Compianto sul Cristo morto

Dieric Bouts painted this small panel around 1460, in the Low Countries, for someone to pray in front of alone. It is a modest picture, made to be held in view and studied closely. Christ's stiffened body lies along a diagonal across his mother's lap while John the Evangelist, in red, slips a white cloth beneath his head. Everyone here weeps quietly, restrained rather than wild, which is how Bouts tends to feel. Devotional books of the time urged the faithful to picture the Passion in the mind detail by detail, and a panel like this gave the eye something exact to rest on. Bouts sets it all against a wide, still landscape that reaches far back behind the grief in the foreground.