The Entombment of Christ – (Fra Angelico) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Fra Angelico

Date: 1450

Size: 89 x 55 cm

Technique: Tempera On Panel

Nine people are gathered in a landscape around the gaunt body of a young man being carried on a cloth in the lower half of this vertical painting. All the people have pale skin tinged with yellow, and all but one have shiny gold halos. The space is framed to the right by a stone-gray structure with a squared opening and, to the left, with a brown, rocky outcropping. Tall cypress trees and sage-green vegetation grow up and over the structure to our right. The bearded young man, Jesus, is laid out horizontally with his feet to our left, on a flax-yellow cloth carried by two elderly men. He is nude except for a white cloth across his hips, and there are tiny red slashes on the hand and foot we can see, and over his right ribs, farther from us. Just beyond the body, a woman draped in a marine-blue robe bends to gaze at Jesus’s face while being supported by two other women. A young, cleanshaven man in a coral-pink robe over a steel-gray garment stands by them, on our left, with his head lowered and hands clasped. On our side of the body are two women with their backs to us. The woman on the left kneels at Jesus’s corpse with her head bent as she wipes his feet. The woman on the right sits on the ground with her robe drawn over her head, and she covers her face with her hands. On the ground between them, a hammer, the ring of thorns with three arrows extending from it, and a nail puller lie on an white cloth. The only person without a halo is a bearded man standing to our right, closest to the opening in the structure. He wears a red robe and cap draped with a white cowl. The ground beneath the group is carpeted with pine-green grass, and a sprinkling of white dots suggests small flowers. A palm tree stands just outside a tall, narrow wooden gate beyond the group. The gate opens onto a landscape with a river winding to meet a town and hazy mountains in the distance. A tall, steep, laurel-green hill to our left is topped with three wooden crosses, and bodies hang from the crosses to either side. A few bands of clouds float across the sky, which deepens from ivory white at the horizon to azure blue along the top edge.