Triptych with the Entombment of Christ

This small altarpiece sits right on the seam between two ways of painting. The background is still the gold of medieval devotion, tooled into raised grapevines that stand for the wine of Christ's blood. But the figures lowering him into the tomb are modelled in oil, a technique Robert Campin, working in the cloth town of Tournai, was among the first to handle with real skill. Oil let him give faces a weight and grief that flat tempera never could. On the left wing the two thieves still hang on their crosses. On the right, three days on, Christ steps from the tomb while the soldiers set to guard it sleep. Count Antoine Seilern, an Anglo-Austrian collector, left it to the Courtauld in 1978.