Image source: wikiart.org
Introduction
Peter Paul Rubens’s “Entombment” of 1615 is a small, electrifying sheet that compresses the pathos and dynamism of the Baroque into pen lines and brown washes. Rather than the chromatic thunder of his altarpieces, we encounter a choreography of bodies set down with swift, exacting strokes. The drawing shows the dead Christ borne toward the tomb by a tight ring of figures whose gestures interlock like cogs in a clockwork of grief. At once study, invention, and complete statement, the work exposes Rubens’s thought in motion: how he turns narrative into movement, light into feeling, and a handful of tones into a fully convincing world.
Medium, Touch, and the Speed of Thinking
The image is built from pen and brown ink heightened and shadowed with wash. Rubens drives the pen quickly, establishing contours with a calligrapher’s confidence, then floods selected regions with warm shadows to lock volumes into place. The brown wash is modulated from pale tea to near ebony; with it he models cheekbones, clavicles, and the heavy draperies that cradle the body. The technique is economical yet exuberant. Wherever the pen lingers, the line fattens; where he races, it thins to a hair. Those variations are not ornament—they are an index of pressure and time, a visual pulse that transfers the energy of the artist’s hand directly to the scene.
Composition as Vortex
The sheet turns on a steep diagonal set by the corpse of Christ, whose feet swing toward the lower left while the head sinks toward the bearers at the right. Around this diagonal Rubens coils a ring of mourners viewed at staggered heights. The circle is incomplete and alive: heads lean inward, shoulders curve, arms cross the body’s axis, hands grip the winding sheet. The viewer’s eye is pulled in a spiral from Christ’s pale torso to the cluster of faces at the right and back along the drapery to the bearers in the lower left. The effect is centrifugal and centripetal at once, like a current that both swirls and carries. In that vortex lies the emotional temperature of the scene—grief that surges yet performs its necessary work.
The Body That Anchors Meaning
Rubens treats the body of Christ with devastating clarity. The ribcage is a delicate cage of short ink strokes, the abdomen slack, the limbs weighty and unresisting. A sliver of shadow under the cheek suggests the head’s heaviness against the cloth. One forearm falls back with the lifeless looseness that painters learn only from relentless observation. The figure is idealized in proportion yet insistently dead in attitude. By making the corpse exquisitely believable, Rubens makes the narrative incontrovertible. All the surrounding animation finds its tragic counterweight in this absolute stillness.
Hands, Cloth, and the Mechanics of Mercy
No detail is more eloquent than the hands. A man at the front gathers the sheet under Christ’s shoulders; another supports the knees; still another behind the head seems to steady the weight with fingers splayed. Mary and the holy women do not lift so much as guide and receive. The winding cloth, rendered in broad pools of wash broken by brisk pen strokes, becomes both tool and symbol: an instrument that distributes weight and the prelude to burial. Through the grammar of grasping and wrapping, the drawing describes mercy as labor—care enacted with arms and linen.
Light, Wash, and the Theater of Tones
The wash organizes light like stagecraft. Rubens drops a dark field behind the upper group, which throws the faces into relief and deepens the hollow where grief concentrates. He lets the ground lighten toward the lower left, where the cloth spreads like a pale sail. This schematized illumination is never fussy; it simply does what light must do to tell the story. Shadows pool where bodies meet, along the arc of Christ’s ribs and in the recess between bearers; highlights are just unpainted paper, spared like jewels. With three or four tonal steps he conjures space, volume, and atmosphere.
The Architecture of Faces
The faces are swiftly differentiated. A bearded bearer bends with knitted brow, his nose and forehead carved in a few decisive strokes. The Virgin’s oval is calmer, framed by a hood that Rubens softens with wash so the features seem to glow from within. A figure at the rear—perhaps Joseph of Arimathea—looms with a grave, vertical beard, his outline layered with short lines that make him read as weight and will. Even the least developed heads carry character. Rubens requires minimal description to signal temperament; sorrow registers through direction and shape more than through wrung expressions.
Movement Without Blur
Baroque painting often conjures motion through flying drapery and tilted axes. Here, motion arises from sequencing. Every figure is doing something different at a slightly different angle, yet all actions converge on the same task. The drawing feels like a musical canon: the tune is the bearing of Christ, sung by one part after another, always overlapping, always tending to the same cadence. Because the actions are concrete—lift, wrap, steady—the scene never dissolves into melodrama. Movement is purposeful, not decorative.
The Drawing as Studio Instrument
Rubens used such sheets as engines of invention. They could be compositional rehearsals for paintings, prompts for workshop collaborators, or autonomous works for collectors who prized the revelation of process. This “Entombment” reads like a working modello: the major masses are set, the light is mapped, the psychology of groups is established, and the narrative traffic pattern is solved. If one compares the sheet to Rubens’s large painted treatments of the subject, the family resemblance is striking—the diagonal of the body, the ring of bearers, the emphasis on cloth. The drawing is not a diminished version of a painting; it is the DNA from which painted bodies can grow.
