Mourning Woman from a Lamentation

This mourning woman from a Lamentation scene, painted around 1525 and now in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, is a fragment of a larger devotional composition that was at some point dismembered. Such isolated heads of weeping women from Metsys’s workshop became prized independent paintings, their concentrated emotional intensity making them effective devotional images in their own right. Metsys's religious paintings combine the Flemish tradition of meticulous naturalism with compositional ideas absorbed from Italian Renaissance models.

The late technique shows Metsys’s fully developed command of emotional expression, with grief registered through subtle downturned features and glistening eyes rather than dramatic contortion.