George Pattison: Human, all-too human? Anastasia Filippovna’s ‘Portrait of Christ’
NB: I dedicate this post to the memory of Fr Stan Swamy, S.J., (1937-2021), presumed guilty before trial, denied bail and who died in the custody of the state. Rest in Peace Fr Stan. Nothing you did was in vain, nothing forgotten. DS
Christ’s depiction in Dostoevsky’s novel ‘The Idiot’ creates layered religious, historiographical and artistic readings. Much of The Idiot was written while Dostoevsky and his wife were living in Florence, just a stone’s throw away from the Pitti Palace, where the writer often went to see and to admire the paintings that adorned its walls, singling out Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola for special mention. It is very probably no coincidence that visual images play a prominent role in The Idiot.
Later, he is confronted with an image of a very
different kind - Hans Holbein’s 1520-22 painting of the dead Christ, shown with
unflinching realism and reportedly using the body of a suicide as model. It is
a Christ stripped of the beauty that bourgeois taste regarded as an essential
attribute of his humanity and, in its unambiguous, mortality, devoid also of
divinity. On first seeing it, Myshkin comments that a man could lose his faith
looking at such a picture and, later, the despairing young nihilist, Hippolit,
declares that just this picture reveals Christ’s powerlessness in face of the
impersonal forces of nature and the necessity of death that awaits every living
being. It is, Hippolit suggests, an image that renders faith in resurrection
impossible…
These two images can be seen as
establishing the visual parameters for a complex interplay of the themes of
beauty, death, and divinity that run through the novel as a whole and that go a
long way to structuring the conceptual — and religious — drama at its heart.
This drama is also, crucially, at the centre of then contemporary European
debate about Christ and about the representation of Christ. But these are not
the only images that contribute to Dostoevsky’s take on that debate…
https://www.eurozine.com/human-all-too-human/
The
Judiciary is the Defence of the Innocent. Or so we thought...
Father
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WANTED:
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