TEARS ARE AMONG the most visible, and yet elusive, aspects of the body's mutability. When tears come, they are impossible to ignore, but, of course, they can be extremely fugitive— fleeting and leaving scarcely any physical trace. Religious paintings and sculptures depicting tears, and the lamentation that prompts them, constitute a large body of conspicuous and enduring sources of information about crying in the early modern period, while secular representations are much rarer. Yet, when examining this evidence, it is readily apparent that individual images, and even parts of images, can be interpreted differently depending on the cultural context in which they are considered. Historically, in some contexts, the sincerity and even sanctity of tears were honoured, while in others, their potential for disruption and perceived lack of faith were censured. This chapter will investigate the complex relationship between early modern images and experiences of lamentation and crying, by analyzing examples of an iconographic genre in which these commonly occur: the Passion of Christ.

The literature on tears in early modern religious images and in the experiences of their viewers has flourished in recent decades. Notably, the 2012 book Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History included three chapters on thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenthcentury depictions of lamentation in religious paintings and mosaics from northern and southern Europe. This chapter aims to complement these studies by drawing attention to an analogous, but significantly different kind of image to those already investigated. A Lamentation of Christ (henceforth referred to as “Lamentation” for brevity) attributed to the fifteenth-century Italian sculptor Bartolomeo Bellano (figure 2, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and a number of similar works of sculpture and painting show conspicuously impassive male devotional figures in Passion scenes. These call for further discussion of crying in, and in response to, early modern images, with reference to such contemporary influences as devotional practices, sumptuary laws, and decorum.

In the first of the three chapters just mentioned from Crying in the Middle Ages, Henry Maguire noted that Byzantine church writers commended expressions of grief, but in moderation, because conspicuous displays were said to show a lack of decorum and to imply a lack of faith.