One of the most admirable works of fifteenth-century Italy can be found in the heart of Bologna, like a small miracle, nearly 600 years after it was made. Even the illustrious Gabriele D’Annunzio was so charmed by it during a visit that he described Niccolò dell’Arca’s Lamentation “the sublime, violent image of a petrified cry”.

Entering the church of Santa Maria della Vita and coming to the chapel to the right of the high altar, the terracotta group strikes the visitor like a theatrical epiphany, immediately drawing you into a mythical, profoundly dramatic narrative infused with telluric, eternally vital pathos. Everything shakes and vibrates, like a symphony, play or poem. Christ’s unchanged grace is rashly shattered by the polyphonic group of six figures, especially the vivid, hyper-realistic expressionism of the faces of the female figures, literally sculpted in the wind, the vibration of their garments and features anticipating the great Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

A 17th-century Emilian writer accurately described them as the “endless weepers”. A bold work for its time and restless synthesis of late-Gothic and Tuscan humanism, an art-historical diamond in the rough forever able to move, shake and seduce. And we can still hear that cry in the wind.