Stop and Look – Raphael’s The Entombment (1507)
Thanks to the glib generalisations of the self-congratulatory ‘modern’ twentieth century, Raphael, after four centuries of appreciation as one of the greatest of the Renaissance masters, came to be regarded as insipid and sentimental. An artist not on the same level as those titanic geniuses, Michelangelo and Leonardo. This picture gives the lie to that idea at once.
It is appropriate to the season of Easter, when the Church contemplates the sufferings, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. It’s a story that has been told and depicted so many times that we sometimes have difficulty seeing it with fresh eyes. Raphael reports a central episode here as an event taking place in front of us. The dead body of Jesus has been taken down from the cross, and is being carried to the sepulchre in which it will be laid – finally, as far as his grieving friends imagine. We know, of course, that the story ends quite differently.
Although Raphael is famous for the classical dignity of his pictures, with a genius for elegantly balanced compositions and refined drawing, he could put those gifts to use in the cause of a robust, almost violent realism. We’re confronted here by a group of people in emotional and physical disarray, a disorderly crowd, it seems at first. Two of them, tense with the strain of carrying a dead body down from the hill in the background, seem to be pulled in opposite directions by the muscular effort of their exertions. Immediately beside them a woman, Mary Magdalen, is trying to get as close to the corpse as possible, in order to express her grief. Just behind, Jesus’ mother Mary is fainting into the arms of three attendants.
The calm symmetry we expect to find in Raphael’s beautifully composed scenes eludes us here. Instead, there’s an immediately obvious stress and tension in the gestures and poses of the participants. The heads don’t line up in the fashion of a portrait-group: they turn this way and that, directing our eyes abruptly towards different portions of the design. The central figure of the dead Christ, pale and inert, its lifelessness conveyed strikingly by the dangling arm, concentrates everyone’s attention, including our own, and contrasts with the agitated and heightened emotions of the surrounding personalities.
Only in the placid landscape beyond is there any suggestion that ideal calm can be found, and even there the hill of Golgotha with its three now empty crosses lowers under a dark cloud. The influence of the gentle, suave art of Raphael’s master, Perugino, comes through in this beautiful piece of nature-painting, but only to point up the startling realism of the figure group in the foreground: realism that was still almost unknown in Italian painting at this time. Raphael was twenty-four when he painted the picture.
