Chapter 1 of 6
A Carved Grief
You're looking at a painting that behaves like sculpture. Around 1435, Rogier van der Weyden set ten near-life-size figures inside a shallow gold box, as if a carved altarpiece had suddenly drawn breath. There's no landscape and no sky, only this crowded golden niche and the slow, terrible work of taking Christ down from the cross.
He painted it in oil on oak for the crossbowmen's guild of Leuven; look into the upper corners and you'll find tiny crossbows hidden in the tracery. Everything here bends toward one diagonal: the falling body, and the mother who falls with it.
