The Entombment by Dieric Bouts

The Entombment by Dieric Bouts

Laying the body down

Christ’s body is being lowered into a stone sarcophagus by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, supported in a white shroud. Mary bends over her son; John steadies her; Mary Magdalene and the other women mourn beside them. The landscape behind is a gentle Flemish valley in the pale light of evening.

A rare survival

What makes the picture remarkable is its material. It is painted not in oil on panel but in glue-bound paint on linen, a technique widely used in the Netherlands in the fifteenth century and now almost entirely lost — the cloths were fragile, cheap to produce and rarely preserved. The matte, soft surface and muted colour come from that medium. It was part of a larger altarpiece whose other panels are scattered or lost.

Bouts’s restraint

Bouts, working in Leuven, favoured still, elongated figures and quiet emotion. Here nobody cries out; the grief is expressed in the slow bending of bodies toward the dead Christ.

Where it hangs

The painting is in the National Gallery in London and measures 90 by 74 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 4,226-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 28 inches on its longest side.

Sources: National Gallery, London · Wikidata Q7732307 · Wikimedia Commons