Milan, Giovanni Bellini's Lamentation arrives at the Diocesan Museum from the Vatican.

From Feb. 20 to May 11, 2024, the Museo Diocesano Carlo Maria Martini in Milan will welcome the Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Giovanni Bellini (Venice, c. 1435 - 1516), one of the pinnacles of the Venetian master’s work, which is housed in the Vatican Museums. The exhibition, curated by Nadia Righi, director of the Diocesan Museum in Milan, and Fabrizio Biferali, curator of the Department for the Art of the 15th-16th Centuries of the Vatican Museums, with main sponsor the Unipol Group and sponsor BPER, presents the precious panel painting made by Bellini around 1475, which originally formed the cymatium for the altarpiece of the high altar of the church of San Francesco in Pesaro. The altarpiece is one of the greatest masterpieces of Italian painting, marking the painter’s maturity and sealing his role as the leader of the Venetian painting school.

The scene depicts the moment when Christ’s body, before burial, is mourned and anointed with perfumed oils. In a confined and compressed space, rendered with a strongly foreshortened cut from bottom to top that takes into account the height at which the table must have stood, the statuesque presence of the four characters stands out: Christ, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and Magdalene, who holds Jesus’ in her hands. It is precisely the extraordinary intertwining of hands that constitutes the focal point of the representation: there the viewer’s gaze converges thanks to Bellini’s masterful orchestration, which, with a crisp, clear light and a sharp alternation between light and dark, guides the eye as it passes from Christ’s legs abandoned on the tomb to the wound in his side, and it is there that all the gazes of the characters are also concentrated. In the background, a blue sky reveals the artist’s new openness to nature and the atmospheric rendering of the landscape and, in this work, appears as a sign of hope.

Giovanni Bellini, Lamentation over the

Giovanni Bellini, Lamentation over theChrist

Giovanni Bellini, Lamentation over theChrist

Giovanni Bellini, Lamentation over theChrist

Giovanni Bellini, Lamentation over theChrist,

The exhibition is completed with a section entitled In Front of Bellini. Four Contemporary Artists in Dialogue with a Masterpiece, produced in collaboration with Casa Testori and curated by Giuseppe Frangi, president of the Associaizone Giovanni Testori, which presents the works of four contemporary authors, namely LETIA Letizia Cariello, Emma Ciceri, Francesco De Grandi and Andrea Mastrovito, who have confronted Bellini’s masterpiece, reflecting on the themes suggested by the work, to testify how much the Venetian master’s panel is able to touch the heart of artists of our time: the Lamentation is in fact a masterpiece that transcends its historical dimension, and that urges the sensitivity of contemporary man in the face of death, grief, pity and in particular the value of care.

The path winds through four distinct spaces where, in sequence, visitors will find Per te Myriam di Migdel, an installation by LETIA Letizia Cariello dedicated to the figure of Magdalene. Next, Andrea Mastrovito with the large frottage War Christ offers a dramatic actualization of Bellini’s theme; Emma Ciceri, in the very delicate video Studio di mani, reinterprets in personal terms the central motif of Bellini’s Lamentation; Francesco De Grandi reinterprets with a large canvas the iconography of the Lamentation in contemporary terms. The exhibition is accompanied by a Dario Cimorelli Editore catalog.

Milan, Giovanni Bellini's Lamentation arrives at the Diocesan Museum from the Vatican.

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