In every painting entitled “Lamentation” that I recall or can find with a Google image-search, Jesus lies prone, usually with a shroud behind him, and Mary looks downward at his limp body. She usually has companions: most often Mary Magdalen, because the relevant Gospel passages (e.g., Matt. 27:61) place the two women together from the Crucifixion to the empty tomb. (The specific moment of lamentation is not explicit in the Gospels.)

An exception is Carlo Crivelli’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1485) in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Crivelli shows Jesus’ body propped up so that he appears to look down at Mary with a gentle expression. Jesus’ hand has fallen so that it is on the same level as the hands of Mary and St. John and is intertwined with John’s in a rotationally symmetrical pattern. However, Jesus and John display opposite emotions: Jesus calm, John in anguish. Mary Magdalen’s hands help to support Jesus’ thigh so that his right foot appears to take a step.

To my eye, the color of Jesus’ body stands out more from the rest of the painting in the original than in the photo above (supplied by the MFA). Crivelli makes Jesus look animated and yet strikingly pallid.

The garland of fruit is a common motif in Crivelli’s work and seems to represent a local tradition in the region where he worked, the Marches, of hanging fruit above religious paintings during festivals. Crivelli–who favored trompe-l’oeil to the extent that Susan Sontag cited him as an example of “camp”–has incorporated this popular tradition into the painting. The garland includes a cucumber, which is so common in Crivelli’s work that it functions as a signature. The whole structure looks like a throne in the Netherlandish painting that Crivelli often imitated.

By making Jesus sit and appear to look down on Mary, and by intertwining his hands with the others’, Crivelli asks us to ponder the relationship between the living and the dead. In the Gospel account, Jesus will soon rise again. Nevertheless, he has died. It would be as much of a theological error to ignore the reality of his death as to deny his pending resurrection. I think that Mary Magdalen may be tempted by the former error as she tries to make his body move.

Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913) were partners in life and work who published joint poems under the pseudonym “Michael Field.” One of their poems describes a pietà by Carlo Crivelli–this one, if I am not mistaken. It is similar enough to the MFA’s Lamentation that some of their words apply to both paintings.

For instance, Michael Field writes: “His body, once blond, is soiled now and opaque / with the solemn ochres of the tomb.”

The poem implies that Mary Magdalen had found the living Jesus attractive. But now, “no beauty to desire / Is here–stiffened limb and angry vein.”

Yet there is such subtle intercourse between
   The hues and the passion is so frank
      One is soothed, one feels it good
      To be of this little group
      Of mourners close to the rank,
Deep wounds ...