The Dead Christ with Angels

Painted in 1864 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Dead Christ with Angels was Manet's attempt to enter the grand tradition of religious history painting with a canvas that combined religious content with his deliberately unidealized approach. The subject — Christ's body tended by two angels after the Deposition — had been treated by countless old masters, and Manet's deliberate decision to paint Christ with a working-class physical type and to include one angel with conspicuously red wings was instantly controversial. The Salon critics attacked both the painting's lack of spiritual transcendence and its technical approach.

The pale, heavy body of Christ is rendered with Manet's characteristic direct approach — flesh described through warm ochre and cool grey-green shadow, without the smooth idealisation of academic religious painting. The angels' wings — one markedly red — provide chromatic intensity against the pale flesh. The composition is relatively shallow, the figures placed close to the picture plane in a manner that denies celestial transcendence.