La Lamentation du Christ

Dürer made this Lamentation in Nuremberg around 1500, and it started as a private grief. A goldsmith named Jakob Glimm commissioned it as a memorial after his first wife, Margaret, died that year. In the original the mourning family knelt inside the picture, the widow and her children shown much smaller than the holy figures, in the old convention of the pious donor. Later restorers painted those portraits out, and only when the overpaint was removed in 1924 did the Glimms reappear. The core scene is the dead Christ laid across his mother's lap, an aged and broken Mary among the women, with John, Mary Magdalene, and Nicodemus standing to the right, two of them holding the jars of balm for the burial. Behind the sorrow Dürer set a wide Nuremberg-style landscape of rocks and a distant walled town.