Entombment

Rubens spent eight years in Italy and came home to Antwerp in 1608, at the start of the Twelve Years' Truce with the Dutch. Churches emptied and damaged in the religious wars were being refitted, and the city's painters had altarpieces to supply for years ahead. This panel was made around 1615 for one of them, an altar that seems never to have been built. Behind it stands Caravaggio's Entombment, painted for the Chiesa Nuova in Rome about 1603, which Rubens had studied there and copied after he got home. He kept the straining, bent figures lowering the body into the tomb and changed the light and the colour. At just over 80 centimetres high it is a very large example of the oil sketches he used to work a composition out.