The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb

In a narrow box barely wider than his body, the dead Christ lies stretched full length, alone - the flesh going green at the wounds, the mouth and one eye open, the fingers stiffening - painted with a cold, clinical truth that allows not the faintest hint of the resurrection to come. Holbein, soon to be Henry VIII's court painter, gives us a human corpse and nothing more, pressed almost into our own space by the coffin-like format. Three centuries later Dostoevsky stood before it in Basel and wrote that such a picture could make a man lose his faith. It is the Lamentation stripped of all consolation.