The Dead Christ in the Tomb with Two Angels

Janssens's Dead Christ in the Tomb with Two Angels of 1610, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, is one of the artist's most important works in an American collection. The subject — Christ's body laid in the tomb before the Resurrection, attended by lamenting angels — draws on a long tradition of devotional imagery whose most famous predecessor is Caravaggio's Entombment of 1602–03 in the Vatican. Janssens, working in Antwerp in 1610 the same year as his Scaldis and Antverpia, brings his fully formed Caravaggist idiom to a subject demanding maximum emotional compression. The two angels introduce a supernatural element to an otherwise human scene of death and mourning, their celestial identity contrasting with the brutal physicality of the dead body they attend. The Metropolitan's acquisition of the work places it among major Baroque paintings that entered American collections in the early twentieth century.

Canvas with the dead Christ horizontal across the tomb's edge, two mourning angels on either side or above. Janssens's sidelighting creates strong chiaroscuro across the horizontal body, the pallid dead flesh catching light from one side while the other falls into deep shadow. Angels are differentiated from the mortal mourners of his Lamentation paintings through luminosity — a slight radiance distinguishes celestial from human presence. The tomb's stone edge provides a hard horizontal counter to the soft body above it.