The Deposition by Arnold Böcklin: Lamentation beneath the Cross

A white shroud has been spread across a meadow full of daisies, and on it lies the body of Christ, held at the shoulders by an old man in green and gold while a kneeling companion raises the linen towards him. Further to the left, a red-haired woman falls backwards in a faint, her hand caught by a young man in crimson. The Deposition by Arnold Böcklin, a large panel painted in tempera and coloured varnish, is catalogued in German as Beweinung unter dem Kreuz, the Lamentation beneath the Cross. It belongs to the Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and is held in the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie under inventory number A I 827.

The date needs some caution. The painting has been listed under the years 1871–74 with a height of 160 cm. The museum’s collection record, however, dates it to 1876 and gives its size as 164 × 250 cm. Its catalogue text, written by Angelika Wesenberg, describes the picture as only just finished when the Swiss painter showed it in Berlin in the autumn of 1876. The record does not say whether the earlier dates reflect a long period of preparation, and the question remains open. Sammlungen der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin

Arnold Böcklin, Beweinung unter dem Kreuz (The Deposition), 1876, tempera and varnish on wood, 164 × 250 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. A I 827.

A Frieze of Mourners at Dusk

At 250 cm wide, the panel gives Böcklin room to lay out his figures in three groups along a shallow strip of foreground, arranged almost like a relief. The fainting woman and her companion stand at the left. The kneeling man occupies the centre, and the body, the old man and an aged woman fill the right. Behind all of them runs a low white wall with a stepped top, plants spilling over its edge. A row of dark cypresses rises behind the wall against a sky that deepens into blue. Below the swooning woman, small pale houses cluster on a distant hillside: a town seen at a distance, with no road or path leading the eye towards it.

The Crucifixion is still present (Luke 23:32–33). At the upper right a crucified man hangs with his arms stretched upwards towards the crossbar, his head inclined and his palms bloodied. A second hanging body is cut off by the top edge of the panel, leaving its torso and part of a bent leg in view. A wooden upright rises along the right margin, and at the lower right a squared beam lies on the ground. Christ himself is already down among the flowers, so the picture shows the moment after the Deposition proper (John 19:38–40), when the body has reached the earth and the mourning begins. This explains why the German title speaks of lament where the English one speaks of descent.

The sky darkens towards evening, the figures and the white wall remaining clearly and brightly lit. Small white flowers, with a few blue ones among them, are scattered over the grass right up to the lower edge. One of Christ’s hands rests among them.

The Fainting Magdalene and John

The left-hand pair is the most theatrical passage in the painting, and it drew the sharpest comment in 1876. Theodor Fontane, who was then working as an art critic, named the two figures as Magdalene and John and mocked them in terms that the museum’s catalogue still quotes. The woman’s head is thrown back so far that her throat forms the apex of the backward curve. Her eyes are closed and her lips parted, and her long auburn hair falls in thin, wiry curls over a white undergarment painted with a glossy, almost metallic sheen. Around her swings a mantle of deep teal, scattered with gold four-pointed stars and edged with a dark border worked in a looped gold ornament. The mantle fans outward to the left, following the movement of her fall.

John wears a crimson mantle gathered in heavy folds at the shoulder. He holds her hand in both of his, his gaze directed towards her face, with slightly furrowed brows and a tense, sidelong look. The contrast between their gestures is hard to overlook. The woman’s head is flung back while the man’s remains inclined towards her, and the contrived drama of this encounter may be what Fontane found false. He wrote that Magdalene looked like a woman who had just received a letter breaking off a secret engagement, and that John seemed about to tell her, “Lenchen, time heals all.”

Detail of the left-hand pair, Magdalene and John, whom Theodor Fontane mocked for their hollow pathos when the panel was shown in Berlin in 1876.

Fontane’s complaint concerned the hollow pathos of the figures. The colour of the group raises a separate issue. Teal and crimson meet along a single contour, with no transitional tone between them, and this kind of direct juxtaposition was precisely what the critics were reacting to.

The Body of Christ and the Mourners Who Receive It

The Body Laid on the Shroud

Christ lies on his back across the white cloth, his head at the right, tipped backwards and supported from beneath by the old man’s hand. The flesh is green-grey, with the ribs and the hollows of the chest modelled in cool shadow. The face, framed by a dark beard, has sunken eyes, while long reddish hair falls over the supporting hand towards the ground. One arm stretches along the sheet towards the kneeling man; the other has dropped onto the grass. The Berlin critic Adolf Rosenberg, reviewing the picture in the Kunstchronik in 1877, ranked it among the strangest works of a highly gifted artist. He judged that the treatment of the dead Saviour offended religious feeling and aesthetic feeling alike. Such a verdict is easy to understand in front of a corpse painted with such unsoftened pallor.

Shown in strict profile, the kneeling man has thick black curls, a red-brown beard and an intent gaze fixed on Christ’s face. His rust-red garment carries broad yellow chevrons, and fringes hang from the sleeve. One hand lifts the shroud, which falls in gleaming folds; the other presses down on a white cloth spread on the grass.

