Subject of Christian art, popular from the 11th century to the 19th, in which a group of mourners is shown grieving over the death of Christ. The canonical gospels do not mention the lamenting over the dead Christ; it was the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus that described the Lamentation, in which the Virgin, Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathaea expressed their grief. The Meditationes vitae Christi, attributed to St Bonaventure (1221-74) and widely known in the 14th century, also contains a vivid narration of the event. The subject was frequently treated in narrative paintings of the Passion, or as a separate devotional subject; the earliest examples occurred in Byzantine art, for example the 11th-century ivory carving (Konstanz, Rosgtnmus.) showing Christ embraced by the Virgin in the presence of St John, two mourning women and two mourning men, with grieving angels above. The theme was then adopted first by Italian and then by other western European painters and sculptors in the 13th century, continuing in use up to the 19th century. The iconography of the Lamentation overlaps with that of the Piet? and also with other topics of Christ's Passion
See the Abbreviations for further details.
