Ascolta l'arte e mettila da parte

April 15th, 2026

 EPISODE N.18

Today I would like to speak to you about a masterpiece that is not housed in a monumental church, but in a more secluded, almost intimate space: Santa Maria della Vita. A small church in the heart of Bologna that tells a story of suffering and pain, but also of hope.

The sanctuary of Santa Maria della Vita was founded toward the end of the thirteenth century thanks to the initiative of a confraternity known as the Battuti or Flagellants. Tradition holds that they were led by a layman, Raniero Fusani, who arrived in Bologna from Perugia at the very end of the 1200s. As their name suggests, these confraternity members practiced collective public self-flagellation, with the aim of promoting the importance of penance and reconciliation in the name of the suffering Christ, who through his Passion and death had redeemed humankind from sin and brought them closer to God. In a time marked by deep spiritual turmoil and political conflict affecting the Italian communes, the path of penance seemed the most suitable way to foster peace.

Over time, this confraternity grew rapidly and, alongside its original penitential spirit, developed practices of care and hospitality: for the many pilgrims traveling throughout Italy to venerate sites of devotion, but also for the sick and the poor, who were numerous in the city of Bologna. Next to the small church, an oratory was established—a space for gathering and devotion—and a proper hospital: one of the first of its kind.

It is in the fifteenth century, during a period of intense charitable activity, that the confraternity commissioned Niccolò dell’Arca, also known as Niccolò da Bari, to create the group of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, completed around 1463. Originally placed near the entrance of the sanctuary, it is now located in the chapel to the right of the high altar, not immediately visible upon entering the church. When one ascends the short staircase leading to the presbytery and steps into the space that houses the work, the reaction is one of astonishment: the emotional impact of this life-size terracotta group is a vivid experience.

Today we conceive of this masterpiece as a work of art. In reality, it was born as something more. The Lamentation is a tangible testimony to the life of Christ; it is an object of devotion; it is a mirror of the suffering and pain that the walls of Santa Maria della Vita have absorbed for centuries.

The scene represents the moment immediately following the deposition of Christ from the cross—an episode not strictly narrated in the Gospels, but elaborated by medieval imagination. Christ has just been taken down: he has completed his sacrifice. The friends and relatives who had followed his suffering from a distance now draw near to his lifeless, humiliated, violated body. It is one of the most emotionally intense moments of the Passion—something that words alone cannot fully describe.

Here is where art intervenes: to aid understanding, to guide imagination. Niccolò dell’Arca’s compositional choices are clear and powerful. He places the lifeless body at the center, isolated from the group. No one comes too close to Christ, almost out of a kind of fearful reverence. The figures are arranged around him in a semicircle, and each reacts in their own way to the sight of the beloved body without life. We are faced with a true sequence of emotions: six different shades of grief.

Let us begin with the first figure on the left, Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph was a wealthy member of the Sanhedrin, a distant disciple of Jesus: the one who had asked Pilate for permission to take Christ’s body and had laid it in his own tomb. Dressed in Renaissance garments, he kneels before Christ’s head but averts his gaze. He looks far away, outside the scene, with a thoughtful, exhausted expression. He has just finished lowering that heavy, bloodied body from the cross; in his right hand he still holds the hammer. He is worn out, physically and emotionally.

Very different is the reaction of Mary Salome, mother of John the Evangelist and James the Greater, and of Mary, mother of Jesus. They are caught in the moment when weeping turns into lamentation, when suffering can no longer be contained but takes over the entire body. Their faces are distorted by grimaces, their hands twist. Salome digs her fingers into her thighs, while Mary clasps her hands tightly in a desperate prayer—a prayer that can no longer be heard.

John the Evangelist, at the center, remains standing, wrapped in his cloak, with one hand resting on his chin. He struggles to contain his grief, which is clearly visible in every line of his face. His expression is one of disbelief and devastation: he cannot comprehend what has happened. He has lost his master, his closest friend, his cousin.

But the most overwhelming, most physical reaction is that of Mary of Cleophas and Mary Magdalene. They have just burst into the scene, running, breathless, with their veils fluttering and their faces deformed by grief. Mary of Cleophas stretches her hands forward, almost as if to shield herself from what she sees; Magdalene, instead, rushes toward the feet of Jesus—the feet she had long caressed and anointed. Her profile—the most striking, the most pathetic—would inspire the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio to define this work as a “petrified scream.”

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D’Annunzio’s words describing Magdalene, comparing her to the Nike of Samothrace, are extraordinary:

“She was a kind of monstrous Nike, winged with linens. The fluttering bandages gave wings to her head; the edges of her mantle caught at her elbows beat backward like vanes. Her mouth was dilated in a howl, her eyes stiffened by weeping, her fingers twisted.” (La favilla del maglio, 1924)

And yet, despite D’Annunzio’s beautiful expression—“scream of stone”—the group is not made of stone, but of terracotta. A more fragile, warmer material, closer to the body. Its malleability allowed Niccolò dell’Arca to shape real, lived faces: tangible figures, yet vulnerable, just like our own bodies. Metaphorically, terracotta recalls human fragility; its colors are those of the earth from which we come and to which we return.

It is perhaps precisely this fragility that makes the Lamentation of Niccolò dell’Arca so profoundly different from everything that surrounds it. Because here we are faced with something puzzling.

