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Surpassing the certainties of the Renaissance, the rationalizing geometry of Brunelleschi’s lines, the forms that became space in Piero della Francesca’s art, Italian art took, in the early decades of the 1500s, the difficult path of the "maniera", and thus a modernist style, in which lines suddenly became curved, convex, and concave, colors no longer defined an ideal canon of behavior but the changing and shadowy emotions, subjects were portrayed not as abstract and unperturbed models outside of time, but as men made of flesh and bones, of emotions and states of mind, reflected in the shades of their garments, in the skin tones of their faces, in the landscape or interiors in which they were depicted.
The path, already foreshadowed by the late Raphael or the gigantism of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, was confidently pursued by some students of these great painters - foremost among them Giulio Romano - but also by atypical figures, to some extent unsettling, like Giovan Battista di Jacopo, known as Rosso Fiorentino (1495-1540).
The Deposition in Volterra is one of the masterpieces of this overlooked artist - whose cherubs incidentally adorn the unsuspecting notebooks or folders of our contemporary high school students - that allows us to give some concreteness to the general premise around the style of the "maniera", and, above all, around its merits, despite the tone with which, even today, an artistic expression is branded as "mannerism": almost to signify a sterile, stale, repetitive, uninspired, and needlessly complex technique, not coincidentally antithetical to a preceding hypothetical classical or canonical model.
Let us briefly describe the scene.
The altarpiece is ideally divided, by the cross, into four different quadrants, within which the figures of a drama move: Christ is not depicted in the act of triumphing over death, but as a corpse, distinguished by a greenish color that almost blends with the wood of the cross; in his stillness, he contrasts with the movement of the men depicted in the act of un-nailing him from the beams of the cross.
At the bottom right, Mary assumes the same colors as her son, amplifying the message of death and dark despair, and seems almost to disappear in her garments, while being supported by two women, and Magdalene, in a vivid red that clashes with the draperies of the Virgin, despairs at her knees.
At the bottom left, stands alone the despair of the apostle John, whose face, hidden by garments, shows an elliptical pain, absent like the life in this Christ.
Notable in this painting is both the mixing of languages and the emotion aroused in the observer.
It is the material objects here, the cross as a symbol of death rather than resurrection, that divide the space, according to the Renaissance model. Yet, they are portrayed in a cold, distant, detached light. There is no reference to classical models, the landscape itself, behind the cross, is dark, uniform, lacking perspective depth, one might say claustrophobic.
Everything that is not an object is defined more by color than by painting or portraiture technique or the precision of drawing: hence, there is a search for expression, the fleeting touch in which the painted stain becomes form, rather than for rigor in portraiture, all the more so because the majority of the subjects' faces are captured obliquely, if not hidden or wrapped in the drapery of their garments.
The rhythm impressed by the color in this painting guides the observer's eye, leading them to considerations that transcend art, prompting them to question the mystery of Faith.
Often, in Christianity, the hope of the Good News is rightly emphasized, and the figure of Christ, seen through the eyes of a believer, is completely assimilated, in the Mystery of the Trinity, to a God who, besides being perfect, is also Love, a gateway through which man can fully achieve his destiny.
In this dimension, there may be a lack, for the believer, of understanding the mystery of death, common to all men, and common to Christ's own experience. Almost dazzled by Faith, we may underestimate, on some occasions, the drama of those who do not believe, and of those who see, in the cessation of earthly life, the cessation of everything, the end of all hope.
Paintings like this, with their earthy Christ, with the drama of Mary, Magdalene, and John, stir compassion, and perhaps echo, in their somberness, an eternal memento mori, the necessity of darkness, silence, and the solitude of weeping as an ineluctable passage to arrive at a more mature revelation of life's possible meanings.
I believe that in this, Rosso Fiorentino’s painting stands out among the masterpieces of all art, setting in motion, besides the observer's eye, both their intellect and their heart, irrespective of each one’s religious beliefs, thereby reaching, in this way, a universal communicative level, which only genius can probably attain.
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