The Entombment (Bouts)

[4][5] The painting is covered by accumulated layers of grey dirt and cannot be cleaned without damaging the surface and removing large amounts of pigment as its glue-size medium is water-soluble.

[7] The Entombment shows Christ's body, wrapped in a white linen shroud and still wearing a crown of thorns, as it is lowered into a deep stone tomb.

[1] The background contains a wide and delicate landscape with a winding pathway and a broad river before a more distant vista of trees and hills, devoid of people.

The vista in The Entombment is regarded as one of his finest, and is a typical one for Bouts, composed of distant brown and green hills against a blue sky.

[12] The Virgin wears a white headdress and a dark blue dress with a yellowish mantle, and holds Christ's arm just above his wrist as if afraid to let go of her dead son.

Dressed in green robes, Mary Salome stands to the Virgin's left, wiping tears from her face with the fold of her white headdress.

Mary of Clopas is behind them, holding a red cloth over her mouth, while the Magdalen is in the foreground at Christ's feet, dressed in a heavily folded cloak.

[notes 3] Glue-sizing consists of a distemper created by mixing pigments in water and then using a glue-base derived from boiled animal skin and other tissues as a binder.

[13] The Entombment is one of the earliest European pictorial works of art in which the use of smalt could be ascertained and its presence proves that the pigment was not invented during the 16th century, as had previously been believed.

[21] Glue size does not saturate the pigments as much as oil would, allowing them to show as matt and opaque, giving – especially with reds and blues – an intense appearance when applied to cloth.

Cloth is fragile and perishes easily, and this work is one of the best preserved of the few surviving examples of the technique from the period; the majority extant today were executed on wood using oil or egg tempera.

[4] It is possible to see the degree to which the technique allowed Bouts, in the words of art historian Susan Jones, to "[achieve such] sophistication ... to create both fine linear detail and subtle tonal transitions.

"[21] Jones notes that the sky would have appeared with the same clear and pale blue that is still intact in a narrow strip along the top of the work, which has been protected from light and dirt by a frame.

[13] Infrared photography reveals little underdrawing but indicates that the canvas underwent several changes before completion: the figure of Mary Salome was repositioned slightly to the left, the sizes of Nicodemus' arm and shoulder were reduced, and the Magdalen's face was painted over the Virgin's mantle.

[24] The row of rust-stained nail holes running along the top of the cloth is evidence that the frame was eventually positioned within the pictorial field, at a point far lower than Bouts had intended.

Charles Eastlake saw the isolated piece in 1858 and again in 1860 during visits to Milan to purchase examples of Northern Renaissance art on behalf of the National Gallery.

[28] Art historian Robert Koch remarked in 1988 on the similarity of provenance, material, technique, tone and colour of the four works described by Eastlake.

[30] The compilers of the 2006 catalogue raisonné review the proposal by Bomfort, Roy and Smith, taken up by Koch, Hans van Miegroet and Campbell, that the Resurrection panel constituted the center of a single altarpiece that would have included the London Entombment.

"[31] Périer-D'Ieteren writes that she and her co-editors accept that the Annunciation, Entombment and Resurrection are of a piece, stemming from the Guicciardi Collection – but they find the inclusion of the Crucifixion a problematic reconstruction.

There is no documentary evidence to substantiate the claim that the painting came from the Foscari collection, and some art historians believe that representatives of the Guicciardis invented this provenance to impress Eastlake.

Lorne Campbell considers the provenance "probable", noting that a descendant, Ferigo Foscari (1732–1811), an ambassador to the Russian court at Saint Petersburg, squandered his fortune and may have been forced into selling pictures belonging to the family.

[3] Campbell speculates that the painting was produced on commission for export to Venice, noting that unrolled linen would have been easier to transport than canvas, and that the row of holes just below the upper border could be explained if it had been stretched, mounted and framed by someone other than Bouts or a member of his workshop.

[3][34] The companion pieces in the Guicciardi collection (Annunciation, Adoration of the Kings, and Resurrection) were similar works in glue-size, though of lesser quality: Eastlake's notebooks mention them as "not so good (not so well preserved)".

[12] Davies proposed in 1953 that the figuration and pose in The Entombment may have been informed by a small grisaille relief in the arch of the central panel of van der Weyden's Miraflores Altarpiece.