Scènes de la Vie du Christ : Déploration.

Déploration depicts the grieving over Christ's body after the Descent from the Cross, the moment when Mary holds her dead son before the entombment. The scene derives not from Gospel text but from late medieval devotional meditation, particularly the widespread genre of affective piety in which imaginative immersion in Christ's suffering was prescribed as a path to spiritual transformation. Mariotto di Nardo's treatment of this subject in the Petit Palais cycle follows established Florentine conventions — the body laid across Mary's lap or supported by multiple mourners — and would have served as a focus for the kind of emotional participation such texts recommended.

Tempera and gold leaf on panel. The compositional challenge of the Lamentation — multiple mourning figures around a horizontal corpse — is resolved by compressing the group into a shallow foreground plane. The expressivity of the figures relies on hand gestures and inclined heads rather than facial distortion.