The Lamentation

Ulrich Apt the Elder's The Lamentation, painted around 1510 and now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, depicts the mourning over the dead body of Christ after the Deposition — a subject that permitted the greatest emotional intensity in Christian devotional painting, gathering the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, Saint John, and other mourners around the broken body of Christ. Apt was the leading painter of Augsburg in the early sixteenth century, working for the city's wealthy merchant and patrician patrons at a time when Augsburg was one of the most prosperous cities in the Holy Roman Empire and a center of humanist culture. His Lamentation reflects the Augsburg synthesis of German, Italian, and Netherlandish influences characteristic of the city's cosmopolitan artistic culture.

The Lamentation composition groups the mourning figures around the central body of Christ in a compact, grief-saturated arrangement. Apt's Augsburg training shows in the precise Germanic draftsmanship and the emotional intensity of the faces. The palette is rich and dark, with the warm golds of haloes against deep shadows.