Holbein’s “The Dead Christ” Symbol Analysis

Hans Holbein’s painting referred to as The Dead Christ in the novel (the full title of the real painting, which was completed around 1520-22, is The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb) represents atheism and the Christian struggle to maintain faith. When Myshkin goes to Rogozhin’s dark and gloomy house, he sees a copy of the painting, and exclaims that a person could lose their Christian faith from looking at it. Rogozhin replies that this is indeed what has happened—indicating that he, like several other characters in the novel, is an atheist. Later, another atheist, Ippolit, describes seeing Rogozhin’s copy of the painting, and gives a long speech (part of his “Necessary Explanation”) about why it is significant. He points out that usually, when painters portray the dead Christ, they still try to make him look slightly beautiful, even as they also depict his wounds and deprivation. Yet in the Holbein painting, Christ looks like a real corpse: skeletal and rotting. Ippolit says that if this is what Jesus’s followers really saw after he was taken down from the cross, they would not be able to believe in the resurrection.

In a sense, Holbein’s The Dead Christ could be interpreted to represent atheism. The fact that the painting is hung in the gloomy house of the immoral, atheistic character Rogozhin immediately indicates this, as does the fact that Ippolit takes it up in his speech about nihilism. The painting poses the idea that Jesus was not in fact the son of God, but just a man, and that he had an extraordinarily brutal death for no reason at all. At the same time, Myshkin’s fascination with the painting perhaps suggests that what it represents is not necessarily atheism, but the Christian struggle for belief. Christians must confront the fact that Jesus was indeed a man and that he suffered terribly during the passion and crucifixion. Indeed, gazing at the disturbing image of Christ’s dead body in the Holbein painting might precisely enable this confrontation. A significant challenge of the Christian faith is to reconcile the reality of Jesus’s human suffering with the belief that he was also the Son of God, and that his suffering redeemed humanity. In this sense, the possibility of atheism is always lurking within the Christian struggle for belief, a paradox that is explored through the novel’s depiction of the Holbein painting.