Beeny Manet Morgue PDF

Christ and the Angels : Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting?
Author(s): Emily A. Beeny

Source: Representations , Vol. 122, No. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 51-82
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2013.122.1.51
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EMILY A. BEENY
Christ and the Angels:

Manet, the Morgue, and the
Death of History Painting?
What Manet insisted upon, uncompromisingly, was an end to rhetoric
in painting. What he insisted upon was painting that could rise in utter freedom,
in natural silence.
—Georges Bataille, 1955
Even the most determined enemies of Edouard Manet’s talent admit that he
paints inanimate objects well.
—Emile Zola, 1867
I N THE SPRING OF 1865, when critics converged on the Champs

de Mars for the opening of the annual Salon, they confronted a corpse:
‘‘Under the name Olympia,’’ sneered Victor de Jankovitz, ‘‘the artist shows
us a young girl. . . . The putrid color of her body recalls the horror of the
Morgue.’’ 1 ‘‘[She is] exhibited naked,’’ gasped Victor Fournel, ‘‘like
a cadaver on the slabs of the Morgue.’’2 A critic for Le Monde Illustré scoffed,
‘‘Her body has the livid tint of a cadaver displayed at the Morgue.’’3 Most
tellingly, Paul de Saint-Victor, a writer for La Presse observed, ‘‘The crowd
presses forward, as at the Morgue, before the decaying Olympia.’’4
The note of disdain is familiar, celebrated even. But why a corpse? Why
the Morgue? And what might it have meant to transpose a body from the
Morgue to a salon painting? To twenty-
first-century eyes, the Olympia (fig. 1) is not Many of the images in this article
so strikingly cadaverous. Her body appears can be viewed in color in the online
firm, her bare skin, unmarred. Her eyes, edition of the journal at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/
moreover, are open; her address, notori-
rep.2013.122.3.51.
ously direct. Modern art historians have
a b s t r a c t In 1864, with his Christ and the Angels, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York,
Manet drew an uneasy connection between the Paris salon and the public morgue, replacing the
eloquent, universal body we expect to find in a religious history painting with a silent and particular
corpse of the kind exhibited at the new Morgue of Paris. This replacement marked Manet’s rupture with
the French tradition of religious history painting and signaled the birth of a new aesthetic vision, born at
the Morgue, and defined by Zola as Naturalism. Rep re s en ta t io ns 122. Spring 2013 © The Regents
of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 51–82. All rights
reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University
of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2013.122.1.51. 51

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figure 1. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
accounted in various ways for contemporary critics’ insistence upon

Olympia’s deadness. There is the formalist explanation: Manet’s taches and
touches, the screen of unblended pigment erected between viewer and
representation, prevent us from mistaking Olympia for an actual person
and relegate her to the status of a painted—hence lifeless—thing. Then
there are the Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic explanations: bourgeois
male critics’ apparent anxiety about death in the picture marks the place
of a deeper-seated but inexpressible anxiety about sex and its place in
a commodity economy.5
Compelling as these analyses are, they do not explain away the specific
social institution of the Morgue invoked by no fewer than four critics to
describe Manet’s picture. To understand what the Morgue may have meant
to this original audience, we must look back one year to May 1864, when two
venues for the display of bodies opened in Paris. The first was a spectacular
new morgue building—replete with a great green curtain, plate-glass win-
dow, and modern gas lighting system—in the shadow of the cathedral on
the Ile de la Cité.6 The second was the Salon de peinture at the Palais de
l’Industrie, where Manet showed not one but two corpses—the Dead Toreador
(fig. 2) and Christ and the Angels (fig. 3).7 Although ostensibly quite different
in both content and aspiration, the salon and the Morgue had come, by the
mid-nineteenth century, to exist in a kind of queasy cultural proximity.
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figure 2. Edouard Manet, The Dead Toreador (fragment of Incident in a Bullfight),
c.1864. Oil on canvas. Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC.
Suspended between surveillance and spectacle—that is, between social

control and edification on the one hand and entertainment on the
other—both institutions properly belonged to what Tony Bennett has termed
the ‘‘exhibitionary complex.’’8 Both were government sponsored. Both
figured large in guidebooks to the city. Both were free and open to the
public—at least, in the case of the salon, on Sundays.9 Both were sites for the
troubled social promiscuity associated with modern Paris. Moreover, both
granted visitors a glimpse of bared human flesh under conditions of some-
times doubtful respectability.10
Hence, one is tempted to interpret Manet’s bumper crop of dead bodies
at the Salon of 1864 as a kind of morbid joke on the Morgue’s concurrent
opening. Sheer coincidence seems an insufficient explanation for the com-
mon theme of his submissions; he held a number of completed pictures in
reserve at the time, after all, including the Olympia.11 The artist cannot, in any
case, have been unaware of the new Morgue’s grim vernissage, which was
heralded in newspapers the world over, or of the institution’s significance
for Parisian popular culture. As Adolphe Guillot would write in his 1888 study
of the Morgue, ‘‘Tout le monde connaı̂t la Morgue au moins pour en avoir entendu
parler.’’12 The Dead Toreador, with its horizontally arranged body, shares little
with the theatricality of morgue displays, in which corpses, clad only in leather
aprons, were posed on tilted stone slabs behind a window for frontal view-
ing.13 The Dead Christ, however, with its semirecumbent frontality, ghastly
pallor, stark lighting, and bloated extremities, recalls nothing so much as
a corpse fished from the Seine and stretched, half-naked, on a gaslit slab.
Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 53

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figure 3. Edouard Manet, Christ and the Angels, 1864. Oil on canvas. H. O.
Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The picture bridged an already uncomfortably short distance between

the salon and morgue, suggesting that the same rules of viewing might
apply to both, that a body exhibited at the former might convey no more
meaning than one displayed at the latter. I propose that, by invoking the
morgue in a picture whose subject—of all subjects—should have rendered
word flesh, Manet troubled a French history-painting tradition that
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figure 4. After Carré, Interior View of the Old Morgue at the Place du Marché Neuf,
1845. Pen and ink on paper. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
regarded the depicted body as a site of eloquence, animated by meaning,

conceived as text.
‘‘A Waxwork Without a Catalogue’’:

The Morgue
The open public morgue, as Vanessa Schwartz and Bruno

Bertherat have explained, was a curiosity unique to modern Paris.14 Run
since 1804 by the préfecture de police, the Morgue served a dual function. It was
first of all a location where the bodies of unknown individuals found in the
public domain could be examined and identified by passersby (fig. 4). Free
and open to the public at all hours, the Morgue enlisted ordinary citizens in
police work.15 Demands on the institution grew steadily during the Second
Empire, as Haussman’s building projects brought workers from the coun-
tryside into the city, where they were more susceptible to accidental or

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violent death and likelier to perish among strangers. The years 1860 to 1866
saw an increase in the number of bodies received annually from 380 to
572.16 Since receiving the victims of France’s first railway disaster in 1842,
the Morgue had been closely identified with calamities attendant upon
industrialized life.17 The causes of accidental death (after drowning) listed
in order of frequency among the bodies received at the Morgue during the
1860s were
crushing by carriages, falls from high places, collapses, scaldings, machine explo-
sions and railway accidents, suffocations by coal smoke, harmful effects of gas,
smotherings in crowds, lightning, poisoning, drunkenness, and cold.18
Traffic accidents, industrial explosions, and even suffocation by crowds—

disasters specifically linked to modern urban existence—figure prominently
in the list, and in addition to these hazards, suicide and other self-
destructive behaviors commonly associated with the modern city presented
alternative routes to the Morgue. Of the 2,851 adults received at the Morgue
between 1853 and 1863, almost half were ruled suicides. Their supposed
motives were ranked in order of incidence; their most frequent means were
identified as drowning (1,414), hanging (114), firearms (98), charcoal
fumes (56), jumps from high places (45), knives (16), poison (11), train
tracks (7), and alcohol (4).19 Drowning aside, the majority of these meth-
ods, like the pathologies with which they were associated, were modern
innovations. Morgue bodies were modern bodies.
During the early 1860s, names were matched to roughly three quarters
of the corpses displayed—a rate of success made possible by the vast num-
bers of visitors who flowed through the building each day.20 Of course, most
of these visitors came with no hope of recognizing the bodies on view. Here
we arrive at the institution’s second function; the Morgue was also, as Va-
nessa Schwartz, Anne Higonnet, and others have indicated, a place of enter-
tainment, where those with time and stomach enough might come to gawk
at corpses (fig. 5).21 It was in response to these dual demands that the
préfecture commissioned a new facility from the prix de Rome-winning archi-
tect Félix Gilbert in 1861 (fig. 6a–b). The building, which opened three
years later at a cost of 413,673 francs, was modern, ample, well lit, and well
ventilated. It included autopsy rooms, sanitation facilities, administrative
offices, accommodation for twenty-four-hour surveillance personnel, and
enormous green curtains, which would be drawn across the display room’s
window every time a fresh display of bodies was being installed.22
If the Morgue had been founded to attach names to corpses—texts, that
is, to bodies—it became a beloved civic institution, featured in novels, faits-
divers, and tourists’ guides, for other reasons. As the macabre theatrics of the
curtain suggest, most visitors came not to identify but simply to look (fig. 7).
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figure 5. Illustration of the new Morgue’s interior from Le Monde illustré, August
15, 1886. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Thus, by midcentury, the Morgue had come to stand for a new mode of
regarding bodies—a mode that implied a heterogeneous mass audience;
a mode at once coldly appraising and salacious, forensic and prurient;
a mode that denied expressive agency to the body presented (or repre-
sented).23 Charles Dickens described this new way of looking in his 1863
account of the institution:
There was a little pity, but not much, and that mostly with a selfish touch in
it. . . . There was more of a secretly brooding contemplation and curiosity. . . . There
was a wolfish stare at the object. . . . And there was a much more general, purpose-
less, vacant staring at it—like looking at waxwork, without a catalogue, and not
knowing what to make of it.24

