The Entombment

Albrecht Dürer

National Gallery of Art

Six men and women stand or kneel in front of a sixth person, a man, holding the limp corpse of another, Jesus, in this vertical drawing on cream-white paper. Jesus and the man supporting him are in the lower right corner of the page, and a woman with long, loose hair bends low to kiss Jesus’s feet in the lower left corner. These three people are the mostly simply drawn of the group, sketched in with outlines and contours without shading. The other woman kneels with her hands together, facing Jesus in profile. A young, cleanshaven man stands at her far side and rests his hand on her other shoulder. A trio of three men stand closely behind this pair. All three wear elaborate hats, two may converse, and one holds a drum-like object and another a hammer. A rectangular stone tomb stretches behind Jesus at the foot of a rocky cliff face. Across the paper, three crosses rise from a hill in the top left corner of the composition. A ladder leans against the central cross, and men hang heavily from the other two. The artist signed and dated the work as if he had inscribed the top middle of the tomb cover. A capital letter D is tucked between the wide legs of a capital A, both under the date, 1504.