Beneath the cross, the Virgin Mary holds the dead body of Jesus as mourners surround them. This scene was a well-established subject in Venetian painting by the second half of the 16th century. Typically, the primary mourners are Saint John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene. Others often depicted include Mary Cleophas and the two followers who took Jesus’s body down from the cross and bore it to the tomb, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Of the two men, the rich Joseph is typically the elder and better dressed. Accordingly, the protagonists in the Gallery’s painting might tentatively be identified as Saint John, the Virgin, Mary Magdalene (usually dressed in red, and thus more likely to be the woman in the background), Mary Cleophas (in the foreground), and Joseph of Arimathea.

The overall style and figure types in the Gallery’s picture are generically in the vein of Jacopo Tintoretto. However, the decorative approach and small scale of the Lamentation suggest the work of a Venetian madonnero, a painter who made and sold images of the Madonna for ordinary households.

The details of Tintoretto’s studio organization remain unknown. However, the profusion of derivative works that include references to studio types and figures from Tintoretto’s paintings, yet are manifestly by different hands, suggests that there may have been semi-independent painters associated with the workshop who were not subject to the workshop’s stylistic standards. On the other hand, Tintoretto may have hired assistants to work on projects on an occasional basis, and these painters may have had their own separate businesses executing works like the Lamentation that mimicked Tintoretto’s style.