Lamentation of Christ

Rembrandt's c.1650 Lamentation of Christ in the Ringling Museum of Art belongs to his sustained engagement with Passion subjects throughout his career, from the emotional theatricality of the 1630s series commissioned by Frederik Hendrik to the increasingly intimate, stripped-down treatments of the 1640s and 1650s. The subject — Christ taken down from the cross, mourned by Mary, the disciples, and the holy women — had one of the longest traditions in Northern European art, from Rogier van der Weyden's celebrated panel in Madrid to Rubens's monumental Antwerp Descent from the Cross. Rembrandt's treatment around 1650 makes no concession to either the medieval pathos of Rogier's grieving figures or Rubens's physical grandeur: the figures cluster around the body in near-darkness, their grief expressed through posture and proximity rather than dramatic gesture. The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, assembled by circus entrepreneur John Ringling in the 1920s and 1930s, contains one of the most surprising concentrations of Baroque art in the United States.

A dense, dark palette with warm earth tones punctuated by the pale white of the shroud characterises the work. Rembrandt uses broad, almost rough impasto strokes on the principal figures. The composition is deliberately compressed, denying spatial relief and intensifying the emotional claustrophobia of grief.