Dreadful Terror

Fyodor Dostoyevsky had a lot to worry about during his travels through Switzerland in August 1867. He was on the run from creditors in Russia, suffering frequent epileptic seizures, was newly married, had lost at roulette most of what money he and his new wife had, and was adrift in a country he found “dishonest, vile, incredibly stupid, and intellectually backwards.” Yet still, a day at the museum could transcend it all, and an encounter with an unusual painting would put his work back on track.

Years later, his wife, Anna Grigoryevna, recalled the couple’s fateful trip to an art museum in Basel where the novelist was struck by Hans Holbein’s 1521 painting, The Body of the Christ in the Tomb, which shows a graphic image of the Savior as a very mortal corpse. Anna wrote that the image filled her with such “disgust and horror” she was afraid to even be in the room with it.

“Fedya, however, was enraptured,” she wrote in her memoirs. “And wishing to see it more closely, he climbed on a chair, so that I was in great fear that he would have to pay a fine, because here one has to pay a fine all the time.”

She was also afraid she recognized the look on his face just before his seizures, and urged him to sit down for a bit. But Dostoyevsky couldn’t let it go, returning to the gallery to spend more time in front of the painting. The gears had begun to churn, and the painting would figure as an important part of his third novel, The Idiot, as an embodiment of the crisis of Christian faith he wanted to explore.

Today, Holbein’s painting retains its power as a work that defies every convention artists followed to depict the Crucifixion. There is none of the noble suffering before his death, nor the glorious resurrection three days later. It is an image of a solitary, emaciated body, eyes and mouth caught open, hands twisted in agony with the wounds in plain sight. It suggests nothing but the grim reality of a torture victim whose lifeless body is beginning to putrefy.

It is an important part of the Kunstmuseum Basel’s collection, an example of Northern Renaissance humanism that still has the power to stop visitors in their tracks.

“Everyone sees this painting and takes a second look, because it is so unusual,” said Gabriel Dette, an assistant curator at the museum. And, beginning last summer, a small exhibit opened that commemorates Dostoyevsky’s encounter with the painting, to celebrate its 500th anniversary and the author’s 200th.

The exhibit explores the context in which the painting was created, possibly as a commission for a family cenotaph by Bonifacius Amerbach, a scholar from a wealthy family of printers. Basel was a bustling commercial center at the time, and already becoming an important center of learning, attracting major thinkers like Erasmus of Rotterdam, who lived there on and off and was friends with Amerbach.

Erasmus was very interested in thinking through the historical roots of Christianity as a means of accessing a higher spiritual truth beyond the ritual pomp and often corrupt worldliness of the Catholic Church, the kind of ideas that would also gather and be pushed to further extremes by the Reformation. Records show Amerbach was also thinking along these lines. He had checked out a popular travelogue of the Holy Land from a city library on December 16, 1521, and X-ray analysis of the painting shows that Holbein, mostly likely under direct instruction from his client, had revised it to make it even more historically accurate, as well as foreboding and claustrophobic.

The painting remained in the Amerbach family until 1661, when it was part of a collection purchased by the city that became the core of one of the world’s first public art museums. By the time of the Dostoyevsky’s visit in August 1867, the museum was housed on the upper floor of a building in the city’s old center, in what is now the Natural History Museum (the Kunstmuseum moved to its own home a short walk away in 1936).

Photos from about that time show a different kind of museum – paintings were crammed on the walls, with the Dead Christ positioned just above Holbein’s portrait of his wife and children. And it wasn’t the only painting that made an impression on the novelist: also mentioned in The Idiot are “The Beheading of St. John the Baptist,” by Hans Fries, and another painting of the Madonna that was believed to have been by Holbein, but is now believed to
be a copy.

But in the novel, it is the Dead Christ that becomes an important tool. The first appearance comes when Prince Myskhkin, the trusting and innocent young hero, visits the dark and obsessive Rogozhin at his home and spots a copy of the painting on this wall. Myshkin explains he has seen it in person, as he had just returned to St. Petersburg from a sanitorium in Switzerland, where he had lived. “A man’s faith could be ruined by looking at that picture!” he exclaims.

It then appears later on, when the terminally ill intellectual Ippolit, whose misfortune has turned him into a cynic and nihilist, discusses it at length in his presumptive suicide note. He ponders the painting as proof of the hopelessness of existence in the face of nature’s unrelenting cruelty, and considers the “dreadful terror” Christ’s followers must have felt before the reality of such a scene. “How could they have gazed upon this dreadful sight and yet believed that He would rise again?”

Whether Dostoyevsky knew the original context of the painting, he clearly understood its power to cut straight to the point as a tool for his characters’ journeys. It fit perfectly in his ongoing project of exploring extreme questions of Christian faith, and feeling one’s way through them.