Lamentação sobre Cristo morto

El Greco painted this small panel in the early 1570s, soon after he reached Rome. He had grown up on Crete painting icons and trained in Venice, and in Rome he came face to face with Michelangelo's muscular figures. You can watch him working that out here, in the heavy, sculpted body of the dead Christ held up by his mother and the other mourners. The figures are already starting to stretch and lengthen in the way that would become his signature, and he crowds them into a tight triangle against a dark, stormy sky. It is a modest thing, barely bigger than a sheet of paper, made by a painter still absorbing everything Italy had to show him.