The Lamentation and the Entombment

Bartolomeo di Tommaso da Foligno's Lamentation and Entombment, painted around 1445 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, documents the vigorous provincial school of Umbria in the mid-fifteenth century. Bartolomeo was one of the most prolific painters in the Marches and Umbria, absorbing influences from Gentile da Fabriano's late Gothic grandeur alongside the proto-Renaissance energy of Umbrian masters. The Lamentation — Christ's body mourned before burial — was among the most emotionally charged subjects in Christian iconography, offering painters the opportunity to explore grief, tenderness, and spiritual weight in concentrated figural groupings.

Tempera on panel with gold ground, combining Late Gothic decorative richness with emerging Renaissance attention to figural solidity. The figures display a heavy, somewhat archaic weight typical of Umbrian painting before the influence of Perugino fully transformed the regional tradition.