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figure 6a–b. Félix Gilbert, Plan and Elevation of the Morgue, c. 1861. Avery
Architectural Library, Columbia University, New York.
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figure 7. Illustration of the new Morgue’s interior from Le Monde illustré (detail).
In the metaphor of the waxwork without a catalog, Dickens expressed a cru-

cial anxiety about this new form of vision, a suspicion that it drained its
object of meaning, that Morgue-goers did not so much see as vacantly stare,
that no textually defined meaning—no ‘‘catalogue’’ entries—could attach
to the bodies on view. As Guillot would bluntly declare in his 1888 study,
‘‘The spectacle of the Morgue is no better than any other; it accustoms one
to the sight of blood and scorn for human life.’’25 Here was a form of sight
that constituted moral blindness.
The term ‘‘morgue’’ itself derives from a word for a particular way of
looking: ‘‘morguer’’—literally to look down upon. Use of the term ‘‘morgue’’
dates from the late seventeenth century, when the bodies of dead inmates
were first displayed in the courtyard of the Grand Châtelet prison, where
they might be viewed (‘‘morgués’’) from above.26 To visit the Morgue was thus
to look down, to see bodies in an objectifying light, or, as Dickens suggested,
to ‘‘look . . . at something that could not return a look.’’27
To understand the change wrought by Morgue vision on the human
body, James Elkins’s concept of ‘‘thereness’’ is useful. ‘‘Thereness’’ in Elkins’s
formulation occurs when
the body becomes a fact, an object, or even a specimen, that can express itself merely
by being seen. . . . When it seems that the body is merely given, when it is irreducibly
there, it also appears most in need of articulable meaning.28
Whether in an ethnographic lifecast, a mug shot, or the Morgue’s display

window, the body presented as simply ‘‘there’’ is imagined to speak for itself

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but can do so only by taking its place as the object of an established scientific
or legal discourse. The body retains no expressive agency; its mere presence
constitutes its only meaning. ‘‘Thereness’’ throws out the catalog but keeps
the waxwork.
One might reasonably describe both the Olympia and the Dead Christ as
‘‘irreducibly there.’’ The bodies in these paintings are represented with
a frankness Manet’s original viewers might have associated more immedi-
ately with science or entertainment—or the Morgue, which combined the
two—than with high art. I propose that, perhaps as much as his notoriously
frank representation of a prostitute in the Olympia, it was Manet’s apparent
introduction of thereness and the new way of looking conceived at the Mor-
gue into the province of grande peinture that so scandalized his public. Like
a prostitute, a Morgue cadaver confronted its viewer with an unmistakably
modern and eerily inexpressive body; like the maison close, the Morgue
would prove a foundational site (and sight) for modernism.
A Body Without a Text
Given the proliferation of Morgue allusions in reviews of the

Olympia, the absence of any explicit mention of the institution in reference
to the Dead Christ constitutes a curious non-dit. For here, surely is a Morgue
picture. Gray and white dominate the harshly lit scene, in which we confront
Christ’s slack but muscular body in a semirecumbent, frontal pose. A paper-
cutout angel supports his stiff neck and head. A patchy beard covers the
lower portion of his face, though not his lips, which are slightly parted. His
half-lidded eyes appear dull and sightless. The crown of thorns has left
behind a few flecks of blood on his brow. His flesh turns yellow, gray, and
green, with wounds described in layers of crusted black and brown. His feet
are swollen and awkwardly foreshortened, their toes smeared together. His
left hand is missing its thumb. Contemporary critics pointed to his lack of
finger- and toenails as a symptom of the picture’s unfinished state, but this
effect of the non-fini was, of course, a calculated choice.29 Clotted paint,
abrupt foreshortening, and unblended color rupture the wholeness of
Christ’s body, suggesting rough treatment, waterlogging, or decay; the
willful crudeness of Manet’s style materializes the decomposition of
Christ’s flesh. This body is, if nothing else, thoroughly dead.
Despite routine harping on Manet’s lack of finish, the tone of criticism
in 1864 was somewhat milder than what would greet the Olympia—a reflec-
tion of critics’ reluctance to grant the painter another succe`s de scandale of
the kind he had scored the previous year with Luncheon on the Grass at the
Salon des refusés.30 Of course the picture did not go unremarked. Or
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figure 8. Caricature after Manet’s Christ and the Angels in La Vie Parisienne, May 21,
1864. Getty Research Institute.
unridiculed. Edmond About dismissed it as ‘‘a soggy firecracker,’’ while Jules

Castagnary classified it as ‘‘a nightmare.’’31 A caricaturist for La Vie Parisi-
enne portrayed Manet’s Christ as a sagging drunk supported by a winged
waiter (fig. 8). Dismayed by the apparent working-class origins of Christ’s
thick-shouldered body, critics accused Manet of smudging the savior’s face
with lampblack, of painting the ‘‘most beautiful of men’’ as a dead coal
miner—a victim of precisely the sort of industrial accident most likely to
land a body at the Morgue.32 In a particularly snide review, Théophile
Gautier sniffed,
Manet’s [Christ] seems wholly unacquainted with the habit of bathing. The
pallor of death mingles [here] with grimy half tints, with black and dirty sha-
dows that the resurrection will never wash clean, if a cadaver so far gone can be
resurrected at all.33
Christ’s dirtiness, it would seem, more than his deadness, was the issue of
concern. For of course the bare fact of Christ’s deadness did not make the
painting radical. The slumped central figure and basic composition seem to
derive from Paolo Veronese’s Christ with the Virgin and an Angel (fig. 9) or
from seventeenth-century Spanish precedents, such as Francisco Ribalta’s

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figure 9. Paolo Veronese, Christ figure 10. Francisco Ribalta, Dead
with the Virgin and an Angel, Christ with Two Angels,
1582. Oil on canvas. State c. 1615. Oil on canvas.
Hermitage Museum, Saint Museo del Prado,
Petersburg. Madrid.
Dead Christ with Two Angels (fig. 10), a painting then in the Paris collection of
James-Alexandre Pourtalès-Gorgier, another of whose pictures likely inspired
the Dead Toreador.34
Manet’s unflinching approach to Christ’s bodily death also relates the
image to older iconographic types: particularly the recumbent Christ in the
tomb.35 Perhaps the most celebrated example of that subject in the nine-
teenth century, as it remains today, was Hans Holbein’s 1521 painting in
Basel (fig. 11).36 The picture, which plays a sinister role in Fyodor Dostoyev-
sky’s 1868 novel The Idiot, presents Christ as an emaciated corpse, his mouth
agape, his fingers clenched in rigor mortis, his eyes rolled back into their
sockets.37 Naturally, the freak-show vividness of such imagery was not in-
tended simply to titillate; in Leo Steinberg’s famous formulation, ‘‘Realism,
the more penetrating the better,’’ was, in the Renaissance, ‘‘a consecrated
form of worship.’’38 By emphasizing Christ’s literal, physiological suffering
and death, Holbein could underscore the twin miracles of his incarnation
and resurrection. To redeem mankind and be resurrected, Christ had first
to die. Thus, by highlighting Christ’s deadness, Holbein’s picture could
point the way to resurrection and redemption.
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figure 11. Hans Holbein the Younger, Christ in the Tomb, 1521. Oil on panel.
Kunstmuseum, Basel.
figure 12. Philippe de Champaigne, The Dead Christ, before 1654. Oil on canvas.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
But does the starkness of Manet’s portrayal serve a similar purpose?

