The Entombment of Christ

Caravaggio painted The Entombment of Christ around 1603–04 for the Chapel of Pietro Vittrice in the Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome, where it served as the high altarpiece. The composition — five figures lowering Christ's body into a stone sarcophagus — is organized around the horizontal of the dead Christ and the vertical of the stone lid into which he descends. The stone itself, projecting toward the viewer at the picture's lower edge, was a deliberate spatial provocation: the viewer stands at the edge of the tomb, participating in the entombment. Caravaggio's treatment of the five figures — each in a different emotional register from prostrate grief to steady support — creates a psychological range within a single concentrated space that Rubens, Géricault, and Cézanne would all study and learn from.

The dramatic diagonal descent of figures from the raised arms of Mary of Clopas to the lowered body of Christ creates a powerful compositional movement, with the stone slab jutting toward the viewer breaking the picture plane in a remarkably theatrical gesture.