Descent from the Cross

Here, we are seeing an artwork by Daniele da Volterra, a famous painter who is mostly known for painting the clothes of the figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgement fresco in the Sistine Chapel. In this fresco, we see the depiction of the descent from the cross, a well-known and used iconography in Renaissance art history. We are seeing two different scenes being depicted: the body of Christ supported by men and women gathered around Mary on the lower part of the composition. The men are mourning Christ and are occupied with his body. On the other hand, the women who gather around Mary are in a state of indirect grief. They are grieving the Mary who has just watched his son being crucified. We also see the three Marys gather around the Virgin Mary, an addition that further intensifies the grief that is going on within the Virgin, almost as if the women around the Virgin are not aware of the ‘actual’ main scene. From the perspective of this fresco, we are faced with a vertical perspective. Without consciously thinking about it, lots of us humans tend to organize a composition with far away objects higher up, and closer objects lower down. This is what Volterra did in this fresco. We see the foreshortened body of Christ, which further intensifies the visual understanding of the three-dimensionality. Moving on to the other figures composed around the Christ, most of the historians believe that these figures were inspired by Michelangelo. Considering the relationship between Volterra and Michelangelo, and as we can observe from the style and depiction of the bodies, their muscularity, and the fact that they are mostly half-nude, suggests that these figures might have been inspired by Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.