Lamentação sobre Cristo Morto

Vasari tells a hard story about the summer of 1502. Luca Signorelli, then working in Orvieto, got word that his son Antonio had died of plague back home in Cortona. He came to see the body, had it stripped, and drew it with what Vasari calls complete steadiness, without a tear, wanting only to keep looking. That same year Signorelli painted this Lamentation for a church in Cortona, and the tradition grew up that the dead Christ, laid out pale and heavy in the foreground, was modelled on his lost son. Whether or not that is true, the realism of the body is what people have always remarked on. Behind the mourners he set two smaller scenes, the Crucifixion on one side and the empty tomb of the Resurrection on the other, so grief and hope share one panel.