The Entombment of Christ

Caravaggio lit the scene from a single high source on the left so that the pale corpse and the white shroud blaze against a black background. There is no landscape, no sky, only bodies and stone. The figures form a steep diagonal that runs from the raised hands at the top right down to the hanging arm of Christ at the bottom left. That dangling arm echoes Michelangelo's Pieta in Saint Peter's, and Caravaggio surely meant the reference. Look at the dirt under the fingernails of Nicodemus and the plant growing in the crack of the stone; the sacred story is told with the realism of a street scene.

The canvas was painted for the chapel of the Vittrice family in the Chiesa Nuova in Rome, the church of Saint Philip Neri, whose followers valued plain, direct devotion. It was admired at once, and even critics who disliked Caravaggio's other works praised it. Rubens copied it, and so did Fragonard and Cezanne. Napoleon took it to Paris in seventeen ninety seven, and on its return in eighteen seventeen Pius the Seventh kept it for the Vatican rather than sending it back to the church. In a gallery of Baroque paintings it stops visitors dead, which is exactly what Caravaggio intended.

Did You Know? The slab's sharp corner appears to break through the picture plane, so that a worshipper at the altar below felt the body was being lowered towards them.