Hans Holbein - The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb

 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521, oil on wood, Kunstmuseum, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel

Holbein obliges viewers of this painting to confront the graphically shocking reality of death. It shows the body of the recently tortured and crucified Christ now interred, seemingly many days after expiration if we are to judge by its discolouration. Despite the fact that the corpse clearly no longer breathes, the narrow confines of the casket remain claustrophobia-inducing for the onlooker. Its space is so restricted that the full-stretch and extremely emaciated cadaver barely fits inside it. The image is horrifying for us and ignominious for its subject. At 32 x 202cm it is effectively life-size and this reinforcement of a sense of actuality obliges us to accept that no living thing could tolerate such immuration. This is what real death looks like, boxed without need of respect for the respiration of an occupant.

It’s as if the artist has created a revealing cross-section of the chamber, a scientific study true to northern Renaissance Humanist principles, contending that human corporeality, irrespective of any question of divinity or hypostatic union represented in the figure of Jesus, is worthy of pictorial inquiry. The painting examines unflinchingly the phenomenon of lividity, the appearance of eyes, hair, skin and wounds postmortem; the contusing of hands and feet, the first stages of putrefaction. It does this with trompe l’oeil illusionism, as if we are not looking at a flat image but a cut-away to a properly three-dimensional presence within some architectural recess showcasing its grisly display for us. Appallingly and gruesomely, the fallen-back hair dangles down from the slab and threatens to fall outside the frame and obtrude into our own observing space.

Although scholars have debated the implications of this depiction as they apply to Reformation thinking in the sixteenth century, my overriding sense is that the painting wasn’t intended to challenge the belief that Jesus was the son of God, nor that the resurrection would happen a short while later. Instead, it’s more a condemnation of the extreme barbarism of those who did the maiming and the killing and a testament to the suffering of Christ and his sacrifice, his transcendent gesture of sin atonement.

Famously in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin exclaims of the painting ‘Why, a man’s faith might be ruined by looking at that picture!’ Such a response is perhaps understandable in the context of nineteenth-century novels which grappled with ideas about morality, good and evil, life’s absurdity and want of meaning in the face of suffering. But what sort of response would the painting elicit from Holbein’s contemporaries and what did the artist expect it to elicit? Would it have seemed sacrilegious? What meaning did viewers attach to it? Again, my intuition is that rather than it seeming indecent or profane, or an attack on faith intended to enjoin apostasy, the reaction would have been empathetic – it would have induced pity in the beholder, that such an outcome should have befallen the son of God; that it should have come to this.

But there can be no doubt that this is a human body, one which has been wracked by pain and wasted by malnourishment. The prominent ribcage and hip bones, and those death-stare eyes and hanging mouth are all profoundly mortal. Whatever the sanctity which may have inhered the soul of this figure before death, these bodily remains are now subject to the same entropy as any other previously living organism. Such an image of death stands as an affront to our own existence in the world of the living; it violates our sense of decorum; it frightens us, and it excites us ghoulishly because of its ultimate otherness to our own continuance in life. However, there is nothing here to suggest that Christ did not adopt a body, did not endure birth, life and death as a temporary measure and that once done with, (shock, horror!) that body would decay. The picture is a reminder of our own mortality as much as it is a chronicle of the Passion’s endgame.

It is not the first artwork to tackle the dead and pre-resurrection Jesus as a subject. Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ, with its radical (and problematic) foreshortened perspective is a good example of an earlier Renaissance treatment.

Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation of Christ , c. 1470, tempera on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

But even though the corpse in that picture exhibits a deathly pallor, it retains an aura of holiness, and the facial expression is one of peaceful, eyes-closed beatitude; the corpse ‘enjoys’ the pillow-cushioned release and repose of death as well as the veneration of the lamenters. The Holbein by contrast, gives us an unholy Christ whose eyes stare unfocusedly upwards, away from us and into nothingness. He is alone, abandoned, his spirit utterly absent and lies forsaken with no comforting mourners on hand. This corpse is as dead as dead can possibly be.

It may be that the painting was intended to circumvent the move to iconoclasm that some Reformation leaders were beginning to urge on their followers in the early 1520s. The Lutherans of the period may not have agitated as forcefully for the destruction of graven images (in conformance with their interpretation of the second commandment) as the more stringent Calvinists did later, but they did object to images which were designed to be worshiped ritualistically, or which served no pedagogical purpose. So, the depiction of a very dead Christ may have been intended to project an antidote to the religious portraiture veneration that was beginning to seem idolatrous. It is also known that Holbein moved in Erasmus’ Humanist circle (he painted his portrait several times and later benefited from letters of introduction written by the priest-scholar to Thomas More in England) and his free thinking influence over the artist seems to have been profound, even though they didn’t meet in person until 1523, a couple of years after the making of this painting. Although Erasmus remained a Catholic to the end, he also criticised the Church for some of its venal practices and argued for a kind of ‘back-to-basics’ worship of personal piety and which may have persuaded Holbein to eschew the making of more symbolic, intercessory and cultish Christian images in favour of the hard and uncompromising verism of the Dead Christ.

Both the humanist Erasmus and the harder-line Reformation Protestants believed that the New Testament should be read as literal truth. Christianity, they believed, was sola scriptura; the bible was the only source of authority and formed the foundation for the individual’s relationship to God, as opposed to the teachings of the Church and its priests. On that basis, it is clear why Christ’s humanity and his death should not be disavowed by any imagery which embellished or prettified the cruel and bleak reality of it. I think Holbein was moved by these new ideas.

In his painting, at its dead (no pun intended) centre, Christ’s exaggeratedly long middle finger of his blackening and nail-pierced right hand, a finger which extends revoltingly beyond the others with its tip resting on the creases of the sheet, is like a silent attestation to this truth. It points ringlessly downwards as if in denial and refusal of ornament and is propped emphatically upon the slab as if reasserting the idea of redemption and salvation as related in the scriptures. It is a finger that is also shaped as if for benediction. Like the hair, the hand threatens to fall out of the picture’s frame and to accost the viewer and exhort them, even in death, to have faith.

Some have speculated that Holbein painted this work to represent the instant just before resurrection, but I think that he has presented us with a body discarded, a body beyond such a miracle and in need of thoroughgoing transmutation instead – this mortal coil needs to be shuffled off irrevocably and a superphysical restoration inhabited in its place if it is to capable of discharging fully God’s promise of salvation.