Entombment of Christ

Albrecht Altdorfer's Entombment of Christ at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, painted around 1518, depicts the placing of Christ's body in the tomb in Altdorfer's characteristic manner — the solemn figures of the Entombment surrounded by the visionary landscape that makes all his sacred narratives simultaneously devotional images and celebrations of the natural world. Altdorfer was the founder of the Danube School and the most innovative landscape painter in early sixteenth-century Germany, and even in this Passion subject, the atmospheric environment — dark rocky cliffs, overcast sky, trees and vegetation — plays as important a role as the human figures. The Entombment was a subject inviting meditation on grief, loss, and the anticipation of Resurrection, and Altdorfer gives it a nocturnal quality that deepens the emotional intensity. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna holds the Habsburg imperial collection, which assembled exceptional examples of German Renaissance painting, and Altdorfer's Entombment is among its masterpieces of the early sixteenth-century German school.

The panel combines the emotional gravity of the burial scene with Altdorfer's luminous landscape painting, using dramatic light and atmospheric effects to heighten the devotional impact.