A sacred representation

I will be forgiven for the daring but for the reasons that it is now disheartening to specify, this page will not be dedicated in these next two issues to cinematographic novelties and moving images but to a reflection in front of a single sacred image on which they questioned themselves. masters of Western thought.

This is the painting The body of the dead Christ in the tomb of Hans Holbein the Younger painted in 1521 and now preserved in the Kunstmuseum in Basel. A work that portrays the body of Christ before the resurrection depicted in a crude realistic way (right from the real size of a man lying in a two-meter long painting) in a state of severe decay with three visible wounds: one in the hand, one at the hip and the other at one foot. It is a martyr face, steeped in pain, without hope, the gaze lost in the void.
It seems once again to send out the cry of abandonment to the Father.

This realist intent was not new for the time (suffice it to see the previous Crucifixion painted by Grunewald) and was explicitly motivated to push the viewer to consider the observed work even more thoroughly, reflecting on the meaning and unleashing a sense of pietism and of guilt. The deep feeling inherent in the painting was not lost over the centuries but remained hidden until it returned to the surface in 1868 when Dostoevsky wrote one of his masterpieces, The idiot. Rogožin, friend and rival of the protagonist Prince Myškin, has a copy of the aforementioned work by the German painter in his house.
In front of it, the following exchange of words takes place between the two characters: "That painting!" Exclaimed the prince, struck by a sudden idea. "Looking at that picture, you have to lose all faith." "And in fact he gets lost," confirmed Rogožin.

In the novel, another character, Ippolit in the following pages, confirms the thesis of Prince Myškin, insinuating at the end a frightening hypothesis: if Christ, the day before his death, had seen his body reduced in this macabre state, he probably would not have had the strength to climb that cross, he would have lacked the necessary courage. Jesus himself, despite the miracles, would have doubted himself, his divine nature, the existence of his Father: "Normally, the artists who deal with this subject try to give Christ a beautiful face: a face that horrible tortures were not able to deform. Instead, in the painting of Rogožin, we see the corpse of a man who was mangled before being crucified, a man beaten by the guards and the crowd, who fell to death under the weight of the cross and who he suffered for six hours (according to my calculation) before he died.The face painted in that picture is just that of a man just removed from the cross, he is not stiff from death but he is still warm and, I would say, vital.

His expression is that of someone who is still feeling the pain suffered. A face of ruthless realism. I know that, according to the Church, from the earliest centuries, Christ, becoming man, really suffered like a man and that his body was subject to all the laws of nature. The face of the painting is swollen and bloody; eyes dilated and glassy. But, in contemplating it, one thinks: "If the Apostles, the women who stood by the cross, the faithful, the worshipers and all the others saw the body of Christ in that state, how could they believe in the imminent resurrection? If the laws of nature are so powerful, how would man dominate them when their first victim was the very One who, while alive, gave his orders to nature itself, the One who said: "Talitha cumi!", And the dead child resurrected; He who exclaimed: "Get up and walk!", And Lazarus, who was already dead, came out of his tomb? ».

Looking at that painting, one is taken by the idea that nature is nothing more than a huge, mute, inexorable monster, an immense but deaf and insensitive machine, capable of grasping, lacerating, crushing and absorbing in its bowels a Being who, by alone, it was valid as the whole of nature with all its laws and the whole earth which, perhaps, was created only so that that man could be born! The painting gives the impression of this blind, cruel, stupid force to which everything is fatally subject. Within it, there is no one among those who used to follow Jesus. On that evening, one evening that annihilated all their hopes and perhaps all their faith, those who followed Jesus had to experience a nameless anguish.

Terrified, they disappeared, supported only by a great idea, an idea that no one would be able to take away or erase from them: if the Master, on the eve of the torture, had been able to see his own image, would he have gone up to the cross anyway? Would he die the way he died? "

Davide Bracco
NP marco 2021