"The Dead Christ", 16" x 72", oil on canvas, 2015
My latest painting, "The Dead Christ" is, obviously, an homage to the great Hans Holbein the Younger painting, "Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb", oil and tempera on panel, 12" x 79", 1521-1522.
Holbein (active 1519 - 1543) is a Northern High Renaissance master of German descent, known primarily as the court painter of Henry VIII of England . Henry is the originator of the Church of England and Episcopalianism. Holbein is the portrait painter of renown of Henry and the many wives and challengers (Sir Thomas Moore) he beheaded.
Holbein is the greatest humanist of the humanist Renaissance period, roughly 1350 - 1550 A.D., because his paintings and drawings represent the deepest insight into the human psyche through intense visual scrutiny. Holbein is a precursor of the Realist movement of the 19th century which includes Frenchmen Gustave Courbet, Eduoard Manet, and Edgar Degas, and American Thomas Eakins, all of whom are followers of Holbein's uncompromising investigation into the essential visual truths of his subjects.
Holbein's dead Christ is dead: he depicts the reality of death in the same way that Courbet depicts the reality of a death in "A Burial at Ornans". While Courbet represented the response to death, in Holbein, this is rigor mortis: not someone who is expected to raise in 3 days. Holbein is protestant, removing all the glorious rapture and spiritual metaphor of Roman Catholic death. Holbein shows us what happens to our bodies when we die: this is what, as a Realist concerned with what the reality of our existence on earth looks like, I respond to.
But my dead Christ is not about death - he is obviously alive. But, lying on a table on a white sheet, he is in a dead pose in a death environment; mortuary or necropsy.
Could it be about sacrifice? Not divine Jesus-type sacrifice but day-to-day human-type sacrifice? This is a guy puting himself (maybe not voluntarily) in the pose and environment of ultimate sacrifice, sacrificing one's self for the greater good of community, family, humanity. I've always said my work is about the reality of being a young man (even as I am not so anymore).
Both painted environments are claustrophobic. The Holbein environment is meant to suggest a coffin. Mine, utilizing a Sienese brocade drapery device borrowed from a 1450 painting by Giovanni di Paolo, "Coronation of the Virgin", represents a place that is other-worldly, not constrictive, an environment somewhere between the limitations of earth and the realm of redemption.
Holbein is the greatest humanist of the humanist Renaissance period, roughly 1350 - 1550 A.D., because his paintings and drawings represent the deepest insight into the human psyche through intense visual scrutiny. Holbein is a precursor of the Realist movement of the 19th century which includes Frenchmen Gustave Courbet, Eduoard Manet, and Edgar Degas, and American Thomas Eakins, all of whom are followers of Holbein's uncompromising investigation into the essential visual truths of his subjects.
Holbein's dead Christ is dead: he depicts the reality of death in the same way that Courbet depicts the reality of a death in "A Burial at Ornans". While Courbet represented the response to death, in Holbein, this is rigor mortis: not someone who is expected to raise in 3 days. Holbein is protestant, removing all the glorious rapture and spiritual metaphor of Roman Catholic death. Holbein shows us what happens to our bodies when we die: this is what, as a Realist concerned with what the reality of our existence on earth looks like, I respond to.
But my dead Christ is not about death - he is obviously alive. But, lying on a table on a white sheet, he is in a dead pose in a death environment; mortuary or necropsy.
Could it be about sacrifice? Not divine Jesus-type sacrifice but day-to-day human-type sacrifice? This is a guy puting himself (maybe not voluntarily) in the pose and environment of ultimate sacrifice, sacrificing one's self for the greater good of community, family, humanity. I've always said my work is about the reality of being a young man (even as I am not so anymore).
Both painted environments are claustrophobic. The Holbein environment is meant to suggest a coffin. Mine, utilizing a Sienese brocade drapery device borrowed from a 1450 painting by Giovanni di Paolo, "Coronation of the Virgin", represents a place that is other-worldly, not constrictive, an environment somewhere between the limitations of earth and the realm of redemption.