Entombment of Christ

Tintoretto was still a young man when he painted this Entombment, around 1543, in a Venice crowded with older and more famous names. The picture's later history is the part that stayed documented. By 1935 it belonged to Italico Brass, a painter and collector in Venice with a large private holding. In 1941 it passed into the art being gathered for the museum Hitler planned to build in his Austrian hometown of Linz, assembled under a special commission that drew in thousands of works. When the war ended it went to the Munich Central Collecting Point, the depot the Allies set up to sort and return works displaced by the fighting. Its whereabouts after that survive mainly in the federal custody files that followed those Linz pictures for decades. The painting is an early version of a scene Tintoretto came back to more than once, the body of Christ carried to the tomb.