After its creation, the painting was housed for several years at the Hospital de Jesus Nazareno in the city of Taxco, Guerrero. The painting was subsequently transferred/donated to the collections of the old Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City. In 2000, The Burial of Christ entered the collection of the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL). This is its present institutional location.
Nicknamed "Echave el Mozo" which translates to "The Younger", due to being the youngest in a celebrated painterly lineage, Baltasar de Echave y Rioja has not been documented as extensively as his predecessors as little information of his early life remains extant today. The Figge Art Museum notes that Rioja is generally associated with the workshop of Jose Juarez; a leading baroque painter of the 17th century. His contribution is very significant to the corpus of Mexican art as he belonged to a uniquely transitional phase during the development of the baroque painting tradition. In terms of subject matter, Rioja is no different from other contemporaries and successors as it was the norm for practitioners to illustrate religious narratives and episodes due to the authority, the Catholic church exalted over the rest of the diaspora. He is distinguished for the aesthetics he developed and explored in his career which is quite distinctive for his era. "The Burial of Christ" is among Rioja's most powerful allegorical works as it exhibits a strong sentimental scene rendered in what can be termed as, Rioja's "proto-baroque" visual grammar. The grammar of image making or iconography follows the established canons of earlier Christian pictures. The central figures are Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, Joseph had obtained permission from Pontius Pilate to take Christ's body from the cross and provide it with burial, while Nicodemus brings the myrrh and ointments associated with the preparation of the body. The Virgin Mary appears overwhelmed by grief, while Mary Magdalene expresses her sorrow through her tightly clasped hands. Rioja conjures the composition with a performance-like theatricality rather than simply displaying a biblical episode. The physical aspects showcase a manneristic character while the treatment of light which sharply illuminates the figures hints to a tenebrist tendency more than chiaroscuro, which is grounded more in a gradual shift or smoother blend of tones. The dynamism seen in the postures, gestures and expressions suggest a shift towards dramaticism, which becomes the foundational element of the baroque tradition. Much of Rioja's work shows this proto-baroque aesthetic which makes him a crucial figure whose practice and life needs to be researched and studied in order to understand the oil painting history of colonial Mexico (New Spain).
Baltasar de Echave y Rioja's painting, The Burial of Christ, is not merely a painting of the internment of Christ. It's an exploration of death and hope, of grief and sacrifice. Executed in 1665, the work depicts Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus with the dead body of Christ in preparation for His final rest, while the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene are left in grief.
I am most captivated by the way that Christ's body is bathed in an unnatural light and seems to glow from the surrounding darkness. He acts as the focus of the spiritual and emotional weight of the piece - he is light even in death. The mourners in the piece exude emotional anguish through their gestures and facial expressions which serve to transform a moment from the biblical story into a scene of human grief.
The painting conveys, in essence, a very christian paradox to me: that death may look like the absolute end, but that this death becomes the journey from which Christ can be resurrected from and be atoned.