We are in the heart of the fifteenth century: an age that seeks order, proportion, harmony; an age that looks to antiquity in order to rediscover balance.

And yet here… everything seems to break apart.

The figures are not composed, not contained, not “beautiful” in the classical sense. They are overwhelmed—as if grief had shattered every boundary.

And to fully understand how radical this choice is, it is enough to look at what happens shortly afterward, in the same city.

If we enter the Basilica of San Petronio, we find another Lamentation, created by Vincenzo Onofri in the 1490s, just a few years after Niccolò’s. It is a painted terracotta work—just as Niccolò’s must originally have been—placed within a grotto, similar to the one that may once have housed the group in Santa Maria della Vita. The subject is exactly the same: six figures surround the reclining body of Christ, and Magdalene is once again the most visibly desperate.

And yet the atmosphere is completely different.

Grief gathers inward, restrains itself, becomes quieter. Faces express suffering but are not distorted. Gestures are measured, almost controlled. It is as if the scene were filtered through a sense of decorum—as if grief, though present, had to remain within certain limits.

The comparison thus becomes inevitable.

On one side, Niccolò dell’Arca, who lets emotion explode.
On the other, Onofri, who contains it.

Two different ways of looking at the same moment.
Two different ways, perhaps, of understanding human experience.

Even if we do not know exactly who commissioned Onofri’s Lamentation, its placement within the Basilica of San Petronio must have influenced its more conventional language. In a place of prestige and representation, emotions had to be restrained.

Niccolò’s group, on the other hand, was conceived for a space crossed daily by the sick and the dying, in search of care, comfort, and hope. By placing before their eyes the example of Christ’s death, in all its human suffering, the artist and the confraternity sought to remind them that pain is a universal experience, shared by all, but one that can be endured—and perhaps overcome—through faith.

Long before Baroque art emphasized the importance of emotional involvement in the viewer’s experience, Niccolò had already understood it. He too, probably long before Caravaggio, had managed to capture, in those terracotta faces, real, living figures—people who seem to have truly inhabited the spaces of Santa Maria della Vita.

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After observing Onofri’s Lamentation, so measured, so controlled, one might think that grief in art follows a precise direction—that over time it becomes more and more contained, more and more rationalized.

But this is not the case.

Let us take a sudden leap. Let us leave fifteenth-century Bologna and move to 1937.

We are in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. The Basque city of Guernica is bombed by German aviation, allied with General Franco. It is one of the first systematic bombings of a civilian population—an event that shocks international public opinion. In response, Pablo Picasso creates Guernica for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair.

It is not a religious scene. There is no Christ. There are no saints. And yet… once again we find ourselves before a lamentation.

Once again there is a body on the ground, shifted to the left: that of a fallen soldier, recognizable by the broken sword. All around, grief spreads, expands.

A mother screams, clutching her dead child. Her head is thrown back, her mouth wide open in a cry that we cannot hear, yet we perceive it with the same force as the sculpted cry of Niccolò dell’Arca. It is impossible not to think of the Virgin.

The two women on the left—one kneeling, with a shattered gaze; the other with arms raised to the sky, caught in a furious scream—closely recall Mary of Cleophas and Magdalene in the Lamentation of Santa Maria della Vita.

And then there are the bodies: broken, fragmented, disjointed.

If Niccolò bent bodies to their limit, Picasso breaks them. He strips them of unity—as if violence did not only strike life, but the very form of the human being.

In Niccolò’s Lamentation, the figures rush in, overwhelmed by grief: veils lift, bodies tilt, space seems crossed by an invisible force. In Guernica, that same energy becomes chaos. Lines break. The composition offers no point of balance. We cannot stop. We cannot grasp an overall vision. We cannot impose order.

And yet, despite all this, something remains strikingly similar: the scream.

A scream that crosses the centuries, that changes form, language, style… but not nature.

And so perhaps we can reread everything we have seen in a different way—not as a succession of styles, but as a long, uninterrupted reflection on human suffering.

From Niccolò dell’Arca, who makes it physical, uncontrollable, almost unbearable… to Vincenzo Onofri, who tries to contain it… to Pablo Picasso, who shatters it.

And us? Where do we stand today?

In a world still marked by war, violence, loss… perhaps we are closer to Guernica than we would like to admit. And yet we continue to return before these images—before these bodies, these faces, these gestures.

Why?

Because pain, however difficult to confront, is what unites us most deeply. It is what makes us human. It is what allows us to recognize ourselves in others.

When we look at Niccolò dell’Arca’s Lamentation, we do not see only an episode of the Passion. We see loss.

When we observe Onofri, we see the attempt to give form to that loss.

When we enter Guernica, we see a world in which that loss multiplies, expands, disperses.

And perhaps it is precisely here that art finds its deepest meaning: not in consoling, not in resolving, but in making visible—in giving form to what would otherwise remain unexpressed.

READ THE ARTICLE IN ITALIAN

Artworks: Niccolò dell’Arca, Compianto, 1463, terracotta, Santa Maria della Vita, Bologna; Vincenzo Onofri, Compianto, 1490s circa, terracotta, Basilica di San Petronio, Bologna; Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, tempera su tela, Centro de Arte Reina sofia, Madrid.

Music: Charles Chaitman