The Mourning of Christ

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) was an immediate contemporary of Corot. The Kunsthalle owns two works by this titan of French Romanticism. In 1843/44, he created a wall painting of the "Mourning of Christ" for the Church of Saint-Denis du Saint-Sacrement. The work in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe was painted in 1857 as an (inverted and thus in keeping with his original design) replica of the monumental painting, whose expressiveness deeply impressed Charles Baudelaire. The poet, one of Delacroix's most glowing admirers and brightest advocates, wrote of him: "He created intimate genre paintings, he made large emotional historical paintings. Perhaps he alone created religious paintings in our faithless century, which were neither cold like competition works, nor pedantic, mystical, or neo-Christian."

Indeed, the "Mourning of Christ" is impressive in its extraordinary expressiveness, which Delacroix produced with a lambent brushstroke and a use of colour in which muted values contrast boldly with bright reds and blues. Compositionally, Delacroix gathers the mourners into a dense group of sufferers, with the body of Christ in their midst. Mary, on whose lap the dead Christ rests, spreads her arms out wide. With this gesture, Delacroix makes reference to a painting type coined by Rosso Fiorentino around 1530/35, in which Mary, in agony over the loss of her son, experiences his crucifixion with her own body.

This scene is situated in a zone between heaven and earth, in a sort of cavern, out of which the viewer looks past the mourning group into a wide, hilly landscape and into the sky. The view indicates the transitory nature of Christ's death and subtly anticipates his resurrection and ascension.