The Entombment

A tempera panel under a metre high was not made for an altar. It was made for a room, something to pray in front of at home, and Florentine households around 1480 had a good many of them. Christ stands upright in the tomb here, held by his mother, by Mary Magdalene and by Joseph of Arimathea, an arrangement meant for prayer rather than for telling the story of the burial. Filippino Lippi was in his early twenties when he painted it. How it reached a naval town on the Normandy coast is the other half. Thomas Henry, born in Cherbourg in 1766, spent his career in Paris as a picture expert advising on purchases for the Louvre, and he bought early Italian panels in the years when French collectors had little use for them. He left 163 paintings to his home town, and the museum opened with them in 1835.