Cristo yacente (Dead Christ)

Gregorio Fernández, Cristo yacente (Dead Christ), 1625–30. Polychromed wood, glass, bark, and ivory or bone. Museo National del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

• Clearly dead figure:
• pale skin
• slack limbs, jaw, etc
• blood beginning to shift in color to dried blood
• torso collapsed in on ribs with lungs no longer receiving air and other organs having empitied

• Depiction of a highly realistic dead Christ reinforces understanding of him being human throughout a portion of his time on Earth
• Meant to be understood visually regardless of how distant a viewer could be standing: Christ on his literal death bed, blood beginning to dry from where it seeped from wounds as he was nailed to the cross

• Gore intended to have a "compounded sensorial affect" on spectators with the flagellation rituals in the processions
• Hitting home the trauma and pain Christ went through in his final moments as a human on Earth, during which he was atoning for the sins of humanity; forcing viewers to witness the amount of sheer agony he must have gone through via the penitents' actions
• "Empathetic Wounds: Gregorio Fernandez's Cristos yacentes as a Nexus of Art, Anatomy, and Counter- Reformation Theology" Dr. Tiffany Hunt, Visualizing Sensous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas. pg. 408-9.

• Carving techniques coupled with realistic color/texture choices tricking the eye into seeing fabirc or skin rather than a wooden/stone object
• Leans heavily into choice of realism over idealism in Spanish Baroque works