JEFF GATRALL

                        BETWEEN ICONOCLASM AND SILENCE: 
                        REPRESENTING THE DIVINE IN HOLBEIN AND DOSTOEVSKII

WHILE IN BASEL IN 1867, Dostoevskii encountered Hans Holbein`s 1521 "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb."  An extended ekphrasis on this painting appears soon after during Ippolitīs confession in The Idiot. In his ekphrasis, Ippolit poses the question of whether Christ himself would have mounted the cross had he seen Holbein`s "Dead Christ" on the eve of his crucifixion. In so placing Christ before a portrait of his own corpse, Ippolit penetrates directly to the problem of representing the divine in modernity. In his "Dead Christ," Holbein does not just replicate a canonical icon of Christ, but represents, in an exemplary display of perspectival precision and anatomical detail, an anonymous human corpse. Ippolit accordingly images two Christs, one iconographic, the other realistic--the former, forsaken by God, gazing at the latter, who lies alone in a tomb. Far from anticipating Christ`s response before the image of his dead body double, or from interpreting the painting itself as an expression of atheism, Ippolit is disturbed by the collapse of meaning in Holbein`s "Dead Christ", by the "senseless (bessmyslenno)" destruction of a "priceless being (bestsennoe sushchestvo)." Moving in the narrow space between the biblical source for his "Dead Christ" and the doctrines that images on this subject are supposed to impart to the viewer, Holbein presents a realistic image of the dead Word. 

With his "Dead Christ," Holbein paints at the representational limits of Dostoevskii`s realism. It is in "The Grand Inquisitor," not The Idiot, that Dostoevskii tries his own hand at making an icon of Christ.  Even as Ivan`s "poem [poemka]" partakes of a pre-modern tradition of religious art, in which heavenly beings are brought down to earth, the poem`s iconography remains constrained by the realism of its novelistic frame. Christ appears in 16th-century Seville at the height of the Inquisition, not in his transfigured form, but in the "image of a man (v chelovecheskom obraze)." Yet despite this human form, Ivan draws
Christīs image with words that are nominalistic and reverently non-sensual: rays of "Enlightenment (Prosveshcheniia)" flow from Christ`s eyes, and he walks with a smile of "infinite compassion (beskonechnogo sostradaniia)." By contrast, Ivan portrays the Grand Inquisitor, with his "sunken eyes" (so vpalymi glazami)," in far more painterly terms. Furthermore, in an appropriation of the theological basis for iconography, the Grand Inquisitor declares the appearance of the tempter`s three question to Christ in the wilderness, not the incarnation of the Word, to be the only miracle to have occurred on earth. These three "questions (voprosy)" arise as three "images (obraza)" in which all the "contradictions (protivorechiia)" of human history are rendered incarnate. Through the interplay of such iconographical alchemy and representational constraint, Dostoevskii
traces a labyrinthine web of relations between word and image, and between silence and iconoclasm, in an attempt to construct a realist iconography for modernity. The image of a silent Christ, lit only by a candle in a dark prison cell, shines forth in the cross-fire of the Grand Inquisitor`s word.