The Entombment
1596
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
About the artist
Artist
Giovanni de' Vecchi
Giovanni de' Vecchi was an Italian painter of the Renaissance period.
See the richer artist page1596
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
The Entombment is a 1596 by Giovanni de' Vecchi, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a group of people lowering Christ’s body into a tomb, their arms stretched in long, wavy lines. De’ Vecchi painted this around 1596, when artists were playing with Michelangelo’s ideas. Instead of perfect muscles, they twisted bodies to show feeling. Christ’s limbs look almost weightless, as if grief has made them float. Look up Mannerism to see how other artists bent the rules like this.
By the end of the 1500s, Michelangelo’s treatment of the nude male had permeated artistic practice. Some artists (today called Mannerists) began to stray from the master’s grounding in human anatomy, emphasizing instead the expressive potential that Michelangelo brought to bear on the human form. To make an emotional impact, Giovanni de’ Vecchi created fluid figures with exaggerated proportions, such as the central figure of Christ that appears here. De’ Vecchi used pen and purplish watercolor to render the forms of the dead Christ surrounded by Saint John the Apostle, Nicodemus, Joseph of…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Giovanni de' Vecchi was an Italian painter of the Renaissance period.
See the richer artist page