The Theology of Touch
Even in the economy of ink and wash, Rubens embeds doctrine. The entombment is an act of custody: the Church receives Christ and bears him into the earth as seed. That idea is present nowhere explicitly, yet it is everywhere in the grip of fingers and the pooling of linen. The dead body is not abandoned; it is held and transferred with reverence. The little increments of handling—here a wrist, there an ankle—translate belief into gesture. In this way the drawing becomes a visual homily on care.
Space Compressed for Intensity
Rubens stacks the figures in shallow depth, creating a compact arena where everything matters. There is no wide landscape to diffuse sorrow; a canopy of dark foliage presses from above like a low ceiling. The compression heightens empathy. We stand almost within touching distance, our eye invited to help complete the task. The edges of the sheet feel like the edges of a stage where we are not audience so much as neighbor, called to assist.
The Discipline of Restraint
The medium’s limits become virtues. Without color, Rubens relies on silhouette, overlap, and value to separate forms. Without broad paint masses, he uses the rhythm of lines to supply weight and direction. The restraint sharpens attention. We notice the small gap between Christ’s heel and the cloth, the tiny articulation of an ear, the gentle bend of a knuckle. Because the marks are few, each one must be true. The truth of those marks is what makes the image throb with life even as it depicts death.
Echoes of Antiquity and Venice
Rubens’s Roman years taught him the sculptural grammar visible in the torsos and the classicizing heads; his Venetian studies gave him the courage to treat wash like a painted shadow that blooms rather than sits. In the leaning elders one can feel a memory of sarcophagus reliefs, their compacted crowds bent to solemn tasks. Yet the liveliness of the contour—the line that seems to breathe—is entirely his own. He fetches authority from the past but refuses stiffness, binding learning to immediacy.
The Emotional Spectrum
Grief in this drawing has a range. There is the concentrated sorrow of the Virgin, whose face, though lightly drawn, suggests interior steadiness. There is the practical sorrow of the bearers, whose attention is on weight and balance. There is the authoritative sorrow of the elder, who directs intake and placement. Rubens’s moral understanding is that suffering belongs not only to the heart but also to the hands and the will. By distributing sorrow across functions, he gives the scene truth beyond sentiment.
The Ground Beneath Their Feet
One of the sheet’s quiet achievements is the sensation of footing. The bearers step, bend, and brace as if on stone, their soles solidly planted, their robes picking up dust. The low wash at the bottom reads as ground made visible by reflected light. That modest floor makes the weight of the body believable, which in turn makes the pathos unarguable. Without good ground, there is no gravity; Rubens ensures both.
Reading Order and Viewer’s Path
The drawing can be read like a clock. Start at the lower left where a bearer grasps the cloth near Christ’s ankles. Move to the horizontal of the shroud and the slack body, then up to the bearded elder at the right who catches the head and directs the transfer. From there, follow the arc of mourners across the top, then descend along the Virgin’s veil and hand back to the cloth. This circuit allows the eye to enact the very act depicted—bearing, turning, settling—so that looking becomes participation.
Touches of Nature
A fringe of leaves hangs over the group, and the wash behind them turns to a mottled canopy, as if we stand at the mouth of a rock-cut tomb shaded by trees. The natural detail is tiny but crucial. It places the narrative outdoors and supplies air for the figures to breathe. The world has not ceased because of death; it continues to shelter and to shadow. Rubens’s nature is not indifferent; it is companionable, a place where grief can happen.
The Sheet as Memory Device
Drawings like this lodge in memory with unusual tenacity because they distill scene to its essentials. The eye retains the diagonal, the ring of heads, the lifted sheet, the clustered hands. When one later meets a finished painting on the same subject, those distilled elements act like keys, unlocking the more elaborate orchestration of color and detail. The drawing is thus both seed and mnemonic, a way for Rubens and for us to remember the heart of the matter.
Why This Entombment Still Feels New
Four centuries later, the sheet remains startling because it lets us watch invention while it happens. We see a master solve problems—how many figures are needed to carry this weight, how to show empathy without collapse, how to stage proximity without confusion—and we see him solve them with speed and grace. The result is not a sketch in the pejorative sense; it is a work whose quickness is its eloquence. The lines do not describe grief; they perform it. The washes do not imitate shadow; they construct space so the body can be borne.
Conclusion
Rubens’s “Entombment” of 1615 is a consummate demonstration of what drawing can do. With a few tones and a living line, he creates a theater of compassion where anatomy, architecture, and liturgy converge. The sheet offers an anatomy lesson in weight, a moral lesson in care, and a compositional lesson in how to turn a diagonal into destiny. It is both preparatory and complete, both private thought and public statement. Above all, it shows that the Baroque could be as intense on paper as on canvas, that a hand moving swiftly over a small surface can contain the amplitude of tragedy and the dignity of those who carry it.