A sacred representation

(continued from New Project of March)

Over the years, the painting resumes its place in the imagination and in reflection in the sphere of the human sciences first of all due to its modernity in dealing with a twentieth-century theme such as that of the death of God and his scandal that tempts and confuses.
Psychoanalyst writer Julia Kristeva in a 1986 essay (Black Sun) underlines the loneliness and isolation of Christ in the painting where "Holbein leaves the corpse strangely alone. And it is perhaps this isolation - a fact of composition - that gives the picture the greatest melancholy charge, more than the drawing and the coloring do [...] this excruciating realism by its very parsimony is accentuated to the maximum by the composition and position of the painting: only an elongated body placed above the spectators and separated from them. Separated from us by the base, but without any line of flight towards the sky because the ceiling of the niche looms low, Holbein's Christ is an inaccessible dead man, far away, but without any beyond ».

But Kristeva is also shocked by the mystery of the picture and its creator who might also want to invite us to consider «the tomb of Christ as a living tomb, to participate in the death depicted and to include it in our life so as to make it alive ». The effect of Christ's open eyes and mouth was described by the art critic Michel Onfray as saying that "the viewer sees Christ he sees: he can also think what death has in store for him, since Christ stares at the paradise, while his soul is already there. But no one has bothered to close their mouths and eyes on the Christ-man. Or rather Holbein wants to tell us that, even in death, Christ sees us and speaks to us ».
At the end of an investigation, however, never really concluded and testifying to the strong evocative capacity of this painting, Pope Francis in the 2013 encyclical Lumen fidei refers to Holbein through the quotation of the novel by Dostoevsky. In the harshness and crude way of depicting death, faith is strengthened in relation to the love for man shown by Jesus Christ.

Thus in point 16: "The maximum proof of the reliability of Christ's love is found in his death for man. If giving one's life for friends is the greatest proof of love (cf. Jn 15:13), {C}{C}{C}{C} Jesus offered his life for everyone, even for those who were enemies, to transform the heart. This is why the evangelists located in the hour of the Cross the culminating moment of the gaze of faith, because in that hour the height and breadth of divine love shines. St. John will place his solemn testimony here when, together with the Mother of Jesus, he contemplated the One they pierced (cf. Jn 19:37): "He who has seen bears witness and his testimony is true; he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you too may believe " (Jn 19:35). FM Dostoevskij, in his work The Idiot, makes the protagonist say, the prince Myshkin, at the sight of the painting of Christ dead in the tomb, by Hans Holbein the Younger: "That painting could also make someone lose faith". In fact, the painting represents, in a very crude way, the destructive effects of death on the body of Christ. And yet, it is precisely in the contemplation of Jesus' death that faith is strengthened and receives a dazzling light, when it reveals itself as faith in his unshakable love for us, which is capable of entering death to save us. In this love, which did not escape death to show how much he loves me, it is possible to believe; the totality of him overcomes every suspicion and allows us to entrust ourselves fully to Christ ».


Davide Bracco
NP April 2021