Joseph of Arimathea with the Body of Christ

Author: Klazina Botke

This drawing depicts the moment just after Christ’s body is taken down from the Cross. His dead body is lifted up and shown to us by Joseph of Arimathea. According to the Bible, he and Nicodemus were responsible for the descent from the Cross and the entombment (John 19:38-42). The female figure on the right could be Mary Magdalene. The drawing is a preliminary study for a contemplative image: the viewer is invited to gaze on Christ’s body and meditate on his suffering, on their own mortality and the promised redemption. There is a similar composition in The Entombment  (first half of the sixteenth century) by Giovanni Antonio Lappoli (1492-1552).^[1] A better-known example is the Pietà Bandini (c.1547-55) by Michelangelo (1475-1564), his last – never finished – sculpture. This marble statue, which shows Nicodemus with Christ’s body, flanked by the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, likewise inspires sympathy and devotion.^[2]

Koenigs bought the drawing as a work by Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547) in 1923. At some point the name of Bernardino Poccetti was added on the verso.^[3] The drawing style, with strong contour lines and coarse hatching, does not, however, correspond with the work of these two artists. The physiognomy of the figures is also clearly different. Chris Fischer and Aidan Weston-Lewis recently placed the drawing in the context of Florence, in the circle of Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) and his pupil Alessandro Allori (1535-1607), while Gert Jan van der Sman suggested an attribution to Aurelio Lomi.^[4] This last suggestion is convincing when we compare the study with other drawings by Lomi. The rounded contours and closed eyes are typical of his chalk drawings, as are the articulated but sometimes rather unwieldly hands and heads. The extraordinarily rapid, coarse hatching we see in Joseph’s left arm and elsewhere is also found in a study of a group of young men in Paris.^[5] The striking depiction of the female figure on the left, where cheek, chin and neck are rendered in a single line, strongly resembles that of the woman with a viola da gamba in Lomi’s preliminary study for The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c.1612).^[6]

Aurelio Lomi trained in Florence. Artists like Bronzino and Allori probably played an important part in his artistic education.^[7] As well as Lomi’s painted works, numerous preliminary studies and a number of modelli by his hand have survived.^[8] In the Rotterdam drawing, which as we have said is most likely a preliminary study for a small devotional painting, the emphasis is on the outlines of the figures. The fact that they were indented suggests that the composition was at some time transferred to a canvas or panel. The sheet has been folded twice and has a number of brown spots, particularly in the Christ figure’s upper body and along the horizontal fold. The upper right corner is missing and had already been filled in with blue paper before Koenigs bought the sheet.