The Entombment is an unfinished oil-on-panel painting of the burial of Jesus, now generally attributed to the Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo Buonarroti and dated to around 1500 or 1501.

It is in the National Gallery in London, which purchased the work in 1868 from Robert Macpherson, a Scottish photographer resident in Rome, who, according to various conflicting accounts,[1] had acquired the painting there some 20 years earlier.

[3] According to documents discovered in 1981,[4] Michelangelo had been commissioned in 1500 to paint a panel for the funerary chapel at the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome, but in the end gave back the sum received.

The description of the painting in the National Gallery's catalogue suggests that Michelangelo departed to secure the large block of marble that would become his David sculpture, which he undertook to sculpt in 1501.

[5] The centre of the panel portrays the naked body of the dead Christ being carried up a flight of steps to the sepulchre, which was intended to be painted in the blank area in the rocks at the top right of the work.

[8] Many of the unfinished parts of the painting, such as the cloak of the missing Virgin, would have required quantities of the expensive blue pigment ultramarine made from powdered lapis lazuli.