The Lamentation of Christ

Albrecht Dürer · c. 1497–1510
The Cleveland Museum of Art

Dürer cut this Lamentation for the Large Passion about 1497–1500. The Gospels do not describe this moment; artists imagined the friends of Jesus with his body between the cross and the tomb.

The body lies on a linen sheet on the ground. His mother stands among the mourners with joined hands, and men lift the head and shoulders. The crosses stand on the hill behind; the rock tomb waits at the right.

From the text

The body taken down and wrapped in linen (John 19:38–40)

The women who had come from Galilee watching (Luke 23:55)

A tomb cut into the rock (Luke 23:53)

The artist’s own

The crown of thorns and the nails laid on the grass

Tall, wind-blown trees and a walled town in a German landscape

Details

The linen sheet

The body lies on a linen sheet spread on the ground.

His mother

His mother stands with her hands joined.

Crown and nails

The crown of thorns and the nails lie on the grass.

The tomb

The tomb cut in the rock, with its slab.

Albrecht Dürer, German, 1471–1528. The Cleveland Museum of Art (Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland in memory of Ralph King, 1926.120) · Woodcut · Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access: Collection API record "share_license_status": "CC0" (Creative Commons Zero, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).

The verses

John 19:38–40Afterward, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus (but secretly for fear of the Jews), asked Pilate to let him remove the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission, so he came and removed His body. Nicodemus, who had previously come to Jesus at night, also brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. So they took the body of Jesus and wrapped it in linen cloths with the spices, according to the Jewish burial custom.

Luke 23:53–55Then he took it down, wrapped it in a linen cloth, and placed it in a tomb cut into the rock, where no one had yet been laid. It was Preparation Day, and the Sabbath was beginning. The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how His body was placed.