About the Work
Zoppo was presumably Venice’s most important ‘humanist’ painter after Andrea Mantegna; moreover, he was an accomplished draughtsman. The Frankfurt work was originally in the Madonna Sketchbook produced around 1470. The scene has been staged in a spatially sophisticated and highly dramatic manner. The rigid, dead figure of Christ in the foreground is set off sharply against the expressively mourning apostles further back, the scene’s actual spectators. This contrast is also reflected in the manner of execution.