Could Manet’s Christ be resurrected? The critics were doubtful. In a lone
positive review of the work, Théophile Thoré proposed that the body might
be ‘‘en train de ressusciter’’—just coming to—but most others were less
sanguine, as Gautier’s offhand ‘‘if a cadaver so far gone can be resurrected
at all’’ attests.39 The apparently advanced state of the body’s decomposition,
evident to any frequenter of the Morgue, raised grave questions about
Christ’s eligibility for resurrection. How long had he been waiting in the
tomb?40 And might not a rotting corpse called to life constitute something
closer to ‘‘a nightmare,’’ in Castagnary’s words, than a miracle?
In considering the question of decay and its relationship to resurrection,
another treatment of Christ in the tomb, still more readily accessible to
Manet than Holbein’s, provides an important point of comparison: Philippe
de Champaigne’s mid-seventeenth-century painting of the subject at the
Louvre (fig. 12). Though more graciously posed and proportioned than
Holbein’s gaunt cadaver, Champaigne’s Christ nonetheless verges on
decomposition—his face livid, his flesh torn and punctured, his fingers and
toes faintly purple. He lies on a blood-soaked shroud atop a stone into which
are carved two verses from Romans (6:3–4): ‘‘Quicumque baptizati sumus in

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Christo Jesu, in morte ipsius baptizati sumus. Consepulti enim sumus cum
illo per baptismum in mortem’’ (Know ye not, that so many of us as were
baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are
buried with him by baptism into death).41
The inscription stops short of the verse’s great promise—‘‘ut quomodo
surrexit Christus a mortuis per gloriam Patris ita et nos in novitate vitae
ambulemus’’ (that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory
of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life)—encouraging
contemplation of Christ’s bodily death rather than anticipation of the
believer’s resurrection. It is a somber picture, made more somber still by
the truncated verse; yet knowing how the passage concludes, anticipating
the ‘‘ut’’ that must follow ‘‘mortem’’ leads the devout viewer to read salvific
significance into the body’s very deadness. Champaigne’s perfect accord
between word and image animates Christ’s corpse with scriptural meaning,
binding the picture so firmly to its textual source that no room remains for
the kind of doubt that crept in around Holbein’s painting in the later nine-
teenth century. A founding member of the Royal Academy, Champaigne
was perhaps its most ardent believer in textual fidelity as the moral core of
history painting. The painter’s obligation to his written source was, of
course, all the stronger when the text concerned was sacred.42 Cham-
paigne’s picture vividly attests that in the academy’s beginning was the word.
What, then, of Manet’s painting, which violently disrupts the relation-
ship between word and image? If the dirtiness and decay of the body
alarmed many viewers, close inspection of the picture’s biblical inscription
raised still graver questions about the possibility of this Christ’s resurrection.
Written on a rock in the right foreground (fig. 13), the inscription calls our
attention to the Gospel of John (20:12).43 This passage describes the
moment when Mary Magdalene returns to Christ’s tomb to find his body
gone, ‘‘And [she] seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and
the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.’’ So how do we
interpret Manet’s imagining of the scene, in which Christ’s body remains
stubbornly behind, unresurrected? In pointed contrast to Champaigne’s
picture, Manet’s fails to illustrate the biblical passage cited, defying its text
through the unexplained insertion of a corpse where one least belongs.
Christ is simply there, inert, illegible. Like the nameless cadavers awaiting
recognition at the Morgue, his is a body in search of a text.
A Christian Painting?
Contemporary critics and modern art historians alike have tried

in vain to decipher from the painting Manet’s intended stance on the
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figure 13. Manet, Christ and the Angels (detail).
question of resurrection—and, by extension, on religious belief itself. In

a letter to Philippe de Chennevières requesting favorable placement for
Manet’s work at the 1864 Salon, Charles Baudelaire identified the picture
as ‘‘a Christ awakening accompanied by the angels.’’44 But his letter may or
may not grant us access to Manet’s own intentions for the subject. The
painter, after all, went on to disregard his friend’s advice as to the placement
of Christ’s wound; their views on the painting do not seem to have been
entirely congruent.45 Nevertheless, a contingent of modern art historians
has lined up behind Baudelaire with degrees of confidence ranging from
Michael Fried’s assurance that Christ is ‘‘just now quickening’’ to Dolores
Mitchell’s more hesitant suggestion that the body’s limpness ‘‘foreshadow[s]
resurrection.’’46 Other scholars have embraced the tradition of Gautier,
insisting on Christ’s irreversible mortality, albeit for reasons quite distinct
from Gautier’s sarcastic sanitary concerns. Anne Coffin Hanson has asserted
that Christ’s lingering corpse amounts to a straightforward declaration of
nonbelief. Pointing to circumstantial evidence of Manet’s laicism (princi-
pally the republican credentials of the artist and his brother), Philip Nord
has coolly founded his case for the artist’s supposed antireligious views on
the slippery painting itself.47
The confusion these differing views indicate is, in any event, no acci-
dent. The formal content of the picture itself carefully withholds any

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definite answers.48 It is not, after all, impossible that the corpse is about to
open its eyes and walk away; such is the nature of miracles. But nor do we
have a clear indication that one is about to occur. The angels, for all their
brilliant, rushing plumage, remain flat and unconvincing, no match for the
dead weight of Christ’s body. The faint halo, rendered with a streak of
mustard-colored paint, strikes a profoundly ambiguous note—is it a mark
of reverence or of irony?49 The interpretive text each successive critic or art
historian has supplied is less a resolution than a projection, a protest against
the body’s resolute silence, its refusal not only to articulate the scriptural
passage cited but to communicate anything at all beyond its own presence.
If the disconnect between inscription and image leaves us hard-pressed
to interpret the Dead Christ as a straightforward devotional picture, we
encounter no less difficulty in claiming that Manet painted it simply to
disenchant its theme. As Stéphane Guégan has lately pointed out, the pain-
ter’s supposedly adamant secularism is something of a twentieth-century idée
reçue.50 His decade-long engagement with Christological themes and his
enduring friendship with the abbé Auguste Hurel, vicar of Saint-Philippe-
du Roule, make Manet an unlikely secularist firebrand. An ultramontane
cleric and a deeply conservative art critic, the abbé Hurel was a family friend
of the Manets and maintained cordial relations with Edouard throughout
his life.51 Their correspondence provides us with our earliest surviving
record of Manet’s concept for Christ and the Angels, dated to November,
1863: ‘‘I am going to do a dead Christ, with angels,’’ the artist wrote to Hurel,
‘‘a variation on the scene of the Magdalene at the sepulcher according to
Saint John.’’52 Manet’s explicit mention of John indicates the thought he
devoted to the relationship between the sacred text and his planned ‘‘var-
iation.’’ Manet, however, does not seem to have solicited Hurel’s advice on
his treatment of the subject—an unsurprising choice in light of Hurel’s old-
fashioned tastes, outlined in his 1868 study L’Art religieux contemporain. For
all its invective against the ugliness and moral turpitude of modern painting
more generally, the book gives an instructively confused and hesitant
account of Manet’s picture:
What does this artist propose? What are his thoughts? In what direction does his
work tend? An antisocial or antireligious theory doubtless lurks at the bottom of this
talent, but let us defer our vote, or rather should we fear equally to accept or refuse
him; let us not accord him either fashion or disfavor too hastily.53
Hurel suspended judgment on his old friend’s work, despite his suspicion of
its underlying antireligious sentiment, because he could not be certain what
it actually meant, ‘‘à quoi’’ precisely ‘‘tend son oeuvre.’’ Another reason for
Hurel’s surprising suspension of judgment emerges from the account of the
1865 Salon given by Hurel’s colleague, Félix Jahyer, another ultra-Catholic
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critic. Jahyer suggested a position on the relationship between religious
painting and religious belief that was, likewise, surprisingly open-minded:
If it is not absolutely necessary—as some would wish it—that the artist be a true
believer, he must yet at least live in an atmosphere of faith, that he may draw, from
contact with others, on ideas he does not share, and be thus led to reflect them,
almost despite himself.54
The fact that Manet may not have been a ‘‘véritable croyant’’ thus did not
exclude his picture from the possession of theological meaning, in the eyes
of contemporary critics. Through his contact with Hurel, Manet’s work
might have come to ‘‘reflect’’ religious ideas that its maker did not share.
But the image itself gives no basis to speculation that primarily religious
concerns drove the artist to take on this most Catholic of subjects.
In the end Manet’s interest in treating a sacred subject surely had less to
do with either a profound religious sentiment or a rebellious desire to flout
Catholic doctrine than with his need to confront the French academic
tradition—and the relationship it implied between image and text—in its
most potent and public form: religious history painting. Coming up in
Thomas Couture’s atelier in the mid 1850s, when the master was completing
his suite of decorations for the Chapel of the Virgin at the church of Saint-
Eustache and when the state was handing out commissions for religious
paintings with unprecedented liberality, Manet belonged to a generation
that still understood ambitious painting as precisely the painting of religious
histories.55 Religious history painting was the arena in which the relationship
between form and meaning was most hotly and publicly contested.56 Witness
the caustic reception of Couture’s paintings—deemed insufficiently ideal-
ized—upon their unveiling in 1856. To paint a religious history picture as
willfully unintelligible as Manet’s, to exhibit at the salon a body so obstinately
resistant to reading—devotional or otherwise—was itself a radical gesture.
The Eloquent Body
To understand the radicalism of this unintelligibility, we must

consider the Salon’s status as the putative preserve of the academic tradition
and its pursuit of the ut pictura poesis ideal. As Champaigne’s Dead Christ
attests, from its seventeenth-century origins, the French academic tradition
had theorized the body as a rhetorical instrument, the painter’s tool for
translating religious and historical texts into images.57 Nicolas Poussin, spir-
itual father of the academy, had proclaimed,
Just as the twenty-four letters of the alphabet serve to form our speech and express
our thoughts, the lineaments of the human body [serve] to express the various
passions of the soul.58

