Melancholic Musings II: Holbein’s Dead Christ

In the dark of night, the moon hides instead of caressing my cold skin. I cry out  from sorrow—the silence stifles me. Oh God! What have I done? Silence again… Christ died for our sins and we feast on his blood and flesh to honour him.  Blood is sacrifice! Blood is holy! Blood is honour to the Gods! I shriek and say: it’s also contamination and disease, violence and slaughter, pain and hurt. It reeks of unvoiced dispair, heart-shattering betrayal , and spine-chilling terror.

Where is the line between sacrament and defilement? Christ was betrayed by one of his own apostles, crucified by the Romans, and buried by a secret disciple. He resurrected from the grave three days later.

Will I also rise again?—I ask myself, lying still like a corpse—I can feel my wounds re-open. My limbs are heavy, the tears i’ve shed blur my vision—and cut off my breath. I repeat: will I also rise again? Whose silence answers me? God? Or is it my own silence echoing back at me.

I fear writing about my own naked emotions, I conjure up ghosts from art and literature to hold my hand while I testify  my sorrows. Ghosts, not the living in the flesh, they frighten me.

Before I can speak of resurrection, I have to speak of death, the corpse—of Christ.

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Holbein confronts us with a harrowing realism, the naked and raw depiction of Christ lying in his tomb. We see his lifeless body discoloured from decay, his eyes and mouth wide open, the puncture wounds from the nails securing him to the cross and the side wound from being poked with a lance to check if the light has truly left his eyes. It’s rumoured that Holbein used a dead body from the Rhine as reference, truth or fiction, he succeeded in depicting Christ as mortal flesh, in the early stages of decomposition.

It’s no wonder that Dostoyevsky was so fascinated by this painting. He was deeply  impacted by it during a visit to Das Kunstmuseum Basel in 1867. His second wife Anna Grigoryevna that accompanied him wrote about their trip in her memoir:

“On our way to Geneva, we stopped for a day in Basel to see a painting in the museum there that my husband had heard about. This painting by Hans Holbein depicts Christ who has endured inhuman torment, already taken down from the cross and decaying. His bloated face is covered with bloody wounds and his appearance is terrible. The painting had a crushing impact on Fyodor Mikhailovich. He stood before it as if stunned. And I did not have the strength to look at it – it was too painful for me, particularly in my sickly [pregnant] condition – and I went into the other rooms. When I came back after fifteen or twenty minutes, I found him still riveted to the same spot in front of the painting. His agitated face had a kind of dread in it, something I had noticed more than once during the first moments of an epileptic seizure. Quietly I took my husband by the arm, led him into another room and sat him down on a bench, expecting the attack from one minute to the next. Luckily this did not happen. He calmed down little by little and left the museum, but insisted on returning once again to view this painting which had struck him so powerfully.”

(Kunstmuseum Basel)

Shortly after, Dostoyevsky started writing The Idiot, in which Holbein’s painting is featured.

“struck by a sudden thought," he exclaimed: "[look-ing] At that picture! Why, some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!"

Kristeva also discussed this painting in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. One of my favourite books on melancholy, as someone who suffers deeply from it. She devoted a whole chapter on Holbein’s work “Holbein’s Dead Christ”. Where she also refers to The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. The image Holbein gives us speaks of anguish, betrayal, Christ’s body forsaken by even his own father, a stark contrast to other depictions that feature Christ on the cross, surrounded by witnesses, among them the three Mary’s, his mother, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Clopas. Kristeva observes the isolation and loneliness of the image, initially created as part of an alter-piece that was never finalised, the other panels never came into existence. It correlates to my own feelings, that I’ll be as alone or even more alone when I’m dead as while I’m alive. The naked and harrowing image of Christ in his tomb is spine chilling, addressing our innermost feelings of despair, versus a romanticised and glorified depiction where he is witnessed in his suffering.

To conclude my chain of thought, on melancholy and the art produced from it, that I deeply admire, I can only

I know nothing of martyrdom—I became an atheist.