Cristo en el desierto

Kramskoi painted this in 1872, at a moment when Russian artists were breaking from academic religious painting toward something plainer and more human. He shows Christ not glorified but exhausted, sitting on cold grey stones in a stony wilderness at first light, hands locked together, sunk in thought. There is no halo, no radiance, none of the usual signals of the divine. Kramskoi said openly that for him this was a picture of a man facing a hard moral choice alone, and he meant it to speak to his own generation about duty and conscience. The reactionary press attacked him for stripping Christ of his holiness. Others took it as a call to act. Pavel Tretyakov, the merchant collector, bought it the year it was painted, and Tolstoy, seeing it, wrote that it was the best Christ he knew. The dawn behind the figure has only just begun to lighten the horizon.