Grief is physical, a 360-degree experience. It consumes our senses, directs our body language contorts our expressions. Faces glisten with tears; mouths are flatlined; eyes heavy; cheeks pallid.

That’s what gets you in the gut about Rogier van der Weyden’s extraordinary masterpiece, The Descent from the Cross (1435). It hangs on a black wall – what else? – in the Prado in Madrid: with the light directed on it, the colours, especially Mary’s lapis lazuli dress and John the Evangelist’s crimson robe, shine like jewels. Van der Weyden was the pioneer of Renaissance realism: he transformed art by putting emotion into the faces of his players, and nowhere is that emotion seen more starkly than in this work. It was commissioned by the crossbowmen’s guild of Leuven, a fact honoured in the T-shaped, crossbow-like pose of the dead Christ.

There are 10 people in this painting, six men and four women, and there’s no hierarchy of the sexes – in grief, we are equals, and there’s an equality about the tasks of sorrowfully and tenderly releasing Christ from his Cross.