Cristo yacente (Dead Christ)

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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

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