Grablegung Christi

Colijn de Coter painted this Entombment of Christ around 1487 in Brussels. De Coter worked in the tradition of Rogier van der Weyden, adapting the great master's emotional compositions for late fifteenth-century patrons. The Entombment, showing Christ's body being placed in the tomb, was one of the final scenes in the Passion narrative. This work belongs to the Early Renaissance, the transformative period in European art when painters first applied mathematical perspective, naturalistic figure modeling, and archaeological interest in antiquity to the inherited traditions of medieval devotional painting. The tension between Gothic grace and Renaissance structure gives art of this period a distinctive energy.

Oil on panel in the Brussels tradition descended from Rogier van der Weyden. The emotional rendering of the burial scene shows de Coter's command of the Rogierian devotional vocabulary.