The Entombment (Michelangelo)

The Entombment of Christ is one of the few surviving panel paintings by Michelangelo Buonarroti, and hangs since 1866 in the National Gallery in London.

Origin

The picture is probably an unfinished altarpiece, which Michelangelo painted for the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome. The image came probably in the Roman Farnese Collection, where it still was in 1649, before it went through various Roman collections. Around 1846 it came into the collection of Robert Macpherson and 1868 in the National Gallery in London.

Attribution

After its discovery by the experts, the authorship of Michelangelo was proposed for the image 1864 by Cornelis and Friedrich Overbeck. This write-up has been adopted by some of their colleagues, while others rejected them. The rejection was usually justified by the fact that the image whose origin is ansetzte to 1510/11, would not fit chronologically between the so-called Tondo Doni and the painting of the Sistine Chapel. At the same time we also recognized the high quality of the image, so that you can later zuwies the so-called Master of the Manchester Madonna, which were acknowledged, after all, a significant participation by Michelangelo himself.

Only later was it realized that the table had to be a good decade older than previously thought. At a small exhibition about the young Michelangelo, which was organized in 1994/95 from the National Gallery in London, the image of a detailed scientific investigation has been subjected. It solidified the view of the experts, that it must actually be a work of Michelangelo and identified it with the panel of Sant'Agostino. This attribution is confirmed by two early drawings in Paris ( Louvre: Kneeling naked girl and standing male nude ). Later drawings, which also address the Entombment of Christ, show similarly clustered groups of figures.

Content

The image shows the body of Christ, flanked right and left of the Saints John the Evangelist and Nicodemus. It is supported by the unfinished Joseph of Arimathea. To the right we see Nicodemus and Mary Magdalene in the left foreground an unknown saint who could be identified as Mary Salome. In the right foreground to only vaguely, is the Virgin Mary.