Deposition from the Cross

Cima da Conegliano painted this Deposition around 1510, during his mature period when he was among the leading painters of the Veneto alongside Giovanni Bellini. The composition follows the traditional lamentation format popular in Venetian devotional painting. Now in Moscow's Pushkin Museum, it arrived in Russia through the extensive art collecting of the imperial era. Cima da Conegliano, active in Venice and his native Conegliano from the 1480s until around 1517, was the most accomplished Venetian follower of Giovanni Bellini in the generation before Giorgione and Titian transformed the tradition. His cool precise light, his characteristic Veneto landscape backgrounds, and his composed figure types gave his altarpieces and devotional panels a quality of contemplative clarity that served the devotional needs of the churches and private patrons throughout northeastern Italy who commissioned him. This work demonstrates the consistent quality that made him one of the most trusted religious painters in the Venetian world.

Cima's signature luminous landscape backdrop frames the grief-stricken figures, with soft Venetian coloring and carefully graduated atmospheric perspective lending the scene a contemplative serenity.