Deposition and Lamentation

Christ’s body has been taken down from the cross. The work of carrying him is giving way to the need to hold him, look at him and mourn. In paintings associated with Anthony van Dyck, this moment takes strikingly different forms: a body slipping towards the ground, a hand lifted to a mourner’s lips, a mother opening her arms beneath a troubled sky. Four pictures in Munich, Vienna, Oxford and Antwerp reveal those differences. They also require care over authorship: the Munich painting is currently attributed to the circle of Rubens, and its attribution to Van Dyck is disputed. ^[1]

Deposition, Lamentation and Pietà

These titles describe neighbouring moments in the Passion story. In a Deposition, or Descent from the Cross, the central action is removal. A Lamentation allows the action to pause around the dead body. A Pietà focuses on Mary holding her dead son; other mourners can expand that group. ^[1] The terms sometimes overlap in the naming of individual works: the Ashmolean calls its painting a Deposition while also recognising Lamentation as a title. ^[3]

The Gospel of John does describe removal and burial. Joseph of Arimathea obtains Pilate’s permission to take Christ’s body; Nicodemus brings spices, and the body is wrapped in linen and placed in a nearby new tomb. Earlier in the chapter, Mary, Mary Magdalene and the beloved disciple are present at the cross. ^[5] The paintings bring the mourners and the body together in an extended encounter. They need not be read as literal illustrations of each action in John’s account.

This distinction changes how we look. A ladder, a raised arm or the mechanics of lowering a body would direct attention towards an unfolding event. Here the urgent questions concern contact: who bears the weight, who touches a wound, who looks towards heaven? The movement away from the Crucifixion makes room for sustained attention to its human consequences.

Four pictures, four identities

The two inventory numbers 404 belong to different museums and different paintings. The approximate dates of the early pictures overlap. They offer a comparison of solutions to a subject, rather than a secure sequence in which each necessarily follows the last.

Munich: weight moving downwards

The Munich picture gathers its figures into a narrow, dark space. Christ’s knees bend towards the lower left, while his head falls to the right against the white fabric across Mary’s lap. His body makes an unsteady diagonal. One arm hangs almost straight down; the other is caught close to John’s red drapery. The torso is neither comfortably seated nor fully laid out. Its suspended position makes support the painting’s immediate concern.

John bends in from the left. His broad red robe gives him visual weight, but his hands make small, attentive contacts with the body. Mary’s head turns upwards. The separation between her face and her son’s is especially telling: his head has fallen, while hers rises towards something beyond the picture. A further mourner appears between the two principal figures, with a lifted hand emerging from the shadow. The group does not share a single direction of looking.

Light picks out the chest and the long folds of the cloth. Much of the surrounding space remains indistinct, so that the pale body seems to come forward from it. Below the feet, the crown, nails and inscribed sheet form a rough cluster on the earth. Those objects carry the eye from the wounds to the instruments that caused them. They also interrupt any easy impression that the white drapery has made the scene serene.

The Munich museum catalogues this within Rubens’s circle and reports a recent proposal of Rubens’s workshop. It came from the Düsseldorf Gallery in 1806. ^[1] The image can therefore illuminate the artistic environment around Van Dyck without serving as a firmly dated first step in his own development.

Circle of Peter Paul Rubens, Lamentation of Christ, about 1620. Canvas, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, inventory 404; attribution to Van Dyck disputed. ^[1]

Vienna: a hand held to the lips

In Vienna, the body turns the other way. Christ’s head falls towards the left, and his legs extend down to the right. Mary sits behind him, her face raised, while John leans out of the darkness at the left. At the right, Mary Magdalene lifts Christ’s hand and kisses it. A small winged child wipes its eyes below her. ^[2]

The kiss changes the rhythm of the scene. The hanging arm on the left and the lifted arm on the right create two different experiences of the same body. One registers the complete absence of muscular resistance; the other is held in an intimate act of care. Magdalene bends close enough for her face and the hand to become a small, concentrated meeting point within the larger composition.

Christ’s chest receives a broad wash of light. The white fabric beneath it carries that brightness down towards the stone seat and across the lap. Green and blue draperies enclose the pale figure without cutting it into isolated sections. The eye can travel slowly from the face to the shoulder, along the trunk and down the extended legs.

The crying child is active beside this stillness. Its bent elbow and hand at the eye make mourning immediately legible, whereas Mary’s lifted face is harder to resolve into one simple response. A viewer can move between the bodily detail of a tear being wiped and the open-ended appeal of her upward gaze. At the bottom left, the discarded instruments return attention to the physical violence behind the scene.

The museum places the work under Rubens’s influence and records it in the gallery by 1720. ^[2] Its smaller scale makes a different encounter possible from the large Munich canvas: individual faces and touches remain closely gathered around the illuminated body.

Anthony van Dyck, Lamentation of Christ, about 1618–20. Canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, GG 486. ^[2]

Oxford: hands bearing the body

Oxford’s Deposition gives John a commanding position at the right. His scarlet sleeve presses against the top of the composition, above Christ’s fallen head. At the left, Mary’s blue cloak spreads out around her seated figure. Behind her, Magdalene brings her hands together. These three areas of colour organise the mourners around the body, but the hands explain their relationships more precisely than the robes do.

