#grief

Part of a long series he kept adding to and rehanging for years — love, jealousy, illness, death, all of it as one run. Supposedly this one went under a second title along the lines of 'After the Fall', which tells you roughly where in that story we've arrived.

The tsar's government wanted this out of sight — it was apparently barred from public display for a while not long after it turned up. Part of what's said to be behind it is the political killing going on in Russia at the time, so it isn't really a history lesson so much as a picture about violence the painter was living through. It's also been attacked by visitors with a blade twice, decades apart.

The whole chapel this sits in was paid for by a banker's son — supposedly to make up for the money his father made lending at interest, which the Church counted as a sin at the time. It's one panel out of a whole wall of them telling the story in order, so it was never meant to be looked at on its own.

The story goes that he kept this one — it was still in his studio when he died, and his sons sold it off to clear what he owed. No one's settled on when he painted it either; the guesses spread across a couple of decades.