The Entombment

Rubens spent eight years in Italy, and one picture he could not leave alone was Caravaggio's Entombment, painted for a church in Rome while he was there. He copied it. Close examination of this oak panel shows he set out to make a faithful copy and then let it slide into something of his own. The dead weight of the body stays, and the arm hanging down, while the group is rearranged around the work at hand, the shared effort of carrying a man into a grave. By about 1612 he was back in Antwerp in his mid-thirties, running the busiest workshop in northern Europe during the truce with the Dutch, when the city's churches were being filled with new altarpieces after decades of religious war.