The Entombment of Christ

On 22 November 1821 a Boston auction sold a picture listed as a Taking Down from the Cross by Bassano, a Venetian painter. The buyer was probably Ethan Allen Greenwood, a portrait painter who ran the New England Museum, and that day he wrote in his journal that he had fetched 22 pictures from Central Wharf and put them into his gallery. When his museum closed in 1839, its contents went to the showman Moses Kimball for the Boston Museum he opened two years later. There the canvas hung as a Bassano from 1841 until at least 1849, in a house that also showed live animals, Egyptian mummies and the Feejee Mermaid, a fake creature made from the upper half of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish.

The museum now gives the painting to Luca Giordano. Its subject is the entombment, the moment after the body of Christ has been taken down from the cross, when it is carried to the tomb. By 1880 it belonged to Thomas Gold Appleton, a Boston writer and collector, and from him it passed to his nephew Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow, a painter and the son of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Ernest's bequest brought it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1923.