Le Christ mort et les anges

Manet sent this to the Paris Salon of 1864, where it drew heavy fire. He painted the dead Christ not as a serene devotional figure but as a real corpse, pale and slack, held up by two mourning angels. Critics pounced on the spear wound, which Manet had placed on the left side of the body instead of the right, and on the sheer earthy realism of a Saviour who looked like an ordinary dead man. To anchor the scene he had a line from the Gospel of John painted onto the stone at the lower left. It names the moment just before the resurrection, when the body still lies in the tomb.