Lamentation sur le Christ mort

Van Dyck painted this scene of grief over the dead Christ around 1628, in the years just after he came home to Antwerp from a long stay in Italy. He was not yet 30 but already famous, and the journey had changed him: the warm, glowing colour and soft handling he had absorbed from Titian in Venice run all through this picture. The body of Christ is laid across his mother's lap while mourners and angels lean in, their faces swollen with weeping. It was a subject Van Dyck returned to again and again in these years, painting several versions for churches around Antwerp. Here the sorrow is kept quiet and close, gathered into the ring of figures pressed around the pale body.