La Mise au tombeau

Titian made this for Philip II of Spain, and it exists because the first one never arrived. In 1557 Titian sent the king an Entombment, and it vanished somewhere on the long haul to Spain. Philip ordered a replacement, and in 1559 Titian shipped this larger canvas from Venice, remarking that he thought the second attempt had come out the better of the two. He was in his seventies by then, working the paint loosely, letting the grief carry the picture. Men strain to lower the dead Christ into a stone tomb while the Virgin and the other mourners press close in the dusk. Along the side of the sarcophagus he painted small scenes of Cain killing Abel and Abraham raising his knife over Isaac, older deaths set beside this one.