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If painting was to aspire to the condition of poetry, the body must be
made to speak with the clarity and precision of language; the limpid gestural
vocabulary of Poussin’s paintings seemed to prove the point, and from
Poussin’s alphabet of the body, through Charles Le Brun’s physiopathic
studies of expression, down to Denis Diderot’s and Jacques-Louis David’s
emphasis on dramatic gesture—the rhetorical body allowed ut pictura poesis
to remain the dominant model for French history painting, or at least its
official ideology, for two hundred years.59
Certainly, the Salon had undergone dramatic changes by the mid-
nineteenth century. Increasingly overrun by genre painting, and no longer
an exclusively academic venue, the salon had become, in some critics’ eyes,
little more than a grand social event.60 The salon juries’ academic members,
however, like the more conservative members of the critical establishment,
still believed in the exhibitions as a showcase for history painting, whose goal
remained ‘‘la représentation du beau pour produire le bien’’—the repre-
sentation of beauty to produce good—as the critic Joseph Dubosc de Pes-
quidoux put it in 1863. For him and his colleagues, the art of painting
remained ‘‘a language’’ (une parole) destined to express ‘‘le beau, le bien, le
vrai.’’61 By bringing together the salon and the Morgue, Manet attacked the
tradition of art as parole; he transformed Christ’s universal, eloquent body
into a silent and particular corpse, inexpressive of its assigned text, indeed,
incapable of eloquence.62
In his landmark 1955 essay on Manet, Georges Bataille unfolded the
implications of this attack on eloquence: ‘‘What [was] at issue,’’ Bataille
wrote, was
the transformation of painting from language, from discourse, into the autono-
mous art that it has been since Manet. . . . What Manet insisted upon, uncompro-
misingly, was an end to rhetoric in painting. What he insisted upon was painting
that could rise in utter freedom, in natural silence.63
Here Bataille’s modernist proclivities are plain enough. The notion of paint-
ing’s ‘‘natural silence’’—much like that of modernism’s ‘‘will to silence,’’—
finds its echo in Zola’s theory of Naturalism, to which I will return.64 History
painting did not, as Bataille would have us believe, come crashing to an end
with Manet, but Bataille’s analysis forces us to acknowledge the radicalism of
Manet’s renunciation, his refusal to paint a picture that could be read in any
conventional sense. We can interpret Christ and the Angels neither as
a straightforward devotional work nor even as a violent renunciation of
Catholic doctrine. Confronted with the cadaver’s insistent and uncommu-
nicative corporeality, we can no longer read text into image, word into flesh.
This body is not schooled in Poussin’s alphabet.65
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Renan and the Resurrection
The picture’s stubborn illegibility was all the more provocative in

1864 Paris, where the resurrection had become a thorny issue. In 1863, the
positivist historian Ernest Renan published the first volume of his monu-
mental history of early Christianity, the scandalous La Vie de Jésus. Renan was
already notorious, having been removed from his teaching post in 1862 for
delivering a lecture at the Collège de France in which he questioned Christ’s
divinity.66 His meticulously researched book expanded on the same theme,
calling into question Christ’s miracles and garnering a succe`s de scandale that
would form an important context for the reception of Manet’s picture.67
Newspapers were full of Renan. Clerics and academic rivals published angry
refutations of his theories.68 Thoré mentioned him in his 1864 Salon review,
and the same critic for La Vie Parisienne who identified Manet’s Christ as
a dead coal miner suggested that the picture had been ‘‘painted for Re-
nan.’’69 Whether or not Manet had read the book, he could hardly have
been oblivious to the fracas it generated.70
Renan based his doubts about the miracle of resurrection on his skep-
ticism regarding the book of John, which he viewed as a particularly unre-
liable document.71 He pointed out that Mary Magdalene’s discovery of the
empty tomb occurs in none of the other gospels, and he called her uncor-
roborated testimony into question still further by diagnosing her as a hys-
teric given to hallucinations.72 Manet’s selection of the very verse from John
describing the Magdalene’s vision must, as Jennifer Sheppard has pointed
out, be understood in relation to Renan’s work, although I believe that the
picture’s opacity militates against interpreting the image (with the Vie Par-
isienne critic) as a straightforward illustration of Renan’s theories.73 Manet’s
interest in John and the story of Christ after the Passion, moreover, pre-
dated both his own Christ and the Angels and Renan’s publication by several
years. In the mid- to late 1850s, Manet had painted a Christ as the Gardener
(now lost) representing the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the
resurrected Christ, whom she mistakes for a gardener.74 The story is re-
counted in John (20:14–15) just two verses after the passage referenced in
Christ and the Angels.75 The artist presented his earlier painting as a gift to the
recently ordained abbé Hurel.76
Whether or not Manet intended his choice of subject for Christ and the
Angels as an explicit reference to Renan, his work shares with the historian’s
a certain literal-mindedness in its imagining of Christ’s death. In a perversely
comic passage from La Vie de Jésus, Renan demanded scientific proof for the
possibility of resurrection, proposing an elaborately controlled experiment
in occult physiology. He speculated:

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If tomorrow a thaumaturge with qualifications sufficiently serious to discuss were to
present himself, if he were to proclaim that he could, I suppose, revive a dead man:
what should be done? A commission would be named, composed of physiologists,
physicians, chemists, and [somewhat incongruously] persons trained in historical
critique. This commission would choose the cadaver, verify its actual death, desig-
nate the room where the experiment was to take place, [and] establish a whole
system of necessary precautions to preclude any doubt. . . . If, under such condi-
tions, a resurrection took place . . . since an experiment must always be repeatable,
the miracle worker would be invited to reproduce his fantastic act in other circum-
stances on other cadavers, in another environment.77
Renan did not deny the possibility of resurrection, but his scientific demands—
randomly selected subjects, a panel of expert observers, and, most important,
iterable results—were, of course, incompatible with an understanding of
Christ’s resurrection as a miraculous unicum. They reflect Renan’s positivist
privileging of visible proof over the written testimony of the gospels.
The Frankenstein image Renan conjured of a laboratory resurrection,
moreover, resonated with contemporary fantasies of Morgue cadavers come
to life. The new, scientific facility, opened in 1864, sought to scrub the insti-
tution clean of a morbid mythology that had grown up around its old location
in the Place du Marché Neuf,78 but the penny press loved the Morgue, and
authors of sensational novels continued to set stories of unholy resurrection
there. The 1872 pocket novel Les Myste`res de la Morgue (fig. 14), for example,
describes a drowned convict displayed on a slab behind the great glass
window, who, quite suddenly ‘‘open[s] eyes wild but alive, most alive, and
gather[s] his strength to rise.’’79 Resurrection haunted the Morgue, an irra-
tional specter within the institution’s new positivist regime. The possibility—
or threat—of resurrection, hovers over Manet’s picture, too. The apparent
biological density of Christ’s corpse allows us to imagine him as a Morgue
zombie, opening his eyes like the pocket novel’s drowned man.
Zola at the Morgue
Among the countless tales of the Morgue and its specters, the
most vivid by far is Emile Zola’s 1867 Thére`se Raquin. The novel tells the story
of a murder and its consequences for those responsible. Zola’s antihero,
Laurent, first visits the Morgue to see whether his victim has turned up there:
He went straight to the glass that separates the spectators from the cadavers; he glued
his pale face to the panes; he looked. Before him were ranged the gray slabs. Here and
there, on the slabs, naked bodies made marks of green and yellow, white and red.80
The colored marks—‘‘taches’’ in the French—made by naked bodies against

the gray slabs may remind us of the famous taches made by Manet’s brush
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figure 14. Frontispiece, Les Myste`res de la Morgue dévoilés, par l’homme rouge (Paris,
1872). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
against his gray grounds; Laurent’s stare amounts to a kind of grisly formal
analysis. Just as the Salon could turn ordinary Parisians into amateurs of
painting, so too could the Morgue transform them into amateurs of death.
Having given up on finding his victim, Laurent returns to the Morgue for his
own amusement, taking
strange pleasure from looking violent death in the face. . . . The spectacle amused
him. . . . This brutally outstretched nudity, bloodstained, torn in places, attracted
and held him.81

