The Entombment

Giordano's Entombment of Christ from around 1670 at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, depicts the lowering of Christ's body into the sepulcher — one of the most compositionally demanding subjects in Christian art, requiring the painter to organize a crowded scene of grief around the horizontal body at its center. The Entombment had been treated by the greatest painters of the preceding century — Raphael, Caravaggio, Rubens — and each of Giordano's versions engaged with these precedents while asserting his own dramatic language. Around 1670, Giordano was synthesizing his Neapolitan training under Ribera with the broader Italian tradition he had studied in Venice, Rome, and Florence, and the Entombment provided a subject where all these influences — Venetian colorism, Roman compositional grandeur, Neapolitan emotional intensity — could be brought to bear in a single challenging composition. The Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester holds this as part of its collection of European Baroque and Rococo painting acquired for the educational mission of a major American research university.

The composition centers on Christ's pale, lifeless body, its luminous flesh creating a dramatic contrast against the dark tomb setting. Giordano uses strong directional lighting in the manner of Ribera to model the mourning figures while maintaining the warm chromatic richness of his mature palette.