The Burial of Christ

Annibale Carracci

1595

Entombment of Christ is a c.1595 oil on copper painting by the Italian painter Annibale Carracci, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

According to Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Annibale Carracci's main 17th-century biographers, the painting was produced for Astorre Sampieri, an important clergyman in Bologna. Malvasia adds the details that it was a painting on copper and that Sampieri commissioned it to give to a major but unnamed figure in Rome but thought so highly of it that he kept the original for itself and instead gave the figure a (now lost) copy made by Carracci's then pupil Guido Reni. It is usually dated to around 1595, the year in which Annibale, his cousin Ludovico and his brother Agostino completed the Palazzo Sampieri frescoes for Sampieri, complemented by Annibale's own Christ and the Samaritan Woman.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0 · Text: Wikipedia (adapted), CC BY-SA 4.0

More Renaissance paintings