Expressing Emotion in the Artwork of Antwerp Cathedral,...

There are many ways a person can choose to express his emotions, poetry, dancing or choosing to express them through art. Painting is one form of art that provides the artist with an endless field of possibilities to put his thoughts into colours and figures, and placing them with relation to one another, with every space in the painting, even the empty one, representing an idea or a thought. Comparing between art works is a very strange and unusual thing, youre never sure what exactly the artist wants to represent, sometimes he seeks to interpret a reality present around him or merely copy what he sees, like a portrait for example. Sometimes he represents a scene that he never witnessed, but read about, and so he tries to flow the words into objects, the objects into figures, and the figures into emotions that reach the viewer. The subject matter of a painting or a piece of art is termed Iconography. Another thing to keep in mind while analyzing a work of art is the function for whi ch the painting or sculpture serves, which most of the time affects both the material of the painting and the style of the artist. In this paper I will discuss a work of art that was meant to serve as an altarpiece for the Antwerp cathedral, the Lamentation attributed to Quentin Massys (c.1520, Museum of fine Arts). I will put the painting in comparison with both biblical interpretations of the Lamentation, and also other artists works that were meant to show the same scene. For the