The Entombment of Christ

The painting depicts the moment in which Christ is buried in the tomb, as suggested by the presence of the tombstone on the left. After the Crucifixion, silence descends on Jesus’s human history and the nails, the instruments of the Passion, removed from the wounds in his hands and feet, lie twisted and still bloody on the floor in the foreground. With the exception of the Virgin in despair on the right, her hands joined in prayer as she appears still to be seeking to converse with her son, the identification of the other figures, including the figure cradling Jesus’s body from behind, who might be Mary Magdalen or an angel, is uncertain. The painting conveys a sense of quiet grief, underscored by the artist’s attention to the details highlighting the Saviour’s sacrifice, such as the wound in his side from which blood still flows, thus urging the observer to identify personally with the sacred event and to wonder at the mystery of Jesus’s death.

In his staging of the entombment, Morazzone was able to fall back on an extensive iconographical tradition. The subject of the Pietà with angels and other figures around Jesus’s body, such as the Virgin, Mary Magdalen and other saints, was extremely common in the late 15th and 16th centuries, particularly in Venice, right up to the later work of Titian and to Veronese. In this painting, Christ is virtually seated on the tombstone, calling to mind certain archaic yet still enormously moving compositions such as Giovanni Bellini’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, formerly in Pesaro and now in the Vatican Museums (c. 1475). In view of Morazzone’s early years in Rome, there is a strong possibility that a potential visual source of inspiration for the composition may have been the Cavalier d’Arpino’s Pietà with Angels, known to have been in the Aldobrandini Collection in 1603¹. We should also bear in mind the subject’s popularity in Lombardy, starting with the work of Gaudenzio Ferrari, a constant lodestar for Morazzone when decorating the chapels of the Sacro Monte in Varallo. He may well have seen the Pietà that Ferrari painted as part of the San Gaudenzio Polyptych in Varallo (c. 1516-20)² , a frontal yet extremely poignant view, and possibly also the intense Lamentation over the Dead Christ now in Budapest (c. 1535)³. Morazzone may have found a more recent source of figurative inspiration in a painting by Federico Zuccari also in Varallo. While visiting the town with Cesare Nebbia in the entourage of Cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1604, Zuccari is said to have replicated the Urbino Pietà in a now lost fresco known only through a drawing⁴.

It is impossible to shed light on the earliest history of our Entombment, which is likely to have come from a picture gallery of considerable importance, a fact seemingly confirmed by the inscription «C.A.V. / n. 179 Morazzone» «36» written with a brush on the back of the canvas, telling us that it belonged to a historic collection whose identity continues to escape us today.

The picture resurfaced in 1962 and belonged to the collection of Carla Bergamasco Cortese in Cremona when it was first published⁵. It went on to become part of the Koelliker Collection in Milan from 2002 to 2017, after which it joined another private collection before reaching the Foundation in 2023⁶.

The Entombment was rediscovered and attributed to Morazzone by Mina Gregori⁷ in the catalogue of an exhibition of the artist’s work held in Varese in 1962, where it was put on display for the first time. At the time, it had additional work at the top and on the left-hand side. This was removed when the painting was restored by Rodolfo Giangrossi in 2003⁸, considerably heightening the scene’s dramatic intensity.

When Gregori published the picture, she stressed the composition’s strong pathos, for which Morazzone drew inspiration from the work of Gaudenzio Ferrari, and proposed a date of 1616-17, when he working in the Chapel of the Institution of the Porziuncola on the Sacro Monte in Orta dedicated to the life of St. Francis (1616-17), a date to which subsequent scholarship has basically raised no objection. In his recent monograph on Morazzone published in 2003⁹, Jacopo Stoppa suggests that the Entombment can be linked, in view of its subject, to other paintings on themes associated with the Passion of Christ, such as the Flagellation of Christ in the Museo de Arte in Ponce, Puerto Rico (oil on canvas, 122.5 x 128 cm, fig. 1), the Flagellation of Christ in the Museo del Prado (oil on canvas, 167 x 116 cm, fig. 2), the Crowning with Thorns in the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence (oil on canvas, 145 x 116 cm, fig. 3) and the Disrobing of Christ in a private collection (oil on canvas, 118 x 167 cm). Though they reveal a considerable iconographical affinity, the paintings’ differing formats and dating spread caused Stoppa to display a certain prudence in mooting the existence of a series of canvases to which all the paintings listed might have belonged in the past, especially as there is no documentary record of such a series having existed. What the paintings do share, on the other hand, is a common approach to composition, where dramatic effect is imparted by the skilful tangle of bodies that is almost, though not quite, excessive for the limited space on the canvas. More recently, Francesco Frangi, while confirming a date of c. 1615 for the Entombment¹⁰, has highlighted both the scene’s intense drama and the alternation in the brushwork of more perfectly finished parts, such as Christ’s body and his hair curling around the crown of thorns in a sophisticated play of light, with other more rapidly executed details, such as Mary’s summarily defined halo or the tunic of the figure cradling Christ on the left, whose collar is rendered with vibrant touches of white paint.

The Entombment’s astonishing intensity is built up from the brown ground out of which the figures emerge, their bodies thrown into relief by slanting light coming from the left, which allows Morazzone to shine the spotlight, as it were, on Christ’s ribcage, thus illuminating the wound from which blood still flows. In the Saviour’s vigorous body, moulded by strong contrasts in chiaroscuro and still tense from having been so recently crucified, the artist offers us a heartfelt and moving depiction of the Son of God’s humanity. The intense pathos and invitation to prayer, however, do not prevent the artist from displaying the characteristic features of his style, which we can detect in the sophisticated folds of Jesus’s loincloth, the anatomical definition of his dramatically arching body, the highlights in his blonde hair and the shards of light on the Virgin’s blue mantle.

