The Lamentation of Christ is a small portable standard, made in San Severino in the Marches of Central Italy in the first decades of the sixteenth century. It came from the church of San Lorenzo in Doliolo and originally bore another panel on the reverse.[1] This depicted Saint Laurence and Saint Andrew, respectively representing the patron saints of the church and the confraternity by whom the standard was commissioned. Bernardino’s emotional style and exaggerated forms suit both the tragic event depicted and the devotional aims of the standard-bearers.

The traditional subject of the Lamentation shows the dead Christ after he is taken down from the Cross. He is received into the arms of his grieving Mother, and the pair is flanked by Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint John the Evangelist. The Cross, with a white cloth representing a winding sheet, is cropped at the top: rather than the cruciform shape, we see only the footrest with Christ’s bloodstains. The linear haloes of the four protagonists form a parabola around the centre of the composition. Unusually, there is no single focus of attention, with the two main subjects, Jesus and his Mother, deployed almost equally in the middle of the panel.

Light falls from the upper left, across the skin and clothes of Mary Magdalene, onto Christ’s pale flesh and then onto the figure of John. Jesus’ body, draped with another white cloth, forms a curve across his Mother’s knees. His limbs are attenuated and their disposition connects the three figures attending him. Mary Magdalene grasps Christ’s right forearm, while his wounded hand rests on her shoulder. John, ‘the beloved disciple’, holds him up under his limp left arm and looks away in anguished disbelief. Mary’s tears are visible as she holds her dead Son across her maternal lap.

Over time the bright hues have been reduced: the sky is no longer blue but grey, Mary’s cloak no longer deep blue, the reds have turned to brown in Mary’s tunic and John’s cloak. This has the strange effect of accentuating the power of the image: the richest colour is the red of Christ’s blood, a warmth picked up in the ochre rocks of Calvary and the brown clothes. Even the sky is barely differentiated; it darkens slightly towards the top of the panel, but cannot distract from the drama in the foreground. The acidic yellow and green of the saints’ robes, and the dark blue dress of Mary (which now appears almost black), are consonant with the sallow tints of the figures’ flesh. Even the metal leaf of Mary Magdalene’s tunic has almost disappeared as it is not painted with the shiny gilt that delineates the haloes. Most affecting is the blood which runs down Christ’s pierced body: it still flows although he is dead.

Bernardino’s mannered style is characterised by severe angular forms such as the limbs of Christ and the contrapposto of John’s body, especially his legs. Cloth is rendered with darkly shadowed folds, which appear more solid than the tender flesh. The scene is frozen at the moment of deepest suffering, underlining the contemporary intense religious feeling for atonement, particularly needed after the ravages of the plague and interminable warfare across Italy.

Christine Dixon

[1] Palazzo Barberini, Rome.