Detail of the central group: the kneeling mourner raises the shroud while an aged man in a jewelled green robe cradles the head of the dead Christ.

Two Elderly Witnesses

Behind the sheet stands an aged woman with both hands pressed flat against her cheeks. Her eyes are red and wet, her mouth turns down, and her face is deeply lined. A striped head-covering in brown-red and pale gold is wrapped around her head, a patterned scarf circles her throat, and a dark mantle falls from her shoulders. Upright and closed, her pose is almost motionless, in clear contrast to the falling woman at the left. Neither an inscription nor the critics cited in the museum’s text identifies her. The subject would allow her to be the Virgin, yet Böcklin gives the faint, the most dramatic action in the scene, to the younger woman.

The old man who holds the body is the most richly dressed figure in the picture. His white hair hangs in long, separate curling locks, and his beard falls far down over a robe of deep green. Broad gold-embroidered bands run down the front of the robe, set with red and pale stones, and a gold chain loops across it. His eyes are red-rimmed and his brows sag. The picture leaves him unnamed, as it does the kneeling man, and their identities are left to the viewer’s knowledge of the Passion narrative (John 19:38–40).

Tempera, Varnish and Unbroken Colour

Böcklin painted the panel in tempera and varnish on wood. The information supplied with the work specifies coloured varnish, although its contribution cannot be isolated from the reproduction. The colours lie in dense, saturated areas with an almost enamel-like brilliance, especially in the jewelled bands of the green robe and in the gold stars on the teal mantle. Throughout the panel, contours are firm. The hair of nearly every figure is drawn strand by strand: wiry red curls for the woman, coiled white locks for the old man, a black, springy mass for the kneeling man. Fine craquelure crosses the crimson of John’s mantle. Thin horizontal lines run across the surface at intervals and may correspond to joins in the wooden support.

According to the museum’s catalogue text, both the composition and the manner of painting owe a debt to the Italian Renaissance. On this basis Böcklin could reasonably have expected goodwill from a Berlin audience. The same text explains why that goodwill failed to appear. From the 1870s onward, Böcklin often set strong, unbroken colours directly beside one another, anticipating Neo-Romanticism and Symbolism. He also used stylised drawing and symbolic colour without hesitation. The green-grey flesh of Christ, set between the teal and crimson of the left-hand group and the green and gold of the old man, may be the clearest example in the painting of colour chosen for its meaning as much as for its likeness.

The Deposition by Arnold Böcklin in Berlin, 1876

Böcklin, when he exhibited the newly completed panel at the Verein Berliner Künstler in the autumn of 1876, knew that the young Nationalgalerie was considering buying one of his works; a design he had submitted for a Meeresidylle (Sea Idyll) had been turned down shortly before. A Christian subject treated in a Renaissance manner seemed a safer proposal. No purchase followed. The reason, according to report, was the Empress’s objection. The imperial couple then transferred to the gallery, from their own possession, a monumental Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (Mark 5:35–43) by the fashionable painter Gustav Richter (inv. A II 830), a gift that the catalogue text presents almost as an answer to Böcklin’s picture.

It fell to the sculptor Reinhold Begas, Böcklin’s friend, to send the news to Florence. He wrote that after fruitless efforts there was no prospect of the gallery acquiring the painting, and that nothing could be done with the people concerned. Even so, the Lamentation attracted more attention than the mythological Meeresidylle had a year earlier, despite its Christian subject or perhaps because of it. Most of that attention was hostile. The conflict, as Wesenberg puts it, was that the artist whose works Count Schack had bought in large numbers in Munich now appeared bizarre and shrill to Berlin critics.

The decision to acquire something by Böcklin nevertheless stood. In 1877 the Nationalgalerie commissioned a large landscape from him, the Gefilde der Seligen (Fields of the Blessed). That picture proved no less controversial and is recorded by the museum as a war loss.

From the Munich Secession to the Nationalgalerie

After this first critical attack, Böcklin kept the Lamentation out of public view for many years. It reappeared in 1894 at the exhibition of the Munich Secession and was bought that same year by the Friedrich Bruckmann publishing house in Munich. The provenance then passes to P. Wolff, of Braunschweig and Schloss Wartensee near Rorschach in the canton of St Gallen, in 1902. It next appears with the dealers M. Goldschmidt & Co. in Frankfurt am Main, on 16 September 1904. Only in 1904 did the Nationalgalerie buy it from Goldschmidt, bringing the panel into the collection that had declined it twenty-eight years earlier. It now belongs there alongside earlier works by the painter, such as the Italian Campagna Landscape of around 1859.

A preparatory design for the composition also survives in Berlin. It is drawn in ink, heightened with white, on grey paper, and is kept in the Kupferstichkabinett.

Sources

• Wesenberg, Angelika. Catalogue entry for Arnold Böcklin, Beweinung unter dem Kreuz, inv. A I 827, Alte Nationalgalerie. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, online collection.