In a project created in collaboration with Casa Testori, four contemporary artists – Jacopo Benassi, Luca Bertolo, Alberto Gianfreda, and Maria Elisabetta Novello – engage in a dialogue with the great canvas, establishing a personal relationship with the Venetian master’s painting through diverse artistic languages, ranging from installation to painting.
Commissioned for the Church of Santa Maria dell’Umiltà at the Zattere in Venice and dating to around 1562, during the painter’s mature years, the work presents a carefully balanced and constructed composition. At the same time, it is dramatic and intense, with dynamic movement emphasized by the use of light and powerful chiaroscuro effects, heightening the emotional impact and drawing the central figures out from a shadowy landscape.
The imposing characters—larger than life and clearly influenced by Michelangelo—are connected through a network of gestures and glances, arranged theatrically around the body of Christ, who is placed diagonally at the center of the scene and supported at the shoulders by a male figure, likely Joseph of Arimathea. Reaching out toward him with arms wide in a gesture of devastating grief is Mary Magdalene, while along another axis lies the Virgin Mary, fainted and overwhelmed with sorrow, supported by a pious woman, perhaps Mary of Clopas. The Virgin, almost seated on the ground in a pose recalling the iconography of the Madonna of Humility, forms a cross with the body of Jesus laid across her. Particularly tender and moving is the gesture of her hand lightly touching her dead son’s foot.
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