BERLIN.- Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie has opened a landmark exhibition celebrating the Venetian Renaissance master Vittore Carpaccio, centered around the newly restored Preparation for the Entombment of Christ. On view from November 20, 2025 through April 6, 2026, the exhibition offers visitors an in-depth look at Venice around 1500 through one of the era’s most enigmatic paintings and a carefully curated selection of related works.

The presentation marks the first time the painting has been shown in its full restored brilliance. Over the past several years, the large-scale canvas underwent a meticulous conservation project led by Babette Hartwieg, the museum’s former chief conservator. Discolored varnishes and old retouchings, some dating back generations, had significantly dulled Carpaccio’s luminous palette. Their removal, along with detailed technical research carried out together with the Rathgen Research Laboratory, has revealed a vividness and compositional clarity that had long been obscured.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the Preparation for the Entombment of Christ, one of only two major Carpaccios in the Gemäldegalerie’s collection. Unlike the traditional scenes of lamentation, Carpaccio chose an unusual and dramatic moment between Christ’s death and resurrection. Christ’s body rests quietly at the center while Joseph of Arimathea prepares the tomb behind him. A contemplative elderly figure, believed to be Job, sits leaning against a tree as if witnessing history from the edge of time. The surrounding landscape is filled with symbolic contrasts: skulls and bones in the foreground, and further back, shepherds who play music in a serene, idealized countryside. The entire composition is charged with tension between mortality and redemption, stillness and narrative detail.

The exhibition situates the painting within its artistic context by displaying works by Carpaccio’s contemporaries and influences, including Giovanni Bellini, Cima da Conegliano, Palma Vecchio, and Francesco Bissolo. These comparisons illuminate Carpaccio’s individual approach to color, composition, and storytelling, offering insight into the vibrant artistic network of early sixteenth-century Venice.

Two exceptional loans from the Kupferstichkabinett deepen the narrative: a preparatory drawing of the dead Christ by Carpaccio himself, and an engraving by Andrea Mantegna. The latter played a crucial role in shaping Carpaccio’s visual imagination and demonstrates how Venetian painters absorbed and reinterpreted ideas circulating across Italy at the time.

The exhibition also acknowledges Carpaccio’s lasting influence on modern scholarship. Aby Warburg, the pioneering Hamburg art historian, considered the Preparation for the Entombment so significant that he included it in his 1929 Mnemosyne Atlas, a monumental project mapping the survival of visual motifs across centuries. A faithful reproduction of Warburg’s original atlas panel is displayed alongside the painting, creating a rare historical dialogue between Renaissance art and twentieth-century iconology.

Visitors interested in the behind-the-scenes work of art conservation will find extensive documentation on the restoration project. The museum provides explanations at multiple levels of depth, from general overviews to detailed technical findings, allowing both casual visitors and specialists to understand the challenges posed by the painting’s condition and the decisions that guided the conservation process.

The exhibition is curated by Babette Hartwieg and Neville Rowley and supported by Culturespaces, Paris. A series of public lectures throughout early 2026 will explore the painting’s iconography, its technical revelations, its inscriptions, and its relevance within broader religious, cultural, and historical debates. These events underscore the Gemäldegalerie’s commitment not only to showcasing masterpieces, but also to fostering an active public conversation around their meaning.

With its restoration complete and its context newly illuminated, Carpaccio’s Preparation for the Entombment of Christ emerges as both a rediscovered treasure and a window into the spiritual and artistic world of Renaissance Venice. The exhibition invites visitors to encounter the painting anew—as a masterpiece whose quiet drama continues to resonate half a millennium after its creation.