Vatican Museums

This precious ceramic work, produced by Alik Cavaliere in 1950, forms part of a small series of panels of religious subjects – Deposition, Crucifixion, Soldier on horseback and Christ deposed from the Cross – that the artist realised in the period following the Second World War. Roman by birth, he moved to Milan in 1938, and by the time he produced this work he had already completed his studies at the Brera Academy as a pupil of Francesco Messina and was beginning to dedicate himself to sculpture. The work encapsulates the characteristics of his production in those years: his debt to the great Italian sculptural tradition, especially in terms of its iconographic basis, a tendency towards objective observation, which translates into a synthetic and personal realism, and an originality in the use of colour and in the deliberate fragmentation of the surface, a feature of Cavaliere’s entire evolution.