Venezuela's tears for a Christ-like Chávez

This picture is a modern lamentation scene. In religious paintings of the Lamentation of Christ by such masters of dignified emotion as Giotto and Poussin, the dead body of Christ has been taken down from the cross to be mourned by heartbroken women. Here, the corpse of Hugo Chávez inspires similarly emotional gestures and expressions in two women who have queued to see him in his open coffin.

If it seems pretentious to equate this tearful scene at the lying-in-state of Venezuela's late president with paintings like Raphael's Deposition – another harrowing depiction of the dead Christ mourned by his followers – then you probably live in a Protestant country. Venezuela has been deeply influenced by Catholicism since missionaries were sent to the coastline named "Little Venice" in the Renaissance

Consciously or not, the people in this picture, the photographer who took it, and even those who have decided that Chávez should lie in state "eternally", are all influenced by the rich visual heritage of the Catholic world that ranges from oil paintings to prayer cards, and feasts perpetually on images of martyrdom and mourning.

Are such displays of grief in Caracas the disturbing beginnings of a posthumous personality cult destined to swallow up a democracy? This picture, in the light of the news that Chávez is to remain on display permanently, inevitably summons up the waxy ghost of Lenin, that preserved icon of totalitarian communism. Yet was Lenin ever mourned as genuinely by the people as Chávez? Pictures of his lying in state in 1924 portray far more subdued crowds.

The Soviet Union was an atheist state and its public display of Lenin's embalmed body was surely at some level an act of scientific rationalist coolness: a replacement for a religious tomb, with Lenin preserved in the light of reason like the utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham, whose embalmed body is kept at University College London. Bentham planned his own preservation as what he called an "auto-icon". He was no dictator. The idea of preserving a body scientifically, cutting out the Christian rite of burial, therefore has radical as well as dictatorial associations. But Lenin's body did become a macabre cult, and communists in Russia do still oppose his burial as if it would be the burial of their beliefs.

Hugo Chávez had a series of conflicts with the Catholic church and told the Vatican to stay out of Venezuelan politics, but he seems to have returned to the church in the last part of his life as he faced terminal illness. In any case, religion haunts the political unconscious. Latin America has particularly rich traditions that dramatise death and perpetuate grief – including Mexico's Day of the Dead, which combines Catholic and pagan imagery. Just as the artist Frida Kahlo was able to mythologise herself as a suffering icon, so Chávez can now become a Christ or a saint to be mourned by the people forever – perhaps as intensely he is in this picture. Is that a disaster for democracy in Venezuela? Will the man who won four elections for socialism now impose his views on the future by deathly diktat?

It may rather be that he is a monumental figure who is never going to be forgotten in the history of the Americas. In the end, the women in this picture simply look like they have lost someone they love.