The Virgin Swooning and the Three Maries at the Tomb of Christ

This landscape looks more like a set piece from a theatre than a natural landscape. The sky has been replaced by a gold background. Around 1350 we see an emerging interest in the physiognomy of the human body and in nature. However, artists are not yet preoccupied with depicting landscapes in full detail as they might look in real life. That particular trend does not have its breakthrough in art until around 1600. In this work nature primarily serves a symbolic function. We can read the trees and flowers as symbols of the resurrection of Christ and of how life continues after death. These trees do, in fact, reach all the way up to the sky. Nature tells us more than the grieving figures in the painting can take in at the moment, but Christian observers of the depiction will know that something else will follow grief. Christ will be resurrected, and there will be a life after death in the golden Paradise.