The Dead Body of Christ

By 1779 Johann Melchior Wyrsch had lived for more than a decade in Besançon, in the French Franche-Comté, painting the portraits its magistrates and merchants wanted of themselves. This work shows the other side of that trade. Alongside the portraits he supplied altarpieces to churches in the region and in his native central Switzerland, and here he lays out the dead body of Christ full length across a wide horizontal canvas, 88 centimetres high and 112 across. The same sober, close attention he gave a living sitter is turned on a corpse. He signed and dated it plainly in the lower left corner, Wyrsch f. 1779, exactly as he signed his portraits. Today it hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel.