The Dead Christ with Angels

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The Dead Christ with Angels: Edouard Manet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Edouard Manet Oil Painting - The Dead Christ with Angels

Keywords: Dead, Christ, Angels

Work Overview: The Dead Christ with Angels
Edouard Manet
Date: 1864; Paris, France *
Style: Realism
Genre: religious painting
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 70 5/8 x 59 in. (179.4 x 149.9 cm)
Location: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), New York City, NY, US

Manet identified the source for this painting, the first of several religious scenes, in the inscription on the rock: the Gospel according to Saint John. However, in the passage cited, Christ’s tomb is empty except for two angels. After Manet sent the canvas to the 1864 Salon, he realized that he had made an even greater departure from the text, depicting Christ’s wound on the wrong side. Despite Charles Baudelaire’s warning that he would "give the malicious something to laugh at," the artist did not correct his mistake. Critics indeed denounced the picture, particularly the realism of Christ’s cadaverous body.

The Dead Christ with Angels, 1864 is one of the rare religious paintings by Manet and also one of the few produced in his period. Although he did not attach much importance to the subject of his paintings, Manet one day remarked to Antonin Proust, "There is one thing that I have always wanted to do, and that is to paint a crucifixion. Christ on the cross - what a wonderful symbol! You can go on searching until the end of time, but you will never find anything like it."

We do not know of any crucifixion by Manet, but he did paint this scene of Christ mourned by angels and also a Christ Scourged. The picture is painted in a somber tonality of funereal blacks and whites, set off, in the Spanish manner, by browns and blues.

"By the way," wrote Baudelaire to Manet when the picture was to be exhibited in April 1864, "it seems that the spear was driven into the right side. (Manet had painted the wound on the left.) You will have to change the place of the wound before the opening. Look it up in the Gospels and don't have malicious people making fun of you."

There was no lack, however, of malicious tongues to say that the painting was a pastiche of Francisco Goya and El Greco. Manet was accused of painting "dirt." Even Theophile Gautier wrote in Le Moniteur of June 25 that "in this figure of Christ the pallor of death is smudged by dirty black shadows."

But a new champion of Manet, Emile Zola, was particularly attracted by this work, in which he found more death than life. "Were are told that this Christ is not a Christ," he wrote in La Revue du XIXe siecle, "and I admit that may be so. As far as I am concerned it is a corpse, painted boldly and vigorously, with the light full on it. I even like the angels in the background - children with great blue wings."

The Dead Christ and the Angels was exhibited at the Salon of 1864 along with Incident in a Bullfight, which Manet later cut down to produce The Dead Toreador . These are the only two paintings on the subject of violent death Manet made prior to the Execution of Maximilian series. They were both completed during the period of the French intervention in Mexico and may contain veiled allusions to it. It is known that Manet began The Dead Christ and the Angels no sooner than November 1863, one month after Napoleon III began his campaign to place Maximilian on the Mexican throne.

This painting refers to a Biblical story in which Mary Magdalen, having been told that the body of the crucified Christ is missing, looks into his tomb and sees two angels sitting where His body once lay. She then turns to see the resurrected Christ standing behind her. Contrary to this narrative, Manet chose to portray Christ inside the tomb and in a liminal state between death and life, much as he pictured Maximilian calm and motionless in the final instant before he fell to the ground. In fact, newspaper reports of Maximilian’s death claimed that he likened the sacrifice of his own life to that of Christ.

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