Holbein shows Christ as a cadaver, outstretched on a white cloth inside a narrow tomb chamber, recognisable as Christ only by the wounds of the lance and the nails^[2]. Its naturalism is markedly different from that of the era's other great treatment of the dead Christ, Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, where the lowering of Christ's body is set against a landscape and treated with heroic, expressive grief^[2]. Holbein offers no landscape, no mourners, no grief. The body simply lies there, a fact to be looked at rather than a scene to be read.

Holbein concentrated his light on the centre of the body, drawing attention to the gangrenous colouring of the wounded hand, while leaving the open mouth and staring eyes in shadow^[2]. The same selective lighting picks out contrasts of light and dark on the feet. This kind of deliberate, dramatic effect stands apart from Holbein's usual objective clarity, and parallels the night effects he used elsewhere in his Passion scenes^[2]. It shows that even within his characteristically dispassionate style, Holbein was capable of working in a more expressive, theatrical register when the subject called for it.

The painting was made in 1521, while Holbein was working in Basel, and its long, narrow format suggests it was probably designed as the predella, the horizontal base panel, of a larger altarpiece, with a Deposition scene most likely occupying the panel above it^[1]. It stands among Holbein's last major religious commissions. As the Protestant Reformation spread through Basel over the following years, demand for devotional painting fell away sharply, and Holbein turned increasingly toward the portrait practice that would define the rest of his career^[1].