Awkwardly bent, pallid, and devoid of vital energy, Christ’s body in Ludovico Carracci’s Lamentation of Christ (1582) is an unconventionally naturalistic depiction of a corpse. In this probing and sensitive analysis of an unexamined early painting by a member of one of early modernity’s most important family of artists, Casper reveals for the first time its position at the nexus of artistic, scientific, and religious ways of understanding Christ’s dead body in Counter Reformation Bologna. It is within these diverse frameworks of knowledge of the dead Christ that Ludovico Carracci and his viewers could activate the painting’s function as a devotional image.