The Entombment of Christ - Caravaggio
The Work
Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ, completed around 1603-1604, is an altarpiece measuring 300 × 203 centimeters - monumental in scale, made to dominate the Vittrice Chapel of Santa Maria in Vallicella (the Chiesa Nuova) in Rome, where it was commissioned for the Order of the Oratorians. Today it hangs in the Vatican Pinacoteca, separated from its original architectural setting but losing none of its gravitational force. The painting is widely regarded as Caravaggio's single greatest religious commission and one of the summits of Western painting.
Biblical Source
The primary biblical source is John 19:38-42, which records that Joseph of Arimathea, with the assistance of Nicodemus, took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths with spices before laying it in a new tomb. The Gospel accounts diverge in minor details: Matthew mentions only Joseph, Luke includes the women who had come from Galilee, and John specifically adds Nicodemus. Caravaggio synthesizes these accounts: the figure at lower left, making direct eye contact with the viewer, is Nicodemus - identified by his scholarly dignity - and the group of lamenting women above includes Mary Magdalene and the Virgin. The stone slab onto which the body is being lowered is the anointing stone, the surface on which the burial preparation takes place, a relic venerated in Jerusalem.
Artist and Commission
The commission was given by Pietro Vittrice, the nephew of the chapel's founder Francesco Vittrice, who had close ties to Philip Neri and the Oratorians - a reforming devotional movement within Catholic life whose spirituality emphasized humble, direct prayer and emotional engagement with the Passion. The choice of Caravaggio, already controversial, was thus a deliberate theological statement: the Oratorians wanted a Passion painting that would break through the viewer's spiritual complacency by the sheer physical weight of the dead body of God. The painting was installed around 1604 and praised by Rubens, who made a painted copy in 1615. That copy, now in Ottawa, testifies to the painting's immediate influence on the Flemish Baroque.
Iconography
The compositional logic is a controlled falling - the entire group is organized around the downward movement of Christ's body from the upper right to the lower left stone slab, which juts forward at the viewer's feet like a stage edge. Nicodemus bears Christ's legs, his head angled outward to face us, making us complicit witnesses and implied participants. The body of Christ - limp, pale, drained - is a radical departure from the idealized Christ bodies of the Renaissance tradition. The wounds at hands and side are visible but not dwelt upon; what Caravaggio emphasizes is mass and mortality. Above, Mary Magdalene's face is buried in a cloth, weeping; another woman stretches her arms upward in a gesture that echoes the Crucifixion posture even as the body below is being lowered. The Virgin, eyes downcast, touches her son's hand in a final maternal contact.
Art Historical Significance
The painting influenced Rubens profoundly and, through Rubens, the entire tradition of Flemish devotional painting. Its compositional scheme - the body laid diagonally across the picture plane, figures straining under physical weight - became a template for entombment and deposition scenes throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (1819) owes an acknowledged debt to the composition's treatment of the dead body as a burden borne by the living. Cézanne made a watercolor copy of the Caravaggio, and the painting's influence on his treatment of figures in landscape is well-documented.
Theological Interpretations
The Oratorian commission gives us a specific theological key: the painting was intended to make the death of Christ physically inescapable for worshippers in the chapel. Philip Neri's spirituality insisted on the Christian's need to confront the bodily reality of Christ's suffering rather than retreating into abstraction. The gravitational weight of the body - captured with such physical authority that viewers instinctively feel it - is a theological statement about the Incarnation: if God truly became flesh, then his dead body has the weight of a human corpse. The stone slab's projection toward the viewer has been interpreted as an invitation to participate in the burial, fulfilling Paul's exhortation in Romans 6:4 to be 'buried with him through baptism into death.'
Controversies
Contemporary critics were divided between admiration for the painting's power and discomfort with its physical bluntness. The plebeian faces and rough hands of the figures - especially Nicodemus, who resembles a laborer - violated academic norms for dignified sacred representation. In the twentieth century, the painting became a focal point for debates about whether Caravaggio was a sincere religious artist or a craftsman who employed religious subject matter for secular ends.
Legacy
Rubens's copy at the National Gallery of Canada provides a direct measure of the painting's influence on northern Baroque art. The work has been reproduced and analyzed in virtually every major study of Baroque painting and appears regularly in systematic theologies of the Incarnation and Atonement as a visual reference point. Successive popes have valued it among the Vatican collections' most important works.
Visiting the Work
The painting hangs in the Vatican Pinacoteca, Room VII, accessible through the Vatican Museums. Visitors approaching from the Sistine Chapel can reach the Pinacoteca in a separate wing. The altarpiece's original location in Santa Maria in Vallicella can also be visited; the church retains its Baroque interior, and the chapel now contains a copy of the painting.
Further Reading
Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (2010); Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (1998); Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (1998); John Gash, Caravaggio (2004); Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Caravaggio: The Artist and His Work (2012).