Figures from a Lamentation Altarpiece (Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist, and St. Mary Magdalene)

Abstract

A photograph from 1925 survives showing these three life-sized sculptures as a part of an elaborate altarpiece in the church of Santa Maria Bianca in Casoretto in Milan. (The area was outside the walls of the old city when the altarpiece was created but is a part of the expanded modern metropolis.) These figures were a part of a group of statues that formed a tableau of a Lamentation, a type of image that was known in the Renaissance as a "sepulcher," and the 1925 photograph in fact shows that the figures were arranged in an artificial cave, with Calvary (including the two theives on their crosses and Jerusalem, made to look like the Castello Sforzesco in Milan) depicted in a smaller scale above. An architectural frame with further figures surrounded these central scenes. When the church was renovated in the 1940's, during the war, for murky reasons the altarpiece was disassembled, the chapel destroyed, and the figures sold at auction. These three sculptures were in private collections before being brought to the museum of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan in 2002 after restoration. The 1925 photograph shows the sculptures covered in heavy repaint, but now the original polychromy has been revealed, including the brilliant mantle of John and dress of the Virgin, which were covered with silver leaf and then painted with a colored glaze. The Virgin Mary must have originally held the body of her dead son on her lap, her face pale and eyes almost closed, as if she might faint. John is relatively calm in his mourning, whereas the Magdalene seems to be running, her drapery forming great s-curve pleats between her active legs. She raises her hands in shock and opens her mouth --neither generally decorous things for a woman to do but here a sign of the extremity of her anguish. Photograph(s) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.