Lamentation of Christ (Durer)

The dead Christ is laid on the ground and mourned by his mother, the holy women, and the men who will bury him, one cradling the crown of thorns, against a wide German landscape with the empty crosses standing on the hill behind. The tiny kneeling figures in the lower corners are the Nuremberg family who paid for the altarpiece, inserted to share in the grief. Durer fuses Italian weight and order, learned on his travels south, with a German relish for sharp particular detail. It mourns the same dead Christ as Michelangelo's Pieta, also in this collection, but in a crowded narrative key rather than a single marble hush.