page_title: The Entombment (Bouts)
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: The Entombment (Bouts) / Painting / Description
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail showing heads of saints, loss of paint and film of dirt
context_page_description: The Entombment is a glue-size painting on linen attributed to the Early Netherlandish painter Dieric Bouts. It shows a scene from the biblical entombment of Christ, and was probably completed between 1440 and 1455 as a wing panel for a large hinged polyptych altarpiece. The now-lost altarpiece is thought to have contained a central crucifixion scene flanked by four wing panel works half its height – two on either side – depicting scenes from the life of Christ. The smaller panels would have been paired in a format similar to Bouts's 1464–1468 Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament. The larger work was probably commissioned for export to Italy, possibly to a Venetian patron whose identity is lost. The Entombment was first recorded in a mid-19th century Milan inventory and has been in the National Gallery, London, since its purchase on the gallery's behalf by Charles Lock Eastlake in 1861.
  The painting is an austere but affecting portrayal of sorrow and grief. It shows four female and three male mourners grieving over the body of Christ.
context_section_description: The Entombment shows Christ's body, wrapped in a white linen shroud and still wearing a crown of thorns, as it is lowered into a deep stone tomb. He is attended by seven mourners dressed in contemporary clothing. Among the group of mourners standing at Christ's side, the three female figures are shown with downcast eyes while the two men look directly at Christ; these gazes are reversed with the couple kneeling at his feet. The background contains a wide landscape with a winding pathway and a broad river before a more distant vista of trees and hills. Bouts is considered an innovative painter of landscapes, even in his portrait work where they are included as distant views seen through open windows. The vista in The Entombment is regarded as one of his finest, and is typically  composed of distant brown and green hills against a blue sky.
  The Pharisee Nicodemus supports Christ as he is lowered, and can be identified by his similarity to Simon the Pharisee in another canvas attributed to Bouts, Christ in the House of Simon. The Virgin wears a white headdress and a dark blue dress with a yellowish mantle, and holds Christ's arm just above his wrist as if afraid to let go of her dead son. She is supported by John the Evangelist, who wears a red robe. Dressed in green robes, Mary Salome stands to the Virgin's left, wiping tears from her face with the fold of her white headdress. Mary of Clopas is behind them, holding a red cloth over her mouth, while the Magdalen is in the foreground at Christ's feet, dressed in a heavily folded cloak. The man in the brown–green tabard at the feet of Christ is probably Joseph of Arimathea, who, according to Gospel, brought Christ's body to Golgotha from Pontius Pilate.
  The Entombment is painted on linen tightly woven with 20 to 22 vertical and between 19 and 22 horizontal threads per centimetre. The cloth is Z-spun (tightly spun) and tabby woven with flax perhaps combined with cotton. The cloth support is lined, unusually, with similar but more finely woven linen mounted on a wooden stretcher. Before the paint was applied, the linen was first mounted on a temporary stretcher and outlined with a brown border – now visible on the lower border – which was used as a guide to cut the picture down before framing. Glue-sizing consists of creating a distemper by mixing pigments in water and then using a glue-base derived from boiled animal skin and other tissues as a binder. The pigments were applied to a linen cloth, treated with the same glue sizing,  fixed in turn to its frame by glue.  The paint saturated the cloth,  often leaving an image on the reverse side, which was lined with an additional cloth.
  Pigments bound in glue had an optical quality that rendered  them opaque in appearance and unusually vivid. Unlike oil, which makes chalk appear translucent, chalk mixed in glue is rendered as stark white. Similarly,  more expensive pigments assume brilliant opacity in a glue medium.  The whites are chalk in areas mixed with lead white, especially in the Magdalen's mantle and veil, Christ's shroud and the Virgin's veil. The artist used four blue pigments, an unusual number for paintings of the period, with indigo predominating.  As a plant-derived pigment, indigo it has a tendency to fade over time. Azurite and lead-white line the under-paint, while the landscape contains indigo mixed with lead-tin yellow. The sky and Nicodemus' collar are painted with lighter and less intense azurite, while the Virgin's dress is azurite mixed with ultramarine and smalt, a blue ground-glass pigment. The Entombment is one of the earliest Western pictorial works of art in which the use of smalt could be ascertained and its presence proves that the pigment was not invented during the sixteenth century, as had previously been believed.
  The greens are mostly verdigris, although those predominant in the landscape are mostly blends of blue and yellow pigments, and the green of the cloth worn by Mary Salome is malachite mixed with yellow lake. The browns are blends of reds and blacks. John's red robe is composed from cinna
caption: Detail showing the heads of Mary Salome,  Mary of Clopas and The Virgin. The loss of paint (in the red cloth) and film of dirt (in the top right corner) are clearly visible.
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