Lamentation

After Christ is taken down from the cross, his mother and followers gather to mourn over his body before burial - a scene of collective grief that medieval piety elaborated beyond the brief Gospel accounts. Giotto arranges it with radical economy: a bare diagonal slope drives the eye down to the locked gazes of the Virgin and her dead son, two mourners sit with their backs to us to draw us in, and even the angels overhead double up in anguish. From his Arena Chapel cycle in Padua, it is one of the founding images of raw human emotion in Western art.