The dimensions, format, theme, support and pictorial style of these three works -The Crucifixion (P8211), Lamentation over the Dead Christ (Museo de Salamanca, CE 106) and The Resurrection (P8212)- all point towards a common provenance, an altarpiece with traditional subject matter linked to the Christological cycle, with special emphasis on the episodes related to the Passion, the death of Christ and the Resurrection. This was the type of iconography most often repeated on the altarpieces of the period, and it is very likely that some of these subjects were included on the retables produced by Morales from the mid-1530s onwards.

The pictorial style of these three works is meanwhile agreed by specialists on the painter to fit coherently with Morales’s best production of the 1560s, or at least that related to paintings destined for altarpieces, a type of work in which workshop participation was frequent. The compositional and pictorial refinement displayed by these works in comparison with the Arroyo de la Luz altarpiece lends credence to Carmelo Solís’s proposal in 1999 that they should be related with the main altarpiece of the parish church of Alconchel (Badajoz), a town where Morales had already worked in the 1540s, probably for the convent of Nuestra Señora de la Luz.

For The Resurrection, Morales regathered the essential elements of the version at Arroyo de la Luz, and based himself on models that were already well established for this scene, with the triumphant Christ standing on the sepulchre and, on either side, the soldiers who were guarding the spot. Two prints by Dürer could have been combined for the composition, one from the Large Passion (1510) for the figure of the resurrected Christ, and another from the Small Passion (1509-11) for the soldiers. Pérez Sánchez discerned a process of compositional clarification in the Arango version that extends to other aspects of the work, such as the arrangement and orientation of two soldiers who differ greatly from the rough figures with oversized heads on the Arroyo altarpiece, the treatment of the fabrics, the simplification of the surrounding landscape and, above all, the light and slender figure of the resurrected Christ, his body revealed to the viewer in a very different way from his counterpart on the Arroyo altarpiece, where much of the torso is covered by the purple robe.

As with the panels of the Crucifixion and Lamentation, Morales has taken great care over the representation of the sky, here tranquil and luminous, and all the features of the landscape. In the bluish distance of the background are some houses of Northern European extraction and a steep mountain, almost a replica of the rock standing alongside the scene in the foreground (Text drawn from Ruiz, L.: The Divine Morales, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2015, pp. 153-159).