Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Lamentation
Hans Baldung (German, 1484/85–1545)
c. 1515–17
- Medium
- woodcut
- Classification
- Culture
- Germany
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Prints
- Credit line
- Dudley P. Allen Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Baldung's originality is evident in Lamentation, one of his most expressive and deeply moving works. Every element—radical foreshortening, compressed figures in exaggerated poses, the abruptly truncated top of the composition, even the frenzy of Mary Magdalene's cascading curls—intensifies the expression of grief. The low point of view projects instruments of the Passion into the spectator's space, making one a participant in this anguished drama.