The Entombment of Christ

El Greco spent the first half of the 1570s in Rome, and in September 1572 he paid his dues to the city's Guild of Saint Luke as a miniature painter. That is roughly the scale of this panel: spruce or fir, about 36 centimetres tall, painted in tempera mixed with oil. A whole burial is pressed into it. The Magdalene kneels at the front in gold, Nicodemus and two younger men take the weight of the body, the Virgin holds his feet, and the hills behind carry nobody except the mourners. The pose of Christ comes from Michelangelo's Pietà, turned about 90 degrees so that the body lies along the tomb. Whether the hand is his has been argued over since before the war. Harold Wethey, cataloguing the painter in 1962, gave the panel to a follower. José Álvarez Lopera called it autograph in 1993 and drew back from that in 2007. The specialist who examined it for its 2013 auction in New York returned it to El Greco. Outside one Venice exhibition in 1981 it has spent its recorded life in private rooms, in Geneva before the war and in Paris after it.