The first version of this painting - a small oil on cardboard - was exhibited by Sassu in 1942 at Barbaroux’s gallery in Milan. The pyramidal scheme repeats the one already used by the artist in his Crucifixion of 1941. The compositional structure, enlived by the agitated gestures of the figures, is taken up again and brought to its culmination in this Deposition of 1943, a monumental painting now in the Museo d’Arte Moderna in the Vatican. The work can be viewed in the vein of the pictures of history and myth from a few years earlier, whose horizontal narrative progression could be said to be counterpoised here by the allusions to the sacred connected with the verticality of the transcendent.