Carlo Crivelli, originally from Venice, led the life of a successful itinerant painter working along the Italian Adriatic coast. Although his isolation from major artistic centers resulted in a strange style marked by a caricatured realism, Crivelli's training in figure drawing underpinned his permutations of the norm, evident in the precise observation of Christ's anatomy. The nude body racked by the stiffening aftermath of death afforded the artist ample opportunity to demonstrate his taut draftsmanship, and in his detailed depiction of Christ's wounds and his graying skin, the angels' tears, and their anguished expressions. Crivelli displayed his fine brushwork. The artist accentuated the realism of sorrow and death for dramatic effect and because of the painting's original position as the crowning element of an altarpiece. He compensated for the height at which the painting would have been seen by emphasizing the curve and weight of the dead body, which the angels can barely support. Carl Brandon Strehlke, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 166.