According to scripture, Jesus
Christ probably died soon after three o'clock in the afternoon, and one
might think, as far as the authorities were concerned, "the case was
closed". However, for the family of a person executed in Roman times
disgrace did not end with death. Roman law provided a harsh accompaniment
to crucifixion: the loss of the right to honour the dead. It was only
through an act of pardon that the body of an executed person was returned
for proper burial. In this respect the narrative contained in the Gospel
of Luke is highly plausible. The Jerusalem councilman, Joseph of
Arimathaea, who revealed himself to be a follower of Jesus at the
Crucifixion, had to bow to convention and beg Pilate, the Roman governor
of Palestine, for the body of Christ. Pilate granted this request only
after a Roman officer, who had been present at the Crucifixion, verified
that the man from Nazareth was indeed dead. What then happened to the body
of Jesus is described in the Gospel of John (19: 39—41): "And there came
also Nicodemus, which at first came to Jesus by night, and brought a
mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight. Then took they
the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the
manner of the Jews is to bury. Now in the place where he was crucified
there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never
man yet laid." But here was this garden? The gardens of Jerusalem were
north of the second city wall, and their presence was indicated by a
nearby garden gate. Here were also the quarries, and during Jesus'
lifetime, chamber graves were hewn from the rock of these steep slopes. In
one of these chamber graves, not far from Golgotha, the "Place of Skulls",
Joseph and those with him buried Jesus.
This sepulchre is the setting for
Andrea Mantegna's
The Entombment. The Italian Renaissance painter, who worked
for fifty years at the Gonzaga Court in Mantua, had trained his eye for
anatomical detail through the study of ancient sculpture. He achieved
great plasticity of form in his figures through the use of a perspective
technique known as foreshortening, and it is probably not a coincidence
that
Mantegna
depicted the body of Christ lying in a tomb. In 1453, a few years before
the picture was painted, Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman
Empire, fell to the Turks. When the Ottomans took the city, Christendom
lost a precious relic, the "anointing stone" on which, according to
tradition, Joseph of Arimathaea had placed the body of Christ. The work by
Mantegna
could be interpreted as a critical response to the Turks defilement of
Christian holy places, since popes of that period called for crusades
against the Turks to free Constantinople and the Christian relics from the
hands of unbelievers.
