The Lamentation

The dead Christ lies stretched across the foreground, his mother swooning, the holy women and mourners bending over him in a dark, theatrical hush. Ludovico Carracci - older cousin of Annibale and, with him, co-founder of the reforming academy at Bologna - charges the scene with the new Baroque emotion, the grief pushed close to the viewer and lit in sharp pools against deep shadow. The Carracci taught a generation to weld Renaissance grandeur to direct feeling, and this lament shows the formula at full pitch: sorrow staged for maximum tenderness.