I looked up Dead Christ in the Tomb, and I’m entirely with Anna

In 1867 the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and his second wife. Anna, honeymooned in Basel. There, in the city’s Kunstmuseum, the newlyweds saw a painting that made a big impression on them both. Anna, who was pregnant, could hardly bear to look at it. But Fyodor was so transfixed that his wife, observing that “his agitated face had a kind of dread in it”, eventually led him away.

The painting that had such a “crushing impact” on Dostoevsky (who went on to write about it in his novel The Idiot) was Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ in the Tomb a lifesize depiction of Christ’s battered

By Katherine Harvey in last Saturday’s Times