Martin Schongauer

This elegant composition depicts the moment Jesus’s body was laid to rest after his crucifixion. Schongauer combined fluid outlines, tiny dots, fine parallel lines, and limited crosshatching to create an image that is at once decorative, moving, and arresting in its apparent simplicity. The blank areas emphasize the sober, stark atmosphere of the event.

Schongauer, who consistently signed his work with his initials, was one of the first artists to take up and perfect the technique of engraving in the late 1400s. The young Albrecht Dürer (wall at right) sought to become Schongauer’s apprentice, but Schongauer died shortly before Dürer reached his hometown of Colmar.

Trained as a painter in the Upper Rhine city of Colmar, Martin Schongauer learned much from studying engravings by the Master ES but brought to engraving a painter’s sense for light and color. His marks vacillate from interpretive, draftsman-like lines, evident here on St. John’s drapery, to more regular systems of hatching and cross-hatching, as on the drapery of the Virgin Mary. Schongauer outlined each figure with one continuous contour, and softened tonal transitions with fine hatching placed at the edges of his forms.

Part of a series of twelve prints representing Christ’s Passion, The Entombment depicts the moment after the Crucifixion when Christ’s body is interred. Christ is surrounded by the Virgin Mary and St. John the Evangelist on the near side of the sarcophagus, and by Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and the three Marys (Mary Magdalene, Mary of Cleopas, and Mary, mother of James) behind it. Spatially isolated from the others and bathed in light, Christ, the Virgin, and St. John are the spiritual center of the pyramidal composition.