Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1520-22, oil on panel, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel.
In The Idiot (1869), Dostoyevsky’s Prince Mishkin notices a reproduction of Holbein’s Dead Christ on the wall in Rogozhin’s house, and observes that it has the power to make one lose their Christian faith. The painting is unusual because Holbein painted it in the form of a predella, which forms the base of an altarpiece, featuring Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. But there is no altarpiece to put Holbein’s dead Christ in context. Mishkin’s fear is that without the context of the resurrection provided by the altarpiece, the dead Christ deprives the Christian of hope. Because Holbein’s painting offers no resurrection, it cannot proclaim anything but death, its unrelenting power to vanquish even the Son of God. Dostoyevesky was fascinated with the painting the first time he saw it in Basel and apparently his wife had to pull him away from it after hours of close inspection. No doubt Dostoyevsky was fascinated by the implications of the image of God’s body, beginning to decay. Holbein gives us the most terrifying painting of law in the Western tradition. Munch’s The Scream rips our sanity from us; Holbein’s painting shows that the law kills God himself.
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