Christ with Joseph of Arimathea (c. 1525): Art, History and Details

Christ with Joseph of Arimathea (c. 1525) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (Italian, c. 1480–after 1548).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

After the Crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea obtained permission to bury Christ’s body in Joseph’s own tomb. Aside from an amorphous, cloudy sky, Savoldo eliminated the background entirely and reduced the narrative to two monumental figures, brought to the front of the picture plane. These qualities surely had a great impact on Caravaggio, who initially trained in Northern Italy, where Savoldo spent his career. This work originally hung over a large altarpiece, which explains the unusual perspective, the panel’s horizontal shape, and the figures’ position above the viewer.

Object facts

• Title: Christ with Joseph of Arimathea
• Date: c. 1525
• Creator attribution: Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (Italian, c. 1480–after 1548)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 134.6 x 221 x 12.7 cm (53 x 87 x 5 in.); Unframed: 105 x 191.8 cm (41 5/16 x 75 1/2 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1952.512

A detail from the museum

This panel originally crowned the largest painting Savoldo ever made for a public setting.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry. "The Liechtenstein Pietà by Savoldo." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 40, no. 6 (June 1953): 119-121.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• Heydenreich, Ludwig H., Wolfgang Lotz, and Lise Lotte Möller. Studien zur toskanischen Kunst; Festschrift für Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich zum 23. März 1963. München: Prestel-Verlag, 1964.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.