The Entombment

Little is known about Filippo Vitale’s career, but he seems to have spent time in the workshop of Carlo Sellitto, the painter often credited with spreading Caravaggio’s style in Naples in the early part of the 17th century. The influence of Caravaggio’s dramatic lighting effects and Jusepe de Ribera’s naturalism are both palpable in Vitale’s work, as seen in this moving representation of the Entombment in which Vitale makes clear reference to Ribera's painting of the same subject, today in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. MI 736). Both pictures share a similar vantage point and Christ's limp body is laid out on a white shroud, flanked by mourning figures that emerge from the shadows. Vitale's painting is not a direct copy of Ribera's, however, and he seems to have produced a number of variants of this composition; one, with figures set before a landscape, was auctioned in Milan at Sotheby's (3 December 2002, lot 54) and another, almost identical to the present work, is in a private collection (see F. Bologna, ‘Battistello e gli altri. Il primo tempo della pittura caravaggesca a Napoli’, Battistello Caracciolo e il primo naturalismo a Napoli, exhibition catalogue, Naples, 1991, p. 152, fig. 164).