The Dead Christ with Angels (c. 1580): Art, History and Details

The Dead Christ with Angels (c. 1580) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Leandro Bassano (Italian, 1557–1623).

The work and its context

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

In this scene, two angels are shown attending to the body of Christ after his death. The artist, Leandro Bassano, came from a family of painters—both his father and grandfather were artists, as were his brothers, Francesco and Gerolamo. Leandro worked primarily in Francesco's studio in Venice, which he took over after his brother's death in 1592. Leandro is best known as a portrait painter, working in a style often compared with that of the great Venetian artist, Tintoretto. Other versions of this painting are in the collections of the Galleria Colonna in Rome and the Civic Museum in Bassano del Grappa, the artist's birthplace.

Object facts

• Title: The Dead Christ with Angels
• Date: c. 1580
• Creator attribution: Leandro Bassano (Italian, 1557–1623)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 157 x 129.5 x 13 cm (61 13/16 x 51 x 5 1/8 in.); Unframed: 123.3 x 96.5 cm (48 9/16 x 38 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.806

Collection credit

Holden Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Rubinstein-Bloch, Stella. Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings, Etc. Presented by Mrs. Liberty E. Holden to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1917.
• G. U. "The Holden Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 2 (1917): 19-34.
• Francis, Henry Sayles. Venetian Tradition: Catalogue of the Exhibition. [Cleveland, Ohio]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1956. Published as: The Entombment

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.