IN AUGUST 1867, AN AGITATED
museumgoer in Basel
climbed onto a chair to have a closer look at a paining. His wife, already
alarmed by the effect the work was exerting on her susceptible husband, worried
about a possible fine. She disengaged him from the picture and soothed his
nerves in a neighboring room. The painting, Hans Holbein the Younger’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1512, is a life-size depletion of a
supine, nearly naked corpse In a long, narrow box. The
right eye slaps up behind the eyelid the mouth gapes. The right hand is
elegantly flexed but pierced and discolored. The Russian visitor of 1867, a
novelist, did not soon forget his ordeal. He later transferred his horror to
the character of Ippolit Terentyev
in The Idiot; after seeing a picture
very like the Dead Christ, Terentyev wonders whether any faith can defy the Implacable
laws of nature-nature, which has wrung the life out of the holy man’s body.
Could the apostles who saw this body, the novel asks, have believed that it
would rise again? Face-to-face with Holbein’s painting, Dostoevsky doubted the
reality of the Resurrection.
In 2006 the bipolar career
of Holbein (1497/98-1543) will unfold across a pair of linked exhibitions In the two cities In which he spent much of his life, Basel and London.
The Dead Christ will be the cynosure of this spring’s show at the Kunstmuseum
Basel, which addresses Holbein’s complex response to Protestantism, the
theological revolution whose hostility to cult Images threatened the livelihood
of every religious painter. Holbein panted his forensic report on the corpse of
Christ in the very first years of Martin Luther’s Reformation. It soon became
clear that there was little future for an artist in radically iconophobic Basel. Holbein, the
well-connected son of a famous painter, set off on (us travels armed with a
letter of recommendation from the titanic scholar Erasmus, seeking employment
in France and the Low Countries before finding work In London painting
portraits of royal courtiers.
In 1532, Holbein, at that
point the most gifted painter ever to have set foot on British soil, settled
more or less permanently in England.
By 1537 he had won a salaried position at the English court. Henry VIII, an
aggressive Protestant, was no less hostile to traditional religious art than
the Swiss preachers had been, but he also loved fine things and required
propaganda. The artist’s London period is the
subject of the year’s second major exhibition, “Holbein in England,” at Tate Britain.
The Basel show reveals a brilliant pamper, draughtsman, and printmaker with pan-European
ambitions. Until the Reformation shut him down, Holbein had been poised to bring German art into a
new era. He was young, a whole generation younger than Albrecht Durer, a near-contemporary of the Mannerists Pontormo and
Parmigianino. Until the Reformation struck, he had no reason to believe, any
more than did Michelangelo, that the highest ambitions of art were incompatible
with the true religion.
During his travels in the
1520s he made tangential contact with the works of the Italians-for example,
the drawings and paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, who had
died in France
in 1519. His alluring painting Laïs of
Corinth, 1526, depicting the courtesan and lover of the ancient Greek
painter Apelles, expresses all the ambivalence of an
artist newly released into a free market of art. Laïs is the successful court
painter’s prize, but at the same time she is a constant reminder that beauty,
once the Image of the divine Itself, is now a mere
commodity. The London years were dominated by portraits of real people-preening
German merchants, swell amidst the tokens of their prosperity; courtiers,
cunning and close; the monarch himself, corpulent, unfathomable; his luckless
wives—a long series of Jobs that seemingly afforded little room for artistic
maneuvering. Holbein also designed allegorical mural paintings and decorated
Henry’s palaces, but little of this work survives. The exhibition at Tate Britain next
fall will be very much about these portraits. It is tempting (unless you are
English) to see Holbein’s Tudor servitude as the tragic curtailment of a
powerful talent.
But to see it that way-to
read this year’s sequence of exhibitions as a story of loss-would be to misunderstand the
artist. For wasn’t portraiture, after all, Holbein’s essential project? Isn’t
that what Dostoevsky grasped-the critical force of neutral description?
When the human face is
fixed, Immobilized, In paint, when It is disengaged
from time by a frame, it takes on an infinite, Inscrutable density. The
Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck, a century before Holbein, learned this from
the Byzantine icon. He then transferred the rhetoric of the sacred portrait to
his portraits of mortals. The painted face hypnotizes. In re-creating his human
subjects as sacred icons, Holbein was only repeating van Eyck’s experiment. He
found a way to extend the project of sacred painting under the radar of
Protestant iconophobia. He set “trap[s] for the gaze,” as Jacques Lacan put it
in his famous discussion (in “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”)
of Holbein’s Ambassadors, 1533, the
double portrait mystically marred by an anamorphically distorted skull.
Holbein’s painting
equalized the human and the divine. His courtier is permanently present, his Christ is subject to the laws of physics. The
two meet chiasmically in his art. When Dostoevsky encountered Holbein, he was
seized by what we would call gnostic doubt: The painting, for a moment,
disclosed the Resurrection as a mere hallucination and Christ as a man who really died, who once lay putrefying in
a sarcophagus. But at the same time-and this was almost harder to accept-the
painting offered Christ as a man who really
lives, in the prosthetic imagination of painting. Historical art was not providing
what the provincial Dostoevsky had unthinkingly come to expect from it-namely,
the beautiful image of Christ as the symbol of his divinity. Not Christ, but
the ardent panel painting itself had risen from the
dead and rattled his faith. “from the vault,”
indeed!
CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD IS
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY OF ART AT YALE
UNIVERSITY.