The Entombment of Christ
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
Christ is being lowered out of the picture and into our space. At the Chiesa Nuova that space held the Vittrice chapel altar, and Elizabeth Lev reads the foreground as the place the priest at Mass would step into and complete.
So the slab is foreshortened until its corner juts into the room. Christ's hand trails down and brushes it: the stone the builders rejected, which the Easter liturgy makes the corner of the Church.
In 1797 the Treaty of Tolentino took it to Paris. It came back in 1817 to Pius VII's Pinacoteca, where no priest completes it.
Sources: Vatican Museums, Pinacoteca, Sala XII, inv. 40386, oil on canvas, 300 x 203 cm · Institute for Sacred Architecture, 'Contemplating the Body of Christ: Caravaggio's Entombment' · 'The Stone of Unction in Caravaggio's Painting for the Chiesa Nuova', The Art Bulletin 40, no. 3 (1958) · Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'The Entombment of Christ' · Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, 'Caravaggio, Deposition (or Entombment)', Smarthistory
Now there was in the place where he was crucified a garden: and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein no man yet had been laid.
John 19:41 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 13,086 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.