Maquette de l'hémicycle de l'église Saint-Philippe du Roule : "Le Christ descendu de la croix"

This 1853 oil sketch on canvas documents Chassériau's preparatory work for the large decorative programme at the church of Saint-Philippe du Roule in Paris, which occupied him from 1852 to 1855 — his final major commission. The subject, Christ taken down from the cross and prepared for burial, was treated with the fullness of the traditional Descent from the Cross or Deposition, a subject with an extraordinarily rich tradition in European painting from Rogier van der Weyden through Rubens to Delacroix. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris holds this sketch as a record of Chassériau's most ambitious ecclesiastical project. The sketch format reveals his working method for large decorative commissions — testing the composition's figure arrangement, tonal structure, and emotional register before committing to the final mural.

The sketch is handled with the freedom appropriate to preparatory work, figure groupings established in broad tonal masses with individual details indicated rather than resolved. The emotional intensity of the subject is already present in the sketch's broad structure, suggesting Chassériau could work from feeling as well as from compositional planning. The warm tonality gives the tragic subject appropriate gravity.