MASP

Ecce Homo. Dead Christ in the Tomb as Vir Dolorum is a door of a tabernacle or reliquary as is shown by the lock on the le side. e extreme crudeness of the modeling denes the anatomy of a gure with the same poetic rigor in which the perspective of an ancient sarcophagus is designed in the space, of an elegance not lacking an archaeological tone. The iconography of Christ as Vir Dolorum is frequently associated with the Arma Christi, in which Christ is represented with the instruments of the Passion and with the iconography of the Mass of St. Gregory the Great. According to this legend, the image of Christ appeared to the saint while he was celebrating a mass in the Church of Santa Croce in Jerusalem (or according to another tradition, in Saint Peter). A small mosaic icon from the 14th century, kept in Santa Croce, may be a copy of a much older (7th-8th century) prototype, which may have been a contemporary illustration of the miracle. e matter was specically studied by Vetter (1963) and Bertelli (1967). According to the former, the oldest conserved painting on the theme is the icon from the sacristy of the Church of Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem, dated from the 12th century. In Italy the theme is recurrently manifested as from the 13th century, whether in illuminations (Vetter 1963, pp. 199-214), or in Tuscan painting (Garrison 1949, n. 150; Marques 1987, p. 230) as well as in Venetian painting (Garrison 1949, n. 152, 153, 267, and 268). e Masp has a Mass of Saint Gregory with the Last Judgment of the Catalan-Valentian Master of the Família Artés, active at the turn of the 15th to 16th centuries, which attests to the enormous di­usion of this iconography beyond Italian Culture. Among the numerous representations of this theme in the 15th century, there are two compositions that are extremely similar to the Masp’s work, both stylistically attributed to Niccolò Alunno, which are at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia (Santi 1985, n. 24) and the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum of Cologne (Klesse 1973, n. 744, p. 138). ese works attest to the frequent representation of Christ in the tomb as Vir Dolorum during late 15th-century Umbrian painting.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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