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THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN

THE LAMENTATION

measurements note
50.7 by 74.5 cm.; 20 by 29 3/8 in.

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Vienna, by 1982;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 11 December 1991, lot 26 (as Domenico Tintoretto), where acquired by the present collector.

LITERATURE

R. Pallucchini & P. Rossi, Tintoretto. Le opere sacre e profane, Milan 1982, vol. I, p. 177, cat. no. 215, reproduced vol. II, fig. 281 (as Jacopo Tintoretto).

NOTE

Although offered for sale in 1991 as a work by Domenico Tintoretto this painting is unquestionably by his father Jacopo, as attested to by Pallucchini and Rossi's monograph on the artist and by more recent private correspondence, following the painting's restoration in 1992.

The painting is almost certainly a modello for Tintoretto's picture of larger dimensions (103 by 140 cm.) in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy, inv. 514 (see fig. 1).¹ The two compositions are very closely related though they are not identical: there are some variations in the figures, such as the facial type of Joseph of Arimathea and, more noticeably, the position of Christ's hands and left arm; small differences in each of the landscape backgrounds; and most significant of all the two putti visible in the Nancy Lamentation are absent in the present work. Both paintings date from the mid-1550s and belong to a group of small-scale devotional works treating themes such as the Deposition and the Lamentation. It seems that around this time Tintoretto was experimenting with variations on these subjects, constantly searching for different compositional solutions. The manner in which the mourning figures spiral out from the body of the dead Christ is not dissimilar to works of around the same date. This particular painting is close in handling to Tintoretto's Deposition in a private collection, La Spezia, where the colours are described by Pallucchini and Rossi as "veronesiani".² That painting, in which the figures are also in a frieze-like arrangement, is of very similar dimensions to the present work (52 by 83 cm.) and has also been dated to circa 1555-56.

1. See Pallucchini & Rossi, under Literature, vol. I, p. 177, cat. no. 216, reproduced vol. II, fig. 282.
2. Pallucchini & Rossi, op. cit., vol. I, p. 173, cat. no. 195, reproduced vol. II, fig. 256.