La Mise au tombeau

This is one of five scenes from Christ's Passion that Rembrandt painted over several years for the most powerful man in the Dutch Republic, Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange. The Entombment and its companion, the Resurrection, were the last to be finished, in 1639, and Rembrandt had made the prince wait. In a letter to the prince's secretary that January he explained the delay by saying he had striven for the greatest and most natural movement of feeling. You can see the aim here. Figures lower the dead Christ into shadow, the whole scene lit as if by a single hidden source, the mourners emerging and dissolving in the gloom around him.