The touching composition developed by Morazzone in his Entombment, which is likely to have been intended for private prayer and meditation, was to prove fairly popularly. Stoppa mentions a drawing (201 x 143 mm, fig. 4) by an unknown hand that appeared on the antique market in the late 1970s¹¹, while a slightly smaller copy¹² was put up for auction more recently. A composition akin to the one in the painting under discussion here is to be found in a picture on the selfsame subject now in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan (oil on canvas, 60 x 54 cm, fig. 5) to which Stoppa, once again, first drew attention¹³ and for which Frangi points to a stylistic affinity with the later work of Morazzone’s pupil and assistant Isidoro Bianchi¹⁴. Unlike in the Gaudium Magnum Entombment, in which all the drama is concentrated in a particularly confined space, in the Ambrosiana version, executed in monochrome on a reddish brown primer, Jesus is being laid in the tomb by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, in a manner more closely reflecting the Gospel story.

A remarkable drawing (350 x 274 mm, fig. 6), on the other hand, has been convincingly attributed to Morazzone by Giulio Bora. Formerly in the Osio Collection and now in the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome, it can also be dated c. 1617 and is extremely close to our picture in the light of its strong compositional similarities. Christ’s body leans forward in a similar manner and is supported by a number of angels, but in place of the Virgin, we have St. Charles Borromeo kneeling in prayer.

The Entombment was painted at a particularly important moment in Morazzone’s career, c. 1615, that coincides with the peak of his artistic maturity. He was working at the time on the Sacro Monte in Orta and frescoing Stories from the Life of the Virgin in the Chapel of the Rosary in San Vittore in Varese (1616-17), while also completing a series of remarkable altarpieces such as the Virgin of the Rosary with St. Dominic and St. Catherine of Siena in the Certosa di Pavia (1617) and St. Charles Borromeo in Glory (1616-20) in the collegiate church of Borgomanero. In 1617, or just after, he joined with Cerano and Giulio Cesare Procaccini to paint the Martyrdom of St. Rufina and St. Secunda (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera), famously christened the “Painting by Three Artists” (“Quadro delle tre mani”) because it was painted by the three most important masters working in Milan in the early 17th century.

In his rendering of the Entombment, Morazzone handles the subject in the light of his long and varied career, from his formative years in Rome and the influence of the Cavalier d’Arpino, particularly evident in his compact, almost sculptural handling of the body of Christ whose sinuous movement forms the fulcrum of the painting, to the subtle luminosity of Christ’s hair and of the parts in which the paint is applied far more rapidly, where one can detect an echo of Giulio Cesare Procaccini and Cerano, the two masters with whom Morazzone interacted in Milan.

The result is a picture that is extremely clear and direct in conveying its religious message while simultaneously engaging the observer’s interest, reflecting the demands of the then archbishop of Milan, Federico Borromeo (1564-1631). This invitation to meditate on the Passion of Christ closely reflects the sensitivity of the Counter-Reformation espoused by Borromeo and expressed as early as during the lifetime of his older cousin, Charles Borromeo (1538-84), also a cardinal, an earlier archbishop of Milan and one of the leading figures at the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church’s response to the Protestant reform promoted by Martin Luther and other reformers. Canonised in 1610, St. Charles rapidly became a very popular subject for paintings in Lombardy and was portrayed on several occasions – not only by artists of the region but also by painters from further afield, such as Ludovico Carracci of Bologna or Valerio Castello of Genoa – while meditating before the dead Christ in the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre in Varallo. Examples of St. Charles Borromeo’s devotion to the crucified or entombed Jesus are also found in the artistic output of the three champions of Lombard painting in the early 17th century: Cerano’s St. Charles Meditating before the Dead Christ is now in the Prado in Madrid¹⁵, Giulio Cesare Procaccini’s version of the same subject matter is in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan¹⁶ and Morazzone’s Crucified Christ Adored by St. Charles now hangs in the Archbishop’s Palace in Milan¹⁷.

Interest in these themes was also expressed by Pedro de Toledo, Fifth Marquis of Villafranca de Bierzo, one of the governors despatched to Milan by the Spanish crown, who, in the course of his term of office from 1615 to 1618, commissioned Giulio Cesare Procaccini to produce a series of large canvases focusing on the life of Christ. He took the canvases back to Spain when he returned home, but they were subsequently dispersed and many of them may now be admired in leading museums all around the world¹⁸. In this grandiose, spectacular group, the stories of the Passion appear to dominate the scene and create a narrative that unfolds in at least thirteen paintings, several of which have yet to be rediscovered. This extraordinary commission is indicative of the popularity of this kind of subject matter during the Counter-Reformation, but also of the governor’s affinity with the sensitivity of Federico Borromeo. In his Ragionamenti spirituali, a collection of sermons delivered to the Augustinian nuns of Santa Marta in Milan, which he draughted in the course of his tenure as archbishop¹⁹, the prelate dwells on the usefulness of meditating on the mysteries of the Passion, which he argues are the most effective for both contemplation and prayer inasmuch as they allow the faithful to grasp Christ’s humanity and suffering in full. Morazzone’s Entombment reflects these guidelines in an exemplary manner.