Sebastiano del piombo lamentation
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I came across this picture in this week&#;s Times Literary Supplement as part of an article describing an exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery in London. I thought I&#;d share it here because it&#;s such an extraordinarily powerful and mysterious image.
It was painted sometime around by Sebastiano del Piombo, a contemporary of Michelangelo.
The Pietà (an image of the distraught Virgin Mary lamenting the death of her son, usually cradling his lifeless body) is a familiar subject in religious art, but this particular version is strikingly different.
For one thing, the Virgin Mary is not holding, or even looking at, the body of Christ. She seems instead to be lost in prayer.
For another, the figure of Mary towers over the corpse at her feet. Is it just me, or does she look rather masculine too? Assuming this is deliberate, are we seeing her somehow growing in stature, perhaps becoming divine herself?
It&#;s as if we catch her in the moment in which she is undergoing some form of transformation. In any case she&#;s not simply overcome with grief as in many depictions of this scene. What she is experiencing remains an enigma. This is not unusual for Renaissance art: paintings in particular often seem to contain secret messages.
The body of
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Most of his life Sebastiano Luciani, known as del Piombo, spent in Rome, and it was here, rather than in his native Venice, that his particular artistic style developed, combining the Venetian love of colour with the plasticity of form and expressive gestures of the Tuscano-Roman school. The Lamentation is an excellent example of his work, with its energetic diagonal composition, powerful figures, its monumentality and restrained drama, which seem to echo the work of Michelangelo, who exercised a strong influence on the artist. The dramatic mood is reinforced by the twilight landscape with the fading colours of the sunset.
Image and text © The Hermitage Museum
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