The Entombment (Michelangelo)

Christ's body is hoisted toward the rock tomb on straps of cloth, John the Evangelist straining in red at the left while others take the weight, the kneeling woman with the scroll likely the Magdalene - the burial that John's Gospel describes when Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus laid him in a new tomb (John 19:38-42). Michelangelo left the panel unfinished: bare priming spreads across the lower right, where the Virgin was to sit, and the figure at the far right is barely begun. Even incomplete, every body is conceived as sculpture, the dead Christ posed with the gravity of carved stone. One of his very few paintings, it was probably set aside around the time he returned to Florence to carve the David.