The Ambassador and the Pharaoh – Excerpt from a Book
The Ambassador and the Pharaoh – Excerpt from a Book

Summary/Abstract: I am standing before this great painting, leaning close as I can over the low cordon, my face all but touching the paint. I am reminded of how Dostoevsky was also afraid of being reprimanded. And that it was also a painting by Holbein that Fyodor Mikhaylovich was beholding. It was 12 August 1867, a muggy summer afternoon at the Basel Gallery. He mounted a chair so as to take a closer look at The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, then just stared at it transfi xed for fi fteen or twenty minutes. “I was worried he would be punished, for everything here carries a punishment”, Dostoevsky’s wife recalls in her memoirs.

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