The Burial of Christ

The Prado owns two versions of this scene, and the other one came first. Painted in 1559 for Philip II, it was copied over to this canvas 13 years later by way of a cartoon, a full-size tracing laid down almost point for point, as X-rays and infrared images show. Only afterwards did the changes come. A figure with nothing to do was added on the left, and the face of Christ was reworked into open anguish, where the earlier one is still. The museum is direct about the rest: assistants worked on this canvas, though Titian went over it himself, and it shows in the sepulchre, handled quickly here, and in the silks of Joseph of Arimathea, reduced to flecks of paint. The Virgin lifting her dead son's arm comes from no Gospel. Titian took it from a devotional book by his friend the writer Pietro Aretino, printed in Venice in 1538.