glazes, above all in the angel's mantle, the background and the sky. In 1982 and 1983 the panel was treated by Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, the restorer who in the same years was working on Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan, and she removed old repaints with a scalpel. Once it was clean, the losses and abrasions left by those earlier campaigns showed plainly.