Along with a number of other wooden panels, this Entombment has been preserved from the altarpiece painted by Cristóvão de Figueiredo for the chancel of the Igreja de Santa Cruz in Coimbra. It is one of the central pieces of 16th-century Portuguese art, displaying a majestic and dramatic language that comes close to the classical style and reinventing a customary episode from western European religious imagery in a new and innovative fashion.

Two portraits, possibly of the donors, stand out from the rest of the painting because of their strongly shaped faces (considered among the best in Portuguese painting after Nuno Gonçalves), as does the treatment given to the front of the tomb itself, which, in the traditional classical style, displays two tondi with representations of episodes from the Old Testament: Jeremiah thrown into the cistern and Jonah swallowed by the whale.