“In August 1867, travelling from Baden to Geneva, Dostoevsky and his wife Anna stopped in Basel to see Holbein’s ‘Dead Christ,’ which the writer had heard about. In her memoirs, Anna tells of how the painting’s vision so struck Fyodor that he could not tear himself away from it. He stood stock-still looking at it and when his wife, who had left the room, disturbed by the realistic representation of the corpse, returned to his side twenty minutes later, she found him riven before the canvas: ‘On his agitated face was the sort of frightened expression I had often noted during the first moments of an epileptic seizure.’ Some pages later, she remembers having heard her husband say that in front of the painting one could lose one’s faith.”
