He holds Jesus’ head and shoulders and bends his cheek towards him.
Bible in art · John
The Entombment
Rubens · about 1612
Getty Center, Los Angeles
Rubens painted this square canvas in Antwerp around 1612, a few years after coming home from eight years in Italy. The figures fill almost the whole picture, close enough to touch.
The pale body of Jesus is lowered onto a stone slab on a linen cloth. A young man in red holds the head; Mary looks up with reddened eyes; an old woman in a white veil holds his hand. Rubens paints the contrast between the grey-white skin and the living, flushed faces of the mourners.
From the text
- Joseph of Arimathea removed the body of Jesus (John 19:38)
- They wrapped it in linen cloths with the spices (John 19:40)
- A new tomb in a garden nearby (John 19:41–42)
- The wound in his side (John 19:34)
The artist’s own
- The young man in red — painters traditionally showed the disciple John this way
- Mary, the mother of Jesus, at the centre (in John she stands by the cross, John 19:25)
- Ears of wheat lying on the slab
- A dark cave of rock instead of a garden
Details
The young man in red
Mary
In dark blue, she looks up, her eyes red with tears.
Another mourner
A woman behind her wipes away tears.
The old woman
In a white veil, she holds Jesus’ hand.
The linen cloth
The white burial cloth on which the body is laid.
Wheat
Ears of wheat lie on the stone slab.
Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish, 1577–1640. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (93.PA.9) · Oil on canvas · Images provided here are believed to be in the public domain and are available under CC0 through Getty’s Open Content Program. (Getty record: "No Copyright", http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)