Mary’s hands meet Christ’s upper arm. John supports him from behind the shoulders, while Magdalene’s hands remain free of the burden. Looking from one pair to another, we move from physical assistance to prayer. There is no need to imagine an exchange of words. The painting has made their different forms of participation visible.

Christ’s upper body leans heavily to the right, while his knees and feet point left. The change of direction at the hips produces a broken, descending line. His extended arm reaches into the blue field of Mary’s cloak, its limp hand hanging below hers. The pale flesh is exposed across the centre, and the narrow streams of blood remain distinct against it. Blood also marks the cloth beneath the head. The contrast between living hands and an unresponsive body is difficult to overlook.

The white linen winds through the lower half of the picture. At the bottom it crosses the gold-coloured fabric and leads towards the crown, nails and inscription. Higher up it lies between Christ’s head and John’s dark drapery. Its changes of direction help join the upper and lower parts of the painting, while its folds make the body’s awkward position more tangible.

The Ashmolean dates this work to the period when Van Dyck was assisting Rubens in Antwerp and describes it as a reworking of an earlier painting. ^[3] That statement does not identify the disputed Munich canvas as its original. The museum’s education material identifies the three mourners and places reflection on Christ’s suffering at the heart of the image’s religious meaning. ^[6] The viewer is given both a sacred story and a set of bodily relationships through which to consider it.

Anthony van Dyck, Deposition, also called Lamentation, about 1619. Oil on canvas, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, WA1869.1. ^[3]

Antwerp: mourning across the whole foreground

The wide Antwerp canvas changes the pace. Christ stretches almost the full breadth of the foreground. His head rests at the left against Mary’s blue-covered knees, while his feet reach towards the right. The long white cloth and the continuous light across his torso and legs encourage the eye to follow his body sideways. There is less sense of a downward collapse than in the upright pictures.

Mary opens both arms. One hand reaches towards the left edge, while the other rises into the sky above the group. Her gesture takes up the width of the setting: it does not close protectively around the body. Her face turns upwards, and the fingers of the higher hand spread against the light. The exposed palms make the gesture available to the viewer without reducing it to a single spoken appeal.

Other figures concentrate on smaller contacts. A man behind Christ bends towards his arm. The kneeling woman at the right bows close to the body, while the angel above her brings a further face and pair of hands into the gathering. The dark wing extends to the right edge. Its feathers provide a dense, patterned surface beside the smooth, brightly lit legs.

The rock at the left encloses Mary, but the background opens above Christ into blue sky and moving cloud. That opening gives the scene a breadth absent from the compressed early groups. Light and dark alternate across the upper half: pale rock, shadowed hollow, sky, brown cloud and grey wing. Below them, the long figure holds the picture together.

A preparatory drawing gives a material context for this treatment of flesh. The Morgan Library & Museum relates its Study for the Dead Christ , I 243, about 1635–40, to the Antwerp painting. It is drawn in black and white chalk on blue laid paper. The museum interprets it as a return to nude-model study familiar from Rubens’s studio, with particular attention to light on flesh and chalk highlights conveying reflected light. ^[7] This offers another reason to linger over the illuminated body as well as the surrounding gestures.

The Antwerp canvas was made for Cesare Alessandro Scaglia’s chapel of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows in the Franciscan church. The museum’s current dating supersedes the older 1634–35 proposal. Van Dyck’s October 1640 Antwerp visit offered an opportunity to commission it; it proves no particular meeting. Although the chapel was consecrated in 1637, Scaglia’s will shows that the altar followed his death in 1641. Its pierced-heart image of Mary expressed the Franciscans’ emphasis on her sharing in Christ’s suffering. The altar was destroyed after 1794; a related example in Turnhout cannot restore its exact appearance. Taken to Paris in 1794, the painting returned from France in 1815. ^[4]

Anthony van Dyck, Lamentation of Christ, about 1640. Oil on canvas, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, inventory 404. ^[4]

Looking, touch and devotion

Across the four images, hands perform several kinds of work. They bear Christ’s weight, hold a hand to the lips, join in prayer, wipe a tear or open towards heaven. Following those actions is a useful way into the paintings. It lets the viewer distinguish each mourner’s involvement before trying to name a precise emotion.

The division between supporting and unsupported limbs is equally important. A living hand meets a dead arm; a sleeve frames a shoulder that can no longer hold itself upright. In the tall pictures, Christ’s knees, elbows and neck repeatedly interrupt the downward direction of the body. In Antwerp, his length can be taken in more continuously. Format changes how the viewer encounters the same physical fact.

The cloth also asks for attention. It cushions a head, crosses a lap, receives blood and catches light. Its whiteness draws the eye into passages that might otherwise be lost among dark robes. Looking closely at these folds does not establish a pigment recipe or a sequence of revisions, but it does reveal how paint makes a surface appear soft enough to touch and strong enough to bear weight.

Such details give substance to devotional attention. The Munich museum relates its Lamentation to the encouragement of empathetic religious feeling in the Counter-Reformation. ^[1] Oxford’s teaching material similarly directs attention to suffering. ^[6] Yet the encounters offered by the pictures differ. Vienna brings the viewer close to a kiss; Oxford emphasises the labour of support; Antwerp leaves the body extended before the gathering. Their place within Van Dyck’s religious painting becomes clearer when these individual choices remain in view.