The Corpse That Nearly Broke a Novelist's Faith
A narrow wooden panel of a rotting corpse once gripped a great writer so violently his wife feared it would trigger a seizure. What did Hans Holbein paint that could do that to a man?
In a quiet room of the Kunstmuseum Basel hangs a painting unlike almost anything else from its era: a life-size, stretched-out body of Christ lying in his tomb, rendered not as a triumphant symbol of resurrection but as a decaying human corpse. Painted between 1520 and 1522 by the German artist Hans Holbein the Younger, the work measures just 30.5 by 200 centimetres — a long, narrow strip that forces the eye to travel the full length of a body that looks unnaturally thin, greenish, and already touched by putrefaction.
Holbein spared nothing in his realism. Christ's face, hands, and feet are shown as decaying flesh, his eyes and mouth left open rather than peacefully closed. Three wounds mark his body — hand, side, and feet — and art historians Oscar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener have pointed out how his raised middle finger seems to reach toward whoever stands before the painting, while strands of his hair appear almost to break through the paint's surface. Above the body, angels hold instruments of the Passion, and a brushed inscription in Latin reads IESVS·NAZARENVS·REX·IVDÆORVM — Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.
Holbein's fascination with the macabre was not unusual for artists working amid the early Protestant Reformation. His father, Hans Holbein the Elder, had taken him to see Matthias Grünewald's altarpiece at Isenheim, a work designed to stir both guilt and empathy in viewers. The younger Holbein seems to have carried that intention into his own painting, continuing a religious tradition of the 1520s meant to provoke piety through unflinching confrontation with suffering and death.
Why the painting was made remains uncertain. Scholars have proposed it may have served as a predella beneath a larger altarpiece, as a free-standing devotional work, or as an ornament laid over a sepulchre. In 1999, Bätschmann and Griener suggested it might have been designed as the lid of a Holy Tomb structure, meant to be placed directly over a symbolic grave. The painting was commissioned by Bonifacius Amerbach, who himself sat for a Holbein portrait, and it later entered the Amerbach Cabinet, where an old description calls it simply a 'Picture of a dead man by H. Holbein... with the title Iesus Nazarenus rex.'
Legend holds that Holbein modeled the corpse on a body pulled from the Rhine. Whether or not this is true, the sheer conviction of the image suggests an artist determined to make death utterly, uncomfortably believable — no allegory, no softening, just flesh subject to decay like any other flesh.
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