Lamentation
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Authors
Domenico Mezagora, attr. to
Date
Type
Image
Language
Keyword
Lamentation , Mary , St. Mary Magdalene , Christ , Nicodemus , Joseph of Arimathea
Alternative Title
Abstract
This group of painted wood sculptures, approximately life-sized, creates a dramatic tableau of the Lamentation, as Mary holds the body of her dead son on her lap, but unlike in Michelangelo's Vatican Pietà , made over ten years later, here the dead Christ is realistically too large to fit in his mother's lap, the stiffness of the wood embodying rigour mortis, as St. John the Evangelist holds his head and St. Mary Magdalene his feet, the raised knees of the other two Mary's presumably also originally supporting his large body. The other two Mary's express the most extreme emotion, their faces grimacing, masks of pain, while Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, John, and, uncharacteristically, the Magdalene have a more stoic sorrow. Raffaele Casciaro has called the artist of this group the Master of Santa Maria Maggiore, who was possibly Domenico Merzagora. In a document of 1485, Giacomo del Maino was commissioned to make a Lamentation group like this one, and so these sculptures must have been made before 1485, and likely were made before 1483, the date of the Lamentation group by Agostino de Fondulis in San Satiro in Milan, which is often seen as the early model for the groups that became popular in the region in the sixteenth-century. These figures, with their exaggerated gestures and expressions of sorrow, likely mimic contemporary sacred dramas. In one of 1375, for example, the staging directions call for the Virgin Mary to be in the middle, John to be at Christ's head, and the Magdalene at his feet. (The Magdalene is almost always at Jesus' feet, as she was thought to be the woman who had annointed Jesus' feet with oil and dried them with her hair when he was alive. John can be in different positions and often in later groups is shown standing.) Now in the Madonna del Sasso in Orselina (near Locarno in modern-day Switzerland), the group was originally made for San Francesco in Locarno and is a part of the Franciscan emphasis on the Passion. Photograph(s) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Description
Madonna del Sasso, Orselina (Locarno); San Francesco, Locarno
Citation
Raffaele Casciaro, La scultura lignea lombarda del Rinascimento (Milan: Skira, 2000), 95-102.