The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb

Judged by subtraction, and there is almost nothing to subtract. The body is the work. The slab carries it, and the white sheet crumpled under the back is the one soft thing, the only sign that hands laid him there. The lid is the argument of the format: without it the body lies in open air, a study; with it the dead man has no room, and the hair and the right hand spill over the edge because there is nowhere else for them to go. The wounds make this corpse this corpse, and the open eyes and mouth cannot go. What yields is at the margins: the inscription is a gloss rather than a structure, and the far end of the niche is permitted by the format more than compelled by it.

Score: 8.9 / 10

What is disclosed is a meaning, not a mood. If God became flesh, then God died as flesh dies: the body is rigid, discoloured at the hands and face, the eyes rolled up and unclosed, the mouth open, a cadaver in a box and nothing else. The panel takes the Incarnation at its word, shows the cost of the word, and uncovers the question the doctrine must answer: whether anything in this body could rise. It does not answer. A second disclosure holds outside its century: a dead person is a thing, and the dignity of the dead is given by the living. That it can be read toward faith and against it is evidence that it is real. Held below the top because one condition, death, carries the whole of it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The elevation is real, of one register, and dreadful: the sublime of terror and of the absence of transport. The viewer stands before a dead man at life size at the level of his slab, and the long format moves the eye from the face to the feet like a slow walk along a coffin. It rises in several places: the face with its open eyes and teeth; the right hand, its middle finger stretched over the edge of the slab into the viewer’s space; the wound in the side, a dark slit under the ribs; the feet, stiffened, the nail wound dark. There is no grandeur of scale or light, and the height is held at one pitch from end to end. A cold height, held without relief, which does not rise from one register to another.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The archetype is the dead god in the earth, the god laid in the tomb, the seed in the ground, and it is built, not alluded to. The format is the tomb; the lid is the earth’s weight; the body lies where the god lies before the third day, and the picture is set wholly in that interval, Holy Saturday. The construction holds because the archetype is stated by withholding: mourners, angels, the instruments of the Passion displayed, the Man of Sorrows upright and showing his wounds, every sign by which the tradition makes the dead Christ a promise, is removed, and the body alone carries the myth. The particular stays fiercely particular. Held below the top because the myth is built from one moment of one story.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The inheritance is the Northern devotional image of the dead Christ: the Lamentation and the Entombment with their mourners, the Man of Sorrows, the effigy on the tomb; behind them Mantegna’s foreshortened dead Christ; and within the decade before, Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, whose crucified body is already a ruin of flesh, though set inside a scheme of resurrection on the same altarpiece. The departure goes further in one direction: the dead god laid flat, alone, at eye level, in a closed box, with no one to mourn and nothing to promise. The stake was a painter in his early twenties, in Basel on the eve of the Reformation, withholding consolation as images were about to be attacked. Held below the top because Grünewald had already broken the decorum; this is a radical compression of an existing subject.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the picture stops knowing what it knows. The knowledge is confinement, a god with no room, and it exists only in the format: a strip of about one to six and a half, the body pressed between slab and lid, the hand and the hair breaking the edge because the box will not hold them. In an upright panel it would be a Lamentation without mourners; under open sky, a study of a corpse; seen from above, an image of pity rather than of an equal. The low viewpoint puts the viewer in the tomb, the life size makes the measure the viewer’s body, and the eye’s passage from head to feet takes time that is part of the meaning. Held below the top because part of what the form knew may have depended on a setting now lost.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Evidence over promise: five centuries, and a reception that turned sharply in the nineteenth. The open questions have not closed. What was the panel for, and where did it stand? Is it an image of the full reality of the death, an image of doubt, or both? Are the open eyes and mouth a painter’s observation or a theological statement? Does the discolouration mark decomposition begun, against the doctrine that the holy one does not see corruption? How far does the Reformation in Basel bear on it? Dostoevsky made it a crux of The Idiot; Kristeva read it in Black Sun (1987) as the image of melancholy and of a death that cannot be symbolised. Held below the top because the surface is small in incident: the depth is in the questions.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Force and reach are scored together, in the field of German and Swiss painting of the 1520s. The intrinsic force is high: the panel takes the dead Christ to a limit no later painter went past, a religious image made almost wholly of physical fact. Reach within painting is narrow. The Reformation closed the altarpiece in Basel within the decade, Holbein’s own career turned to the portrait, no school followed, and its descendants in painting cannot be named with confidence. Delayed reach is credited and discounted, and reach through another medium is real but does not redirect its own field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Dostoevsky, who made it a crux of a novel; Kristeva’s psychoanalytic reading; and its standing as the founding image of the dead body seen without consolation.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five centuries. Form: whole. Body, slab, lid and inscription are legible, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: in the Amerbach Cabinet in the sixteenth century, bought with it by the city of Basel in 1661, and shown publicly there since, in one of the oldest public collections in Europe; it survived the iconoclasm of its own city within the decade of its making and has been in view ever since. Its fame grew late, and fame lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: the ordinary history of a panel of its age, cleaning, varnish and repair, with no loss known that touches the form. It stands level with Mantegna’s Lamentation (9.3).

Score: 9.3 / 10

Judged as command of oil on panel, and the making is load-bearing: the meaning is the exactness. The anatomy is drawn with a precision no contemporary north of the Alps surpassed: the stretched neck, the ribs, the lean belly, the knees, the feet stiffened in death. The flesh moves through greys, yellows and greens from a torso still nearly living to the darkened hands, face and feet, decay painted as a gradient, not a symbol. Hair, beard and teeth are rendered strand by strand without losing mass; the sheet’s softness is set against the stone; the niche, seen from below, is exact, and the hand over the edge breaches the picture plane by calculation. The costs: the colour is deliberately narrow, and the panel never asks for a crowd, a landscape or many lights.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the open face, eyes and mouth still holding the last moment of life, and the stiff feet at the other end, already a thing. One law governs both: the body is a fact, and everything in the field is painted at the same pitch of fact, stone, sheet, flesh, wound and hair, with no element exempt and none raised to symbol. The light obeys it too, falling along the body as it would in a cell; nothing glows. The inscription is the one element of another order, words in a picture that otherwise says nothing, and it is held to the law by being painted as a thing in the niche. The range is narrow, and narrowness is not coherence: a law kept without breach over a small territory.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The orders held: the body and its death; the sacred, in the claim that this corpse is God; nature, as the process of decay begun in the extremities; history, in the inscription and in the execution behind the wounds; and the viewer’s own mortality, set at the measure of the viewer’s body. They are integrated, joined by the format in one length. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no other person, no family, no labour, no state except as the sentence behind the wounds, no landscape, no consciousness but an extinguished one. It is one dead man in a box, and the figure describes the form: below The Ambassadors (8.4), which holds two men, the sciences, the arts, the church and death.

Score: 6.6 / 10