哀悼基督

In 1548 the painter who signed himself Veronese was still a young man in his home town of Verona, only 20 years old and years away from the vast, crowded Venice ceilings that would make his name. This Lamentation belongs to that early moment, painted for Hieronymite monks at the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. He gathered the mourners around the dead Christ in a tight pyramid, Mary and Mary Magdalene and John pressed close, a stormy landscape opening behind them with the hill of the crucifixion still visible in the distance. He finished it the same year as another altarpiece that now hangs a few rooms away in the same Verona museum, the Bevilacqua-Lazise panel, both of them the work of an artist still finding his scale.