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Laurent’s mode of looking exhibits all the characteristics of Morgue
vision as described by Dickens: ‘‘a wolfish stare at the object,’’ a ‘‘brooding . . .
curiosity,’’ and a ‘‘purposeless, vacan[cy].’’ Eventually, and quite unexpectedly,
the murderer spots his victim:82
[Laurent] approached the window slowly, as if forcibly drawn, unable to tear his
gaze from his victim. He did not suffer, feeling only a great coldness within and
a faint prickling on the surface of his skin. . . . He remained motionless for five long
minutes, lost in unconscious contemplation, engraving, despite himself, in the
depths of his memory every horrid line, every filthy color of the picture before his
eyes.83
The murderer experiences no remorse but only a kind of queasy absorp-

tion that Zola described, once again, using language associated with visual
art: line, color, engraving. Upon leaving, Laurent is haunted by Camille’s
face, ‘‘green and convulsed, as he had seen him on a slab at the Morgue.’’84
Though never resurrected in body, Camille comes to life as a hallucination
in Laurent’s troubled mind.
Published in 1867, Thére`se Raquin was Zola’s first full-fledged Naturalist
work.85 Its unapologetically amoral tone sparked controversy, to which Zola
responded in a defiant preface to the second edition: ‘‘The soul is perfectly
absent from [the book]; I freely admit it, since that is how I wished it.’’86 His
characters, Zola insisted, were driven instead by ‘‘their blood and their
nerves.’’87 Thus he claimed for his art an objective, even biological, basis.
The year of the novel’s germination, 1866, was also the first of its author’s
friendship with Manet. The following year saw not only the appearance of
Thére`se Raquin but also Manet’s great solo exhibition, which Zola helped to
orchestrate and famously defended in print.88 The exhibition comprised
fifty paintings as well as a quantity of prints, and opened at the Place de
l’Alma two months after the Exposition universelle, whose fine arts commit-
tee had rejected all of Manet’s submissions.
In addition to the Dead Christ itself, the exhibition included an etching
of the same subject (fig. 15), which heightens the stark lighting of the earlier
picture, presenting Christ’s lumpy body with lurid brightness and plunging
the background into velvety shadow. Manet had worked up the reversed
composition in a watercolor (fig. 16), which exhibits a similarly heightened
contrast between the anemic tones of Christ’s torso and the smooth black
wash of the background and which the artist presented to Zola as a gift of
gratitude.89 Manet’s graphic return to the composition for the exhibition
suggests its personal importance to him but also resonates in a peculiar way
with the notion of engraving found in Zola’s novel. Realizing too late that he
‘‘ha[s] looked too long at Camille in the Morgue,’’ Laurent finds that ‘‘the
cadaver’s image ha[s] engraved itself deeply in him.’’90 Having received
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figure 15. Edouard
Manet, Christ and the
Angels, c. 1866. Etching
(third state). Samuel
Putnam Avery Collection,
New York Public Library,
New York.
figure 16. Edouard

Manet, Christ and the
Angels, c. 1866.
Watercolor, ink, and
gouache on paper. Musée
d’Orsay, Paris.

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some artistic training in his youth, Laurent begins to draw Camille’s features
over and over in a kind of hideous automatism. The corpse returns, resur-
rected, in Zola’s novel (as in Manet’s oeuvre), because the Morgue has
induced a kind of hard and indelible looking that amounts to psychic
gravure.
Of course, Manet’s choice to make an etching after the picture also
seems to have reflected Zola’s preference for the composition, confirmed
by the gift of the watercolor, and declared outright in the writer’s great
apology for Manet, Une Nouvelle Manie`re en peinture (published in tandem
with the 1867 exhibition):
[Here] I find Edouard Manet complete, with the instinct of his eye and the daring
of his hand. Others have said that this Christ is not a Christ, and I admit that this
may be; for me, it is a cadaver, painted in full light, with frankness and vigor.91
For Zola, the picture typified Manet’s new way of painting precisely because it
relied upon a new way of seeing, uninflected by moral meaning. The cadaver
appears not as Christ—that is, enunciating a sacred text—but simply as
a cadaver, ‘‘a fact,’’ in Elkins’s formulation, an ‘‘object, that can express itself
merely by being seen.’’ The painting’s appeal resided in its refusal of eloquence,
the frank uncommunicativeness that made other critics ask whether this
Christ was a Christ at all. Of course, the question was not so immaterial to
Zola as he would have had his reader believe. This cadaver painted in full light
both is and isn’t just any cadaver. To depict the body of Christ as a nameless
corpse dredged from the Seine was to sum up the Naturalist rebellion—its
privileging of flesh over word, ‘‘blood and nerves’’ over ‘‘soul.’’ Manet had
painted a corpse that was simply there, and thereness would become the orga-
nizing principle of Zola’s aesthetics. ‘‘Our artists are poets,’’ Zola famously
complained, but Manet was the exception.92 If academic history painting
continued to aspire to eloquence, the essential condition of language,
Manet’s Dead Christ aspired to a kind of silence, which Zola, the Naturalist
protomodernist, considered the essential condition of images.93
That the terrible silence, the grim Naturalism of both the Dead Christ and
Thére`se Raquin should have emerged from the Morgue is surely no accident.
The institution, as we have seen, posited a new model of seeing—a form of
vision without articulable meaning—in which even the most potentially
eloquent object, the human body, might be estranged, disenchanted, and
rendered speechless. By importing this form of vision into a history painting
of heroic scale and sacred subject, Manet turned his picture into a sort of
allegory for the death of history painting. Christ’s cadaver negates the aca-
demic doctrine of history painting as word-made-flesh, leaving us instead
with painting as flesh itself, as corpse, as thing.
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Notes
I wish to thank Anne Higonnet for the reading group where this article began
and Cordula Grewe for her guidance throughout its preparation. I am also
grateful to Stephen Eisenman and the other panelists in the session of the
2010 College Art Association conference where I first presented this material,
as well as to David Freedberg, Scott Allan, and Abraham Frank for their criti-
cism and encouragement.
1. Victor de Jankovitz, E´tude sur le Salon de 1865 (Besançon, 1865), 23–24:
‘‘L’auteur nous représente,’’ complained one critic ‘‘sous le nom d’Olympia,
une jeune fille. . . . Le corps d’une couleur faisandée, rappelle l’horreur de la
Morgue.’’ Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
2. Victor Fournel [Geronte, pseud.], ‘‘Les Excentriques et les grotesques,’’ La
Gazette de France, June 30, 1865: ‘‘exposée toute nue sur son lit, comme un
cadavre sur les dalles de la Morgue.’’
3. Ego [pseud.], ‘‘Courrier de Paris,’’ Le Monde Illustré, May 13, 1865, 291: ‘‘Son
corps a la teinte livide d’un cadavre exposé à la Morgue.’’
4. Paul de Saint-Victor for La Presse, May 28, 1865: ‘‘La foule se presse, comme à la
Morgue, devant l’Olympia faisandée.’’
5. The salient examples of these approaches appear in T. J. Clark, The Painting of
Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984) (Princeton, 1999),
esp. 96, and Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven, 2002), esp. 158.
6. See the official report: César Daly, ‘‘La Nouvelle Morgue de Paris,’’ La Revue
générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics 22 (1864): 230, maps 33–39. On the
curtain, see Firmin Maillard, Notes Générales sur la Morgue de Paris (Paris, 1877),
8.
7. The painting Dead Toreador, now at the National Gallery in Washington, is
a fragment of the larger composition called Incident in a Bullfight that Manet
exhibited in 1864. For a reconstruction of the complete painting, which
included another fragment now in the Frick Collection, see Ann Hoenigswald’s
contribution to Manet’s The Dead Toreador and The Bullfight: Fragments of a Lost
Salon Painting Reunited, exh. cat. (New York, 1999). For another perspective on
the proliferation of corpses in Manet’s work at this moment, see James Rubin,
‘‘Manet’s Heroic Corpses and the Politics of Their Time,’’ in Perspectives on
Manet, ed. Therese Dolan (Burlington, VT, 2012), 119–38.
8. See Tony Bennett, ‘‘The Exhibitionary Complex,’’ in The Birth of the Museum:
History, Theory, and Politics (London, 1995), 17–88.
9. A reporter for Le Paris (August 31, 1891) referred to the Morgue as the only
‘‘free theater in Paris with the exception of July 14 and Sunday at the Salon.’’
Quoted in Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-
sie`cle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), 61.
10. On the question of nudity and respectability at the salon, see Jennifer L. Shaw,
‘‘The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863,’’ Art History
14, no. 4 (December 1991): 540–70.
11. As George Hamilton and Carol Armstrong have pointed out, Manet completed
the Olympia during the summer of 1863 but held it back, despite its composi-
tional resonances with the Dead Christ, until the Salon of 1865. See George
Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven, 1954), 56, and Armstrong, Manet
Manette, 158–59.

