Replicating Mysteries of the Passion: Rosso's Dead Christ with Angels

Abstract

During his sojourn in Rome from 1524 to 1527, Rosso painted a panel of a dead Christ with angels for his friend Leonardo Tornabuoni, bishop of Borgo San Sepolcro. Vasari saw the painting in the house of Giovanni della Casa at mid-century, but subsequently it was lost from general sight until the 1950s, when it was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Fig. 1). The panel has been assessed by art historians as one of signal importance, at once a high water mark in Rosso's own work and masterpiece of the early Romanmaniera,a painting remarkable for its great beauty and artfulness, composed after long study of Michelangelo and the antique. The first considered estimation of the work emphasized its sculptural qualities, its formal tensions in pose and color, and its artistic virtuosity, suggesting that the subject was a version of theimago pietatis,reworked into a resurrecting Christ, emblematic of the patron's titular see. Although still impressed with the suavity of the panel in relation to Rosso's previous work, a subsequent critic was more conscious of its ambivalences, discerning a continuity with the young Rosso's individualistic and eccentric sensibilities, finally identifying the subject as an assertion of the eucharistic real presence. Analogies with language have been advanced, among them an allusion to the intensely equivocal nature of the painting. For one scholar the artfulness of the panel and Rosso's artistic attitudes were separate from their religious purpose; for another, they were absolutely at odds.