Lamentación sobre Cristo muerto

Correggio made this in 1524 for a small family chapel in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma, where he had just finished a great domed fresco. A Benedictine monk named Placido del Bono commissioned it. Christ has just been lowered from the cross, his head fallen back into his mother's lap, his hands and feet still clenched from the nails. Mary faints. The women around her lean in close, and the whole scene is pushed low and wide, so the grief feels near rather than staged. That raw, almost physical emotion was ahead of its time in the 1520s and points toward the drama painters would chase a century later. The picture stayed in that chapel until French troops carried it off to Paris in 1796, and it came back to Parma 20 years afterward.