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12. Adolphe Guillot’s study provides the most exhaustive contemporary account of
the institution: Paris qui souffre: la basse-géoˆle du Grand-Châtelet et les morgues mod-
ernes (1887), 2nd ed. (Paris, 1888), 179. The new Morgue’s opening was noted
with interest by the international press. See, for example, ‘‘The Morgue,’’ Once
a Week, December 17, 1864, 716; ‘‘Our Weekly Gossip,’’ Athenaeum 1909 (May 28,
1864): 744; and an item in the New York Times, August 21, 1864.
13. ‘‘The Morgue,’’ in Once a Week, 715. In 1877 the bodies were reclothed following
a campaign for public decency carried out in the popular press; see Guillot,
Paris qui souffre, 245. Often compared to those of the grands magasins under
construction at the time, the window converted the corpse into the ultimate
commodity, presented for passing shoppers’ inspection. See Patrice Higonnet,
Anne Higonnet, and Margaret Higonnet, ‘‘Façades: Walter Benjamin’s Paris,’’
Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (March 1984): 408.
14. See Bruno Bertherat, La morgue de Paris au XIXe sie`cle (PhD diss., Université de
Paris I, 2002), and Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 45–88.
15. On the morgue’s surveillance function, see Bertherat, La morgue de Paris, and
‘‘Les visiteurs de la Morgue,’’ L’Histoire 180 (September 1994): 16–17; see also
Allan Mitchell, ‘‘The Paris Morgue as a Social Institution in the Nineteenth
Century,’’ Francia 4 (1976): 581–96.
16. Dr. Ambroise Tardieu, ‘‘La Morgue,’’ in Paris Guide par les principaux écrivains et
artistes de la France (Paris, 1867), 2:1996–2005, 2001–2.
17. Bertherat, ‘‘Les visiteurs de la Morgue,’’ 19.
18. Tardieu, ‘‘La Morgue,’’ in Paris, 2:1996–2005, 2003: ‘‘ l’écrasement par des
voitures, les chutes d’un lieu élevé, les éboulements, les brûlures, les explosions
de machines et les accidents de chemins de fer, les asphyxies par la vapeur du
charbon, l’action de gaz délétères, la suffocation dans les foules, la foudre,
l’empoisonnement, l’ivresse, et le froid.’’ Tardieu was chief of autopsies at the
Morgue.
19. ‘‘The Morgue, or Dead-House, of Paris,’’ Reynolds’s Miscellany of Romance, General
Literature, Science, and Art (August 27, 1864), 158.
20. Tardieu, ‘‘La Morgue,’’ 2001–2.
21. Surviving representations of the Morgue’s interior are somewhat rare. In a ges-
ture of belated respect for the dead, the Musée de la police, which retains the
institution’s archives, does not permit publication of its vast photographic
holdings.
22. On the layout and appointments of the new Morgue, see the official report:
Daly, ‘‘La Nouvelle Morgue de Paris,’’ 230, plans 33–39. On the curtain, see
Maillard, Notes Generales sur la Morgue de Paris, 8.
23. Contemporary sources were insistent on the mixed social character of Morgue
audiences, composed of shopgirls, flâneurs, day laborers, bourgeois ladies, and
small children. See, for example, Guillot, Paris qui souffre, 188–89.
24. Charles Dickens,‘‘XIX Travelling Abroad,’’ in The Uncommercial Traveller (a
collection of essays first published in All the Year Round from 1860 to 1865)
(London, 1958), 192.
25. Guillot, Paris qui souffre, 317: ‘‘Le spectacle de la Morgue n’est pas meilleur que
les autres; il habitue à la vue du sang et au mépris de la vie humaine.’’
26. On the (somewhat complicated) etymology of the word ‘‘morgue’’ see Guillot,
Paris qui souffre, or, for an alternative account, ‘‘Morgue’’ in the Grande diction-
naire universelle du XIXe sie`cle (Paris, 1874).
27. Dickens, ‘‘XIX Travelling Abroad,’’ 192.
28. James Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford, 1999), 155.
76 Representations

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29. See for example the comparison of Christ’s hands and feet to those of Gustave
Moreau’s Oedipus, hung beside Manet’s picture, in (Mme) C. de Sault, ‘‘Le
Salon de 1864,’’Le Temps, May 12, 1864, 2.
30. As Adolphe Tabarant pointed out in Manet et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1947), 82.
31. Edmond About, ‘‘Salon de 1864,’’ Le Petit Journal 489, June 3, 1864, 2–3: ‘‘Nous
ne parlerons pas des deux pétards mouillés que M. Manet n’a pu faire prendre.’’
Jules Castagnary, ‘‘Salon de 1864,’’ Le Grand Journal; cited in Michael Fried,
Manet’s Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago, 1996), 578n138:
‘‘Quant au Christ entouré par les anges, c’est un cauchemar sur lequel il n’est pas
bon d’arrêter la vue.’’
32. Eugénie-Caroline Saffray, dame Chervet [Raoul de Navery, pseud.], ‘‘Le Salon de
1864,’’ La Gazette des Etrangers (June 7, 1864): ‘‘Nous n’eussions jamais cru que
l’audace du mauvais goût, la négation de la sciènce anatomique, le gâchis de la
couleur, l’abus du noir de fumée et la monstruosité appliquée au visage ‘du plus
beau des hommes’ iraient aussi loin que l’aprouve M. Manet dans les Anges au
tombeau du Christ.’’ ‘‘Le Salon,’’ La Vie Parisienne (May 1, 1864): ‘‘Ne négligez pas
non plus le Christ de M. Manet, ou le pauvre mineur levé de la houillière, peint
pour Renan.’’ Nor did the angels escape censure on class and hygienic grounds;
see Paul de Saint-Victor, ‘‘Salon de 1864,’’ La Presse (June 19, 1864): ‘‘ après le
Christ à la cave, soutenu par les deux ramoneurs ailés de M. Manet, holà!’’
33. Théophile Gautier, ‘‘Le Salon de 1864,’’ Le Moniteur Universel (June 25, 1864):
‘‘[Le Christ] de M. Manet ne semble pas avoir connu jamais l’usage des ablu-
tions. La lividité de la mort se mêle chez lui à des demi-teintes crasseuses, à des
ombres sales et noires dont jamais la résurrection ne le débarbouillera, si un
cadavre tellement avancé peut ressusciter toutefois.’’
34. Christ with the Virgin and an Angel is in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint
Petersburg. Other versions of the subject by Paolo Veronese are in the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston; the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille; the Staatliche Gemälde-
galerie, Berlin; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Manet may have
known the picture from nineteenth-century engravings like that published in
Charles Blanc, Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, vol. 11, Ecole vénitienne (Paris,
1868); Charles Sterling was first to point to Veronese as a source for the picture;
on the painting’s pictorial sources and the history of their identification, see
Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 91–99, and Michel Florisoone, ‘‘Manet inspiré par
Venise,’’ L’Amour de l’art 18, no. 1 (January 1937): 26–27, respectively. Geneviève
Lacambre proposed Francisco Ribalta as source in a letter dated April 12, 2004,
in the archives of the Department of 19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary
Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. My thanks to Kathryn Galitz
and Asher Miller for granting me access to the museum’s records on the paint-
ing. The current location of the Ribalta is unknown, but the work was published
in Charles Blanc, Paul Mantz, et al., Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, vol. 4,
Ecole espagnole (Paris 1869). The version of the composition here illustrated is in
the Museo del Prado, Madrid. The painting in the Pourtalès collection that
seems to have inspired Manet’s Dead Toreador is the so-called Orlando Muerto
(seventeenth-century Spanish, now in the National Gallery, London) then
attributed to Diego Velazquez. On the Pourtalès collection connection, see also
Juliet Wilson-Bareau, ‘‘Manet and Spain,’’ in Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for
Spanish Painting, exh. cat., ed. Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre (New
York, 2003), 203–58, esp. 226–30.
35. The quality of the picture that Michael Fried termed its ‘‘special starkness.’’ See
‘‘Manet’s Sources,’’ Artforum (March 1969): 55.

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36. Fried has pointed out this connection; see ibid. Anne Coffin Hanson’s com-
parison with another German Renaissance painting, Grünewald’s Isenheim
Altarpiece leads her to conclude that Manet’s painting, since it represents
Christ’s death in realistic terms without also representing his resurrection, can
be interpreted as bearing antireligious meaning; see Manet and the Modern
Tradition (New Haven, 1977), 105. I believe the relationship between death and
meaning in Manet’s painting, and, indeed, in Renaissance representations of
the dead Christ, may be more complicated.
37. In the novel, contemplation of a reproduction in Rogozhin’s study causes
the character Myushkin to lose his faith. Standing before Holbein’s picture,
Dostoyevsky is supposed to have said to his wife, ‘‘This picture could make
someone lose his faith.’’ See Anne-Marie Pelletier, ‘‘Le Christ au tombeau dans
quelques textes littéraires modernes: entre athéisme et révélation,’’ in Les
Figures du Christ dans l’art, l’histoire et la litterature (Paris, 2000), 109–19.
38. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion
(New York, 1983), 12.
39. Etienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré (Bürger, pseud.)‘‘Salon de 1864,’’ (first
published in L’Indépendence belge), in Salons de W. Bürger, 1861 à 1868 (Paris,
1870), 2:99–100. Gautier, ‘‘Le Salon de 1864.’’
40. Rigor mortis generally sets in two to four hours after death due to an accumu-
lation of lactic acid in the tissues and generally subsides after eight hours. After
approximately thirty-six hours, green spots begin to appear, the result of intes-
tinal bacteria spreading throughout body. These forensic clues, of course, can-
not tell us whether Manet’s Christ has missed his resurrection, scheduled to
occur three days after his death. On the process of decomposition, see Jacques
Ruffié, Le Sexe et la mort (Paris, 1986), 247–52.
41. Romans 6:3–4, King James Bible Online, http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/
book.php?book¼Romans&chapter¼6&verse¼3. Subsequent references to the
Bible are to this edition.
42. The most marked example of Philippe de Champaigne’s insistence on textual
fidelity was his criticism, in a 1668 lecture delivered at the Royal Academy, of
Nicolas Poussin’s Rebecca and Eliezar at the Well. Champaigne faulted Poussin for
his suppression of the camels mentioned in the story in the Book of Genesis;
the lecture gave rise to a famous debate, the so-called controverse des chameaux.
See André Félibien, Conferences de l’Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture (1669)
(Amsterdam, 1706), n.p.
43. On the inscription see Jennifer M. Sheppard, ‘‘The Inscription in Manet’s The
Dead Christ, with Angels,’’ Metropolitan Museum Journal 16 (1981): 199–200.
44. Charles Baudelaire to Philippe de Chennevières, March 1864, in Philippe de
Chennevières, Souvenirs d’un Directeur des Beaux-Arts (1883) (Paris, 1979), 1:40:
‘‘M. Manet envoie un Episode d’une course de taureaux et un Christ ressusci-
tant assisté par les anges.’’
45. Baudelaire to Manet, April 1864, in Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, vol. 2,
(1860–1866), ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler (Paris, 1973), 350–52.
46. Fried, ‘‘Manet’s Sources,’’ 55. Dolores Mitchell, ‘‘Manet’s Olympia: If Looks
Could Kill,’’ Source: Notes in the History of Art 13, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 43. Jane
Mayo Roos has devoted an article to this point of view: ‘‘Edouard Manet’s
Angels at the Tomb of Christ: a Matter of Interpretation,’’ Arts Magazine, 58,
no. 8 (April 1984): 83–91. See esp. 90: ‘‘Manet’s realism need not be interpreted
as either sacrilegious or indifferent. Rather, the harshness of his treatment of
Christ conveys very movingly the grimness of the subject. . . . When we consider
78 Representations

