Spanish school; end of the XVI century.

Spanish school; late sixteenth century.
"Pietà".
Oil on panel.
It presents faults in the pictorial surface.
Measurements: 54 x 101 cm.
The pearly skin of a recumbent christ brings a theatrical and mortecine light to this devotional scene. The subject, the tonality and the composition form an image that awakens the passion of the faithful, inviting them to reflect on the last moments of Christ. In a landscape format, the author presents only the Virgin on her knees weeping over the body of her dead son lying on the ground. The figures stand out for their monumentality and volumetry, covering a large part of the entire surface that is veiled to the viewer, except for the right area where the author develops a landscape in which Mount Golgotha is outlined, with the cross barely visible.
Iconographically it is a very emotive theme, fruit of popular piety, which concentrates the attention on the drama of the Passion and the loving and sorrowful contemplation, with a realistic and moving sense. In Byzantium, and in the representations of Byzantine influence, the figure of Christ rests on the slab of the anointing, where his corpse was perfumed and prepared to receive burial, which later in Italian art will become a sepulcher. This scene does not appear in the Gospels, but finds its origin in mystical literature and in religious texts of piety, as well as in those of the confraternities of flagellants. In the canonical Gospels and in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus it is narrated how Joseph of Arimathea buried the body of Jesus.