Months after the gruesome sack of Rome in 1527, Rosso Fiorentino begins work on an altarpiece in nearby Sansepolcro.  Unlike Parmigianinio’s experience of the sack—saved from harm by the grace of his painting, according to Vasari—Rosso had been enslaved by German soldiers in the fallen city.  His altarpiece presents a pietà, the dead Christ moments after the deposition, lamented in his mother’s lap.  Although bloodless and dignified, the desiccated cadaver betrays intense anatomical study as well as first-hand experience of the decay of the human body. Traumatic witness of the massacre of a city lurks within the dark picture, but there is no explicit imagery of violence.  In fact, the finely painted corpse with its delicate ginger beard and the ornate costumes of the mourners assert a refined elegance familiar in Rosso’s later work.

            Rosso’s painting grapples with imaging an inherently violent event and confronting the horror of mortality appropriately, as the patron confraternity—a community of flagellants—was explicit in its demand for an image that would bring honour to the crucified body.  Approaches to this peculiar painting have either hinted vaguely at its ambiguous but definite relationship to Rosso’s experience of the Sack of Rome, or focused on reading its iconography and avoided confronting its “weirdness”.  The image is constructed to emphasize issues of violence and mortality indirectly, positioning remarkable details in the shadowed periphery which challenge the elegant focal centre.  This study analyzes the painting to consider its sophisticated compositional construction in terms of the local and larger cultural context, as well as to consider what it reveals about Rosso’s understanding of the act of beholding.