Entombment of Christ

Carrying the body to the tomb

The Entombment is the last episode of the Friday. The gospels give it briefly: the body is wrapped, laid in a new tomb cut in rock, and a stone is rolled across. Painting settled on the carrying rather than the laying, because a body borne by several people gives the subject its one movement, and because the tomb itself supplies almost nothing to look at.

Where it falls in the cycle

After the Deposition and the Lamentation, immediately before the silence of the Saturday and the empty tomb of the Sunday morning. Five titles in this catalogue name an Entombment, against twenty-five that name a Lamentation — the burial is the end of the Passion, but the mourning is what the tradition painted.

The record

The catalogue gives Titian, 1526, and the Louvre, Paris, France, one of fifteen works in this catalogue recorded there. It measures 148 x 205 cm, a wide horizontal, which is the proportion a carried body imposes. The style is entered as High Renaissance and the artist as Italian; the subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as brown. The entry names no patron and no earlier owner, and none is asserted here.