Lamentation sur le Christ mort

Tintoretto made this Lamentation in Venice around 1560, one of many altar-scale religious paintings he turned out at speed for the city's churches and confraternities. He set the mourning over Christ's body in near-darkness, the figures lit as if by torchlight, so that the pale dead Christ and the stricken faces around him surface out of shadow. This was his trademark and his advantage: he could stage a sacred scene like theatre, with steep space and sudden light, and he worked faster and cheaper than his great rival Titian, which is partly how he covered so many Venetian walls. Among the mourners the Servite saint Filippo Benizi has been identified, a hint the picture was made for that order. The body laid flat along the foreground, closest to us, is the oldest device in this kind of image, meant to put the viewer right at the edge of the grave.