Giotto's Expression of Grief

Giotto was the first artist to actually try to express emotion through the gestures of his figures and the Lamentation Over Christ is one of the saddest pictures ever painted.  As artistic skills were developed and perfected over the course of the Renaissance and into the Baroque the capable artists could all depict grief or sorrow in the expressions on the faces of the characters in their painting as well as in the physical posture and gestures of the these characters. But there  is a difference between depiction and expression and Giotto with his nascent technical skills, struggling to invent the language of representational painting, expressed grief in a most powerful way, creating an image that resonates with emotion. In that picture, one of a number of panels on the wall of the Arena Chapel, Christ has been taken down from the cross on is lying dead on the ground his head cradled tenderly in the hands of his mother Mary, his feet help by Mary Magdelaine and around him some of his disciples and some elders from the community, and all this on a stark and barren landscape with some of the mourners making broad gestures of grief, arms outstretched and body bent over or hand curled and face tucked into the hands, sadness pervades the scene but looking up from the body and the mourners into the blue sky there are a number of angels and the angels are distraught and  their flying has been effected by their grief and their flight paths are on colliding courses and some seem to be falling out of the sky and others are crying wringing their hands and there is this wild, erratic energy in the sky embodied by the angels that reads in an abstract way like wild painterly gestures of raw emotion. This is where the true expression comes in and there is an added dimension to this in its contrast to the solid forms of the figures below who appear to be carved from stone and who could not be moved by the force of a hurricane.