In The Idiot, Holbein’s painting takes centre stage in discovering the moral and spiritual values of three characters: Rogozhin, Ippolit, and prince Myshkin. They were not the only ones distressed by the sight of Christ’s dead body; Dostoevsky himself was also greatly disturbed when viewing the painting in Basel. It depicts a brutally tortured Jesus, yielded by Death and stripped of his divinity. The aim of my thesis is to highlight several aspects through which the scene can be interpreted, as well as place a great deal of importance on the analysis of the canonical texts regarding Christ’s death and its comparison to select apocryphical segments of the Acts of John, characterised by Docetic thought. From its inception, the traditional Christian community had distanced itself from the narrative that Christ’s suffering was merely an illusion; Holbein and Dostoevsky similarly shun this message while examining the scene happening in the stony tomb. Both of them drift away from the Catholic iconography and display the corpse through a Reformist (in Holbein’s case) or a Russian Orthodox lens (as done by Dostoevsky).
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