Il corpo di Cristo morto nel sepolcro

Holbein painted this in Basel around 1521, and it breaks almost every rule of how a dead Christ was supposed to look. The panel is long and shallow, roughly the width of a real coffin, so the body lies stretched out at your eye level like something laid in an actual tomb. There is nothing idealised about it. The flesh has started to go green, the mouth and eyes hang open, the wounded hand and feet are those of a man three days dead, with no glow of the divine anywhere. More than three centuries later Dostoevsky stood in front of it in Basel on his honeymoon and was so shaken his wife feared he would have a fit. He gave the painting to a character in his novel The Idiot, who says a picture like this could make a man lose his faith. It still hangs in the same city, in the Basel art museum.