Three men and four women gather in a tight group around the lifeless body of a bearded young man in a landscape in this vertical painting. The people all have pale skin with red around their eyes, and tears fall down most of their cheeks. The dead man, Jesus, is at the center of the composition. His skin is ashen white, and his brown hair falls around his shoulders. Blood trickles from wounds on his forehead, palms, feet, and over his right ribs. He wears only a white loincloth. He rests across the lap of a woman, Mary, who sits on the ground and supports Jesus with her knees. Her brows are gathered high over her eyes as she looks up, her cheeks red. An ochre-yellow cloth wraps across her forehead, down the sides of her face, and across her neck and chest. A white cloth drapes over that, all under a sky-blue cloak that covers most of her burgundy-red dress. One hand disappears behind Jesus’s back, and the other arm is held out, palm up, over Jesus’s legs. The people around Jesus wear dresses, robes, and cloaks in amber yellow, emerald green, carnation pink, rose red, orange, and pale lilac. A clean-shaven man, Saint John the Evangelist, supports Jesus under the armpits as he looks at us. Saint John's lips are parted, and his long, copper-colored hair tumbles over his shoulders. By his side, in the lower left corner of the painting, a woman with long, flowing blond hair, kneels and cradles one of Jesus’s hands. She and Mary lock eyes. Another woman with a white veil over a parchment-brown wimple covering her forehead and neck crouches low to lift one of Jesus’s feet, and she looks down at the wound there. Behind her, a balding, bearded man with a fringe of white curly hair stands with his hands out wide. He holds a pair of pincers in the hand closer to us. To our left, behind Mary, the fourth woman clutches her robe to her chest with one hand and wipes tears with a fist of the fabric with the other. Along the left edge of the composition, behind Saint John the Evangelist, a man looks forlornly down at Jesus as he holds long iron nails in one hand and a hammer down by his side in the other. Grassy mounds rise steeply up to an overlook taking up the top right quadrant of the painting. There, two men hang from crosses to either side of an empty cross. Two pairs of people look at those men. A man carrying a spear and wearing a feathered cap walks on a path along the ridge. In a distant grassy meadow to our left, two men ride horses as another holds up a spear, all facing a person with their hands raised. A river winds through rolling hills back to the horizon, which comes four-fifths the way up the composition. An arched bridge spans the river, and people walk across it or row on a boat in the water near the pilings. The mountains are hazy pale blue in the deep distance, and the sky above fades from azure blue along the top of the painting to milky white along the horizon. A scrolling strip of white paper curls in the lower right corner of the composition.

Andrea Solario, Lamentation, c. 1505-1507, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.40

Bach's Passions and the Easter Story in Art

Sunday, March 24, 2024
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
East Building Auditorium

Talks
Hybrid
Registration Required

Senior lecturer, David Gariff, explores the powerful attraction of the story of the Passion of Christ for the composer and western artists. In Bach’s St. John and St. Matthew Passions, as well as in countless depictions in paintings and film, the drama of the Passion has served as an inspiration for profound musical and visual storytelling. 

This hybrid lecture is offered in person and virtually. All registrants will receive a recording after the event.

In conjunction with a Gallery celebration of Bach’s birthday on March 31.