The preparation of the grave of Christ

The more significant painters from the circle of Giovanni Bellini who were born in around 1450/60, and thus about a generation younger than Bellini himself, included, alongside Cima and Montagna, Carpaccio. He was characterised by his narrative talent, which came to magnificent fruition in large cycles of paintings for the assembly rooms of the powerful lay brotherhoods of Venice. He took his cue from Gentile Bellini’s paintings of events populated by many figures, but surpassed their dry
objectivity through poetic atmosphere, painterly opulence and chromatic harmony.
His first major work was the cycle of the Legend of Saint Ursula, painted between 1490 and 1496/98, for the Scuola di Sant’Orsola. One of his later works was the cycle showing scenes from the life of Saint Stephen, painted between 1511 and 1520 for the Scuola di Santo Stefano, to which the Ordination of Saint Stephen as a Deacon in Berlin, dated 1511, belongs. Between these two, he created a further major work: the cycle for the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, painted in about
1505. The Preparation of Christ’s Tomb dates approximately from this same period. It is in many ways an enigmatic work, marked by an extremely profound sensibility. It combines meditative stillness with a wealth of narrative detail. Indeed, its structure in scenes, with subordinate episodes spread across the space of the work, has much in common with the scenes of the cycles.
The body of Christ lies in the foreground, stretched out on a low stone table that is supported in the centre by the red Stone of Anointing, a relic highly venerated in the Eastern church which was kept in Byzantium in the early Middle Ages and was later taken to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Its red colour refers to the blood, shed in Christ’s sacrifice and the Eucharistic symbolism of the painting. Behind the stone, leaning against a tree and lost in thought, sits Job, who bore tribulations in obedience to God and was a precursor of Christ in the Old Testament. He was highly revered in Venice, as the dedication to him in 1493 of the Church of San Giobbe testifies. His figure provides a transition to the group of Mary and Mary Magdalene, sunk to the ground, with Saint John, while on the left in the background two men in oriental clothing roll the stone from the tomb and another, presumably Joseph of Arimathaea, prepares the washing of the corpse. The depiction of the
body of Christ on the flat stone table and connection to the person of Job are rather unusual in this form in Renaissance painting. The association with the deceased Christ of Job, sitting in meditation and mourning next to the body, occurs otherwise only in the work of Carpaccio himself, in a painting in New York (The Metropolitan Museum), which indeed in the early 17th century was in Ferrara in the collection of Roberto Canonici along with the Preparation of Christ’s Tomb that is now in Berlin. Both works were thought to have been by the hand of Mantegna and bore false Mantegna signatures, of which the one on the New York work was removed in 1945, revealing the signature of Carpaccio.
It has been proposed that the Berlin work was the right-hand painting of the altar wall and end wall of the assembly hall of the Scuola di San Giobbe, which was founded in 1383 and furnished in 1504 together with two further scuole piccole at the Church of San Giobbe dating from 1493. The church belonged to a monastery of the Reformed Franciscans, to which a hospice for the poor was attached. The Berlin painting would have been placed on the right of the smaller work, today in New York, which would have been the altarpiece. The arrangement of the altar wall would have been similar to that in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni or in 16th-century sacramental chapels. However, neither the flanking painting on the left nor any of the works that would have decorated the side walls have survived, nor has any trace of them or information about them been passed down. Between 1574
and 1580, the Scuola di San Giobbe building was altered and enlarged. Carpaccio’s works may have been removed at that time. In 1812, the monastery and Scuola di San Giobbe were demolished. Carpaccio painted an altarpiece for the church dated 1510 (Venice, Academy) (B. Blass Simmen 1993).
One of Carpaccio’s particular strengths, alongside his narrative talent, was his sense of colour. In contrast to Cima’s preference for local colouring, Carpaccio’s unifying tendency also applied to colour. In this point, a special characteristic that cannot be overlooked, he has more in common with Montagna. Across the whole of the Preparation of Christ’s Tomb, the copperish red-brown tone that is typical of Carpaccio occurs again and again. With the cool blue of the sky, it forms a dominant two-part harmony, embedded in the scale of earthy green-brown shades of the landscape. Erich Schleier | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019