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what the last hours of Christ’s life were like, Manet’s figure becomes a faithful
approximation of how that body would have looked.’’
47. Philip G. Nord, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth
Century (London, 2000), 31–34 and 19. As Nord points out, the list of Manet’s
portrait subjects reads like a miniature who’s who of secularism in mid- to late
nineteenth-century Paris: Léon Gambetta, Théodore Duret, Emile Zola,
Georges Clemenceau, Henri Rochefort, et al.
48. The recent exhibition has identified the willful ambivalence of many paintings
by Manet with his status as an icon of modernity. See Manet: inventeur du
moderne, exh. cat. (Paris, 2011), particularly Laurence des Cars, ‘‘La peinture
en morceaux,’’ 45–56, esp. 54, and Stéphane Guégan, ‘‘Modernisme, Moder-
nité, Moderne,’’ 27–44, esp. 21–22.
49. Michael Paul Driskel has pointed out a certain affinity between the picture and
Baudelaire’s ‘‘Perte d’auréole,’’ a prose poem in which Christ, transformed into
a Parisian dandy, loses his halo in traffic. See Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and
Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park, PA, 1992), 191.
50. Stéphane Guégan, ‘‘Un catholicism suspect,’’ in Manet, inventeur du moderne,
159–70.
51. Manet gave the abbé Auguste Hurel several works, including a head of Christ
(now in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco), a portrait of the priest, an
etching of the Chanteur Espagnole of 1860, and a drawing for Christ as a Gardener,
a lost painting to which we shall return. Hurel contributed to the subscription
organized by Claude Monet to purchase the Olympia for the Musée du Luxem-
bourg in 1890. On the abbé Hurel, see Ronald Pickvance, Manet, exh. cat (Paris,
1996), 191.
52. Manet to Hurel, November 1863, trans. in Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett,
and Juliet Wilson Bareau, Manet, 1832–1883, exh. cat. (New York, 1983), 199.
53. Manet is not mentioned by name, but, as several modern commentators have
noted, his identity can be determined from context. Auguste Hurel, L’Art re-
ligieux contemporain (Paris, 1868), 238: ‘‘Que se propose cet artiste? Quelle est sa
pensée? À quoi tend son oeuvre? Une théorie antisociale ou antireligieuse se
cache sans doute au fond de ce talent. Différons notre suffrage, ou plutôt
craignons également de l’accorder et de le refuser; ne créons pas imprudem-
ment une vogue ou une défaveur. De la sorte, et de part et d’autre, l’on
s’observe.’’
54. Félix Jahyer, E´tude sur les Beaux-Arts, Salon de 1865 (Paris, 1865), 12: ‘‘S’il n’est
pas absolument nécessaire—comme certains le veulent—que l’artiste soit un
véritable croyant, encore faudrait-il qu’il vécut, au moins, dans une atmosphère
de foi. Il pourrait puiser, au contact des autres, les idées qu’il ne partage pas, et
il serait entraı̂né, comme malgré lui, à les refléter.’’
55. On Thomas Couture’s commission, see Bruno Foucart, Le Renouveau de la
peinture religieuse en France (1800–1860) (Paris, 1987), 272–73; on the boom in
Second-Empire religious art patronage, see ibid., 76–77.
56. See Driskel, Representing Belief.
57. The seminal study on this subject is, of course, Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura
Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (1942) (New York, 1967). More recent
work includes Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La couleur éloquente: rhétorique et pein-
ture à l’âge classique (Paris, 1999), and Marc Fumaroli, L’Ecole du silence: le
sentiment des images au XVIIe sie`cle (Paris, 1994) and L’Age de l’éloquence:
rh étorique et ‘‘res literaria’’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’ époque classique
(Geneva, 1980).

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58. André Félibien, quoting Poussin, Huitie`me Entretien (1685), reprinted in Clare
Pace, Félibien’s Life of Poussin (London, 1981), 184: ‘‘De même que les vingt-
quatre lettres de l’alphabet servent à former nos paroles et exprimer nos
pensées, de même les linéaments du corps humain à exprimer les diverses
passions de l’âme.’’ Whether the words were Poussin’s own or simply attrib-
uted him by Félibien, they were vitally important for the tradition that would
follow.
59. On Charles Le Brun’s theory of expression, see esp. Jennifer Montagu, The
Expression of the Passions: the Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s Conférence
sur l’expression générale et particulie`re (New Haven, 1994), and Norman Bryson,
‘‘The Legible Body: Le Brun,’’ in Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien
Régime (Cambridge, 1981), 29–57. On the retreat and return of eloquent gesture
in eighteenth-century French history painting, see Dorothy Johnson, ‘‘Corpore-
ality and Communication: The Gestural Revolution of Diderot, David, and the
Oath of the Horatii,’’ Art Bulletin 71, no. 1 (March 1989): 92–113.
60. Patricia Mainardi provides a summary of these shifts in Art and Politics of the
Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven, 1987).
61. Du Bosc de Pesquidoux, ‘‘Beaux-Arts, Salon de 1863,’’L’Union 61 (June 10, 1863).
62. Arden Reed has addressed Manet’s dismantling of the ut picture poesis model of
history painting in Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism: Blurring Genre
Boundaries (Cambridge, 2003).
63. Georges Bataille, ‘‘Manet’’ (1955), in Oeuvres Comple`tes, ed. Michel Foucault
(Paris, 1970–1988), see esp. 9:125–36. ‘‘Ce qui . . . est en cause est la transfor-
mation de la peinture, de langage, de discours qu’elle était, en cet art auton-
ome qu’elle est depuis Manet.’’
64. On the concept of Modernism’s will to silence, see Rosalind Krauss, The Orig-
inality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985) (Cambridge, MA,
1987), 9.
65. Manet’s picture was admittedly not the first to inject moral ambivalence into
a timeless religious subject through the insertion of a contemporary corpse.
The most celebrated precedent was Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin in the
Louvre, a picture with which Manet’s frequent visits in the late 1850s and early
1860s would have acquainted him. The story of the picture’s rejection and
scandal is well known. Rather than representing the Virgin’s Dormition, Caravag-
gio seemed to represent her death, yet the controversy surrounding the picture
had less to do with religious doctrine than with the specific body the artist had
chosen to represent the Virgin: he was rumored to have painted the actual
cadaver of a prostitute dredged from the Tiber. It was, of course, the searing
naturalism with which Caravaggio represented the corpse that gave rise to the
rumor—how could so grimly believable a body have been invented? Hence
what Caravaggio violated was not so much Catholic dogma as the humanist
decorum of religious history painting, predicated on the concept of the uni-
versal body and its ability to articulate sacred meaning. Not for nothing did
Poussin claim that Caravaggio ‘‘étoit venu au monde pour détruire la Peinture.’’
My thanks to Cordula Grewe for pointing out this precedent. On the painting’s
history at the Louvre, see Stéphane Loire and Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée,
Caravage, La Mort de la vierge: une Madone sans dignité (Paris, 1990), 15; on its
religious iconography, Pamela Askew, Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin (Princeton,
1990); on its critical fortunes and the story of the prostitute, Todd P. Olson,
‘‘Caravaggio’s Coroner: Forensic Medicine in Giulio Mancini’s Art Criticism,’’
Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 1 (2005): 83–98.
80 Representations

