3a2a) The painting is especially notable for [...] the fact that Christ's face, hands and feet, as well as the wounds in his torso, are depicted as realistic dead flesh in the early stages of putrefaction. His body is shown as long and emaciated while eyes and mouth are left open.
3a2b) The panel has attracted fascination and praise since it was created. The Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky was captivated by the work. In 1867, his wife had to drag him away from the panel lest its grip on him induce an epileptic fit. Dostoevsky saw in Holbein an impulse similar to one of his own main literary preoccupations: the pious desire to confront Christian faith with everything that negated it, in this case the laws of nature and the stark reality of death. In his 1869 novel The Idiot, the character Prince Myshkin, having viewed a copy of the painting in the home of Rogozhin, declares that it has the power to make the viewer lose his faith. The character of Ippolit Terentyev, an articulate exponent of atheism and nihilism who is himself near death, engages in a long philosophical discussion of the painting, claiming that it demonstrates the victory of 'blind nature' over everything, including even the most perfect and beautiful of beings.
3a3a) There are only two really priceless pictures in the whole Museum, one of them being the Dead Savior, a marvelous work that horrified me, and so deeply impressed Feodor that he pronounced Holbein the Younger a painter and creator of the first rank… [T]he whole form [of Christ] is emaciated, the ribs and bones plain to see, hands and feet riddled with wounds, all blue and swollen, like a corpse on the point of decomposition. The face too is fearfully agonized, the eyes half open still, but with no expression in them, and giving no idea of seeing. Nose, mouth and chin are all blue; the whole thing bears such a strong resemblance to a real dead body… Feodor, nonetheless, was completely carried away by it, and in his desire to look at it closer got on to a chair, so that I was in a terrible state lest he should have to pay a fine, like one is always liable to here.
Anna Dostoevsky
3a3b) When I arose to lock the door after him, I suddenly called to mind a picture I had noticed at Rogozhin’s in one of his gloomiest rooms, over the door. He had pointed it out to me himself as we walked past it, and I believe I must have stood a good five minutes in front of it. There was nothing artistic about it, but the picture made me feel strangely uncomfortable. It represented Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters as a rule represent the Saviour, both on the cross and taken down from it, with great beauty still upon His face. This marvellous beauty they strive to preserve even in His moments of deepest agony and passion. But there was no such beauty in Rogozhin’s picture. This was the presentment of a poor mangled body which had evidently suffered unbearable anguish even before its crucifixion, full of wounds and bruises, marks of the violence of soldiers and people, and of the bitterness of the moment when He had fallen with the cross—all this combined with the anguish of the actual crucifixion.
The face was depicted as though still suffering; as though the body, only just dead, was still almost quivering with agony. The picture was one of pure nature, for the face was not beautified by the artist, but was left as it would naturally be, whosoever the sufferer, after such anguish[…] It is strange to look on this dreadful picture of the mangled corpse of the Saviour, and to put this question to oneself: ‘Supposing that the disciples, the future apostles, the women who had followed Him and stood by the cross, all of whom believed in and worshipped Him—supposing that they saw this tortured body, this face so mangled and bleeding and bruised (and they must have so seen it)—how could they have gazed upon the dreadful sight and yet have believed that He would rise again?’
Dostoevsky – The Idiot
3a3c) Excerpted at Arstor: Dostoevsky and the challenge of Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ
3a4) Two signs tell us that this body is also that of Man made God in order, once again, to pay for the sins of the world. Everyone knows the story. Two signs like as much flesh; two pieces of flesh like as many signs. The navel and the genitals. A protruding navel, a button on the surface of a belly of muscle, no fat – that’s the ascetic ideal for you. It testifies that even if you are born of a virgin, you’re no less of a man for that. (Only Adam should have been born without a navel. Take a look through the history of painting, he always has one.) Navel and genitals: a real membrane of flesh, not a symbolic phallus, not a shadow or a concession, but a true penis normalis – and divine, judging by the size suggested by the fabric.
In this painting, a sign may be read in both directions: Son of God or Son of Man. The hand. At least the sign made by the hand, at the exact point that divides the canvas into two parts – right and left. The middle finger outstretched, the other fingers folded back into the palm. And yet in the West this gesture is currently read as an obscenity. Because this finger is associated with penetration. Of the female genitals, certainly, but also of anything that can be similarly penetrated, even in men. Diogenes was happy enough to use his middle finger to insult Demosthenes.
3a5) Looking in the matrix of lack, fragility, and mystery is the proposition that iconoclastic viewing tenders whenever art and religion intersect. Because perhaps most importantly, fertile absence reminds viewers not to discount quite so quickly the rhetoric of doubt that objects perform in the umbrage of pictorial illusion. In the words of the Cubist Georges Braque, another unapologetic deconstructionist-creator, “Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.”
3a6a) Body Double (1984) Brian De Palma, Director
3a6b) Jake’s kindness does not entirely explain his ability to confront Gloria and go out of his way in helping her. Will isn’t enough for him to act: in the film’s opening scene, he finds himself physically unable to rise from the coffin in which he lays while playing the vampire in a horror-porn film. Unable to even move, he can act as neither an actor or person. He must come to the realization that acting, as pretending, is necessary to survive in Hollywood and the deceptive world at large. After discovering his girlfriend had played the loving fiancé just too well, Jake is literally told that he’s “gotta act” by a ruthless acting coach who purposely confuses the two meanings of the word in a shock psychoanalysis session. To finally become the master of his life and discover the truth about Gloria, Jake needs to combine his kindness with his acting skills.
De Palma’s screenplay, however, complicates Jake’s progression from inaction to action by doubling up on the idea of the world’s illusory nature. Jake wasn’t only deceived when he was a passive man: he is again duped when he starts convincing himself that he can and deserves to have control — that is, when he begins peeping on who he thinks is Gloria Revelle. Voyeurism is itself only an illusory, imaginative form of control, one to which Jake does not give in easily. As Donaggio’s entrancing yet delicate theme, “Telescope,” begins, Jake hesitantly approaches the device and repeatedly looks around as De Palma’s camera remains on him, stressing Jake’s unease with accepting even this moderate form of agency. Yet the deception goes further as the woman he fantasizes over will turn out to be someone else — and, like him, a trained pretender. Lost in this web of illusions, he will not manage to control Gloria and what happens to her.
3a6c) Frankie Goes to Hollywood "Relax" (Body Double version)
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