La Mise au tombeau

In 1500 a young Michelangelo, not yet famous, took a commission for an altarpiece in a Roman church and accepted payment for it. He never delivered. He gave the money back and left for Florence, where a huge block of marble was waiting that would become his David. This panel is very likely the picture he walked away from. It shows Christ being carried to the tomb, and it stops mid-work. Some figures are fully modelled, others are only sketched, and down in the lower right corner there is a bare patch of blank ground, an empty space that was meant to hold a kneeling Mary. The blue robe there was never painted, most likely because the costly blue pigment simply had not arrived.