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66. For an overview of Ernest Renan’s career and influence, see Jacques Le Goff,
ed., Histoire de la France religieuse, vol. 3, Du roi Tre`s Chretien à la laicite republicaine
(XVIIIe–XIXe sie`cle) (Paris, 1991), 170–85.
67. See J. Pommier, ‘‘Autour de la Vie de Jesus: Ernest Renan et l’art religieux de
son temps,’’ in Studi in onore di Italo Siciliano (Florence, 1966), 2:1017–30, and,
more specifically, Nord, Impressionists and Politics, 19.
68. E.g., Ernest Havet, Jesus dans l’histoire: Examen de la ‘‘Vie de Jesus’’ par M. Renan
(Paris, 1863).
69. Though not in relation to Manet’s picture. Théophile Thoré (W. Bürger)‘‘Sa-
lon de 1864,’’ 91. ‘‘Le Salon,’’ La Vie Parisienne, 199.
70. As Hanson points out in Manet and the Modern Tradition, 106.
71. Ernest Renan, Histoire des origines du christianisme, livre premier: La Vie de Jésus
(1863), 7th ed. (Paris, 1863), xxiv: ‘‘Ici les doutes sont beaucoup plus fondés, et
la question moins près d’une solution. . . . Comment, à conter d’un plan
général de la vie de Jésus, qui parait bien plus satisfaisant et plus exact que
celui des synoptiques, ces passages singuliers où l’on sent un intérêt dogma-
tique propre au rédacteur, des idées fort étrangères à Jésus, et parfois des
indices qui mettent en garde contre la bonne foi du narrateur?’’
72. Ibid., 433–34, esp. 434n3. This was also the era when Jules Auguste Soury,
a philosopher and pioneer of neurological diagnoses for mental disorders,
retrospectively diagnosed Christ as a ‘‘méningoencéphalite,’’ the sufferer of a pro-
gressive neurological disorder inducing delusions of grandeur. See Jésus et les
évangiles (1865) (Paris, 1878).
73. Sheppard, ‘‘The Inscription in Manet’s The Dead Christ, with Angels,’’ 199–200.
74. On this painting, see Pickvance, Manet, 38–40, and Théodore Duret, Histoire
d’Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre, avec un catalogue des peintures et des pastels (Paris,
1902), no. 59.
75. ‘‘When she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and
knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her: Woman, why weepest thou?
whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him: Sir,
if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take
him away.’’
76. A preparatory drawing for this painting, in red chalk, survives. See Louis-
Antoine Prat, ‘‘‘Monsieur Manet, qui dessine assez bien . . . ,’ ’’ in Manet, inventeur
du Moderne, 95–106, no. 69.
77. Renan, La Vie de Jésus, li–lii: ‘‘Que demain un thaumaturge se présente avec des
garanties assez sérieuses pour être discuté; qu’il s’annonce comme pouvant, je
suppose, ressusciter un mort; que ferait-on? Une commission composée de
physiologistes, de physiciens, de chimistes, de personnes exercées à la critique
historique, serait nommée. Cette commission choisirait le cadavre, s’assumerait
que la mort est bien réelle, désignerait la salle où devrait se faire l’expérience,
réglerait tout le système de précautions nécessaire pour ne laisser prise à aucun
doute. Si, dans de telles conditions, la résurrection s’opérait . . . comme une
expérience doit toujours pouvoir se répéter, que l’on doit être capable de
refaire ce que l’on a fait une fois . . . le thaumaturge serait invité à reproduire
son acte merveilleux dans d’autres circonstances, sur d’autres cadavres, dans un
autre milieu.’’
78. See Mitchell, ‘‘The Paris Morgue as a Social Institution in the Nineteenth
Century,’’ 582.
79. Les Myste`res de la Morgue Dévoilés, par l’homme rouge (Paris, 1872), 4–5: ‘‘Un
homme de 45 ans, taillé en Hercule, tête energique avec une barbe d’un noir

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grisonnant, ouvrait des yeux égares, mais vivants, très vivants, et rassemblait ses
forces pour se lever.’’
80. Emile Zola, Thére`se Raquin (1867) (Paris, 1970), 130: ‘‘Il allait droit au vitrage
qui sépare les spectateurs des cadavres; il collait sa face pâle contre les vitres, il
regardait. Devant lui s’alignaient les rangées de dalles grises. Ça et là, sur les
dalles, des corps nus faisaient des taches vertes et jaunes, blanches et rouges.’’
81. Ibid., 131: Il devenait alors un simple curieux, il prenait un plaisir étrange à
regarder la mort violente en face . . . Ce spectacle l’amusait, surtout lorsqu’il y
avait des femmes étalant leur gorge nue. Ces nudités brutalement étendues,
tachées de sang, trouées par endroits, l’attiraient et le retenaient.’’
82. The murderer’s encounter with his victim was an established trope in literature
of the morgue. It appears in most every account of the institution (e.g., Tardieu,
‘‘La Morgue,’’ 1997; Guillot, Paris qui souffre, 205).
83. Zola, Thére`se Raquin, 133: ‘‘Le meurtrier s’approcha lentement du vitrage,
comme attiré, ne pouvant détacher ses regards de sa victime. Il ne souffrait
pas; il éprouvait seulement un grand froid intérieur et de légers picotements à
fleur de peau. Il aurait cru trembler davantage. Il resta immobile, pendant cinq
grandes minutes, perdu dans une contemplation inconsciente, gravant malgré
lui au fond de sa mémoire toutes les lignes horribles, toutes les couleurs sales
du tableau qu’il avait sous les yeux.’’
84. Ibid. 202: ‘‘verdâtre et convulsionnée, telle qu’il l’avait aperçue sur une dalle de
la Morgue.’’
85. The novel was initially published as a serial in L’Artiste under the title ‘‘Un
Mariage d’amour.’’
86. Zola, preface to the second edition of Thére`se Raquin (1868), in Thére`se Raquin,
60: ‘‘L’âme est parfaitement absente [du roman], j’en conviens aisément, puis-
que je l’ai voulu ainsi.’’
87. Ibid.: ‘‘J’ai choisi des personnages souverainement dominés par leurs nerfs et leur
sang.’’ See Claude Schumacher, Emile Zola: Thére`se Raquin (Glasgow, 1990), esp. 83.
88. On the beginnings of the friendship, see Berg, The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and
the Art of His Times, 13; on the exhibition and Zola’s role in it, see Armstrong,
Manet Manette, 3–30 and 31–47, respectively.
89. The watercolor is not dated but, given its reversal, was almost certainly made in
preparation for print transfer. Manet’s careful retention of such strokes of
seeming carelessness as Christ’s omitted thumb is noteworthy.
90. Zola, Thére`se Raquin, 204: ‘‘qu’il avait trop regardé Camille à la Morgue. L’image
du cadavre s’était gravée profondément en lui.’’
91. Emile Zola, ‘‘Une Nouvelle Manière en peinture: Edouard Manet’’ (1867) in
Oeuvres Comple`tes ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris, 1966–), 12:837: ‘‘Moi, je déclare
préférer de beaucoup Le Christ mort et les Anges; je retrouve là Edouard Manet
tout entier, avec les partis pris de son oeil et les audaces de sa main. On a dit que
ce Christ n’était pas un Christ, et j’avoue que cela peut être; pour moi, c’est un
cadavre peint en pleine lumière, avec franchise et vigueur.’’
92. Emile Zola, ‘‘Mon Salon’’ (1866), in Le bon combat: de Courbet aux impressionistes,
ed. Jean Paul Bouillon (Paris, 1974), 64: ‘‘Nos artistes sont des poètes. C’est là
une grave injure pour des gens qui n’ont pas même charge de penser, mais je la
maintiens.’’
93. On Zola as a painter in words, see William J. Berg, The Visual Novel: Emile Zola
and the Art of His Times (University Park, PA, 1992), and Jurate D. Kaminskas,
‘‘Thérèse Raquin et Manet: harmonie en gris,’’ French Review 57, no. 3 (February
1984): 309–19.
82 Representations

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Christ and the Angels : Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting?

Author(s): Emily A. Beeny

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Christ and the Angels:

I N THE SPRING OF 1865, when critics converged on the Champs

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accounted in various ways for contemporary critics’ insistence upon

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Suspended between surveillance and spectacle—that is, between social

Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 53

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The picture bridged an already uncomfortably short distance between

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regarded the depicted body as a site of eloquence, animated by meaning,

‘‘A Waxwork Without a Catalogue’’:

The open public morgue, as Vanessa Schwartz and Bruno

Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 55

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Traffic accidents, industrial explosions, and even suffocation by crowds—

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Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 57

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In the metaphor of the waxwork without a catalog, Dickens expressed a cru-

Whether in an ethnographic lifecast, a mug shot, or the Morgue’s display

Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 59

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A Body Without a Text

Given the proliferation of Morgue allusions in reviews of the

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unridiculed. Edmond About dismissed it as ‘‘a soggy firecracker,’’ while Jules

Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 61

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But does the starkness of Manet’s portrayal serve a similar purpose?

Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 63

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Contemporary critics and modern art historians alike have tried

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question of resurrection—and, by extension, on religious belief itself. In

Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 65

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The Eloquent Body

To understand the radicalism of this unintelligibility, we must

Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 67

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The picture’s stubborn illegibility was all the more provocative in

Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 69

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Zola at the Morgue

The colored marks—‘‘taches’’ in the French—made by naked bodies against

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Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 71

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The murderer experiences no remorse but only a kind of queasy absorp-

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figure 16. Edouard

Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 73

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Manet, the Morgue, and the Death of History Painting? 75