ARTS
Face to face with Christ
The National Gallery has triumphed where the Churches have failed, says A.N. Wilson With the dawn of the Millennial year, we might have looked to the Churches, or to the Dome, for some meditation on the central question of all: how we have seen Christ; how we have formed His image and how His image has formed us, as a civilisa- tion over 2,000 years. Only second-rate minds are afraid of the obvious, as the great Dr Rowse used to say; which presum- ably explains why it was left to the great mind of National Gallery director Dr Neil MacGregor, and his curator Gabriele Finaldi, to fill a gap left in many minds this spring by the theological professionals.
Seeing Salvation is one of those exhibi- tions to which one will return frequently. And the secret of its success is the simplicity of its central idea. Since Simeon held the Christ-child in his arms, in the Gospel according to Saint Luke, Christians have been those who saw their salvation, rather than inferring it or worshipping it from afar. Whereas Jews avoid so much as naming their God, and, for Muslims, He is the great Mystery, invisible in His mercy and His laws, for Christians, He is, as well as being these ineffable things, one who bled, suffered and died. For this cause, the very name of Jesus — as in El Greco's mystic picture 'The Adoration of the Name of Jesus', 1578 — has been both venerated as sub- lime and set forth as infinitely mundane.
The Christians did not, it is true, trans- late their understanding of the Incarna- tion into iconographic, still less into artistic terms for centuries. But in this exhibition one sees how the growth of Western art itself in part grew out of the need to articulate theological truth; and how, in turn, in the ages of faith, these theological complexities — which per- haps sound esoteric to the secular ear — sprang not from school-room lunacies but from human experiences which are ours, as well as those of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance periods.
Plunge in medias res to Pieter Brueghel the Elder's 'The Adoration of the Kings', a disturbing, not to say dis- pleasing picture, a panel crowded with lumpen ugly faces, buffoonish, warty sol- diers. The Magi seem like the monstrous wizardry of the Brothers Grimm. Unlike the serene Adoration scene of Jan Gos- saert which hangs beside it, the Brueghel shows a child who shrinks from the humanity whose monstrous flesh he has taken. Whereas Gossaeres Jesus accepts the tribute of a gold chalice and gives it calmly back to his kingly worshipper as a Eucharistic vessel, Brueghel's puny, unhappy baby is being offered myrrh. He squirms at the grim knowledge of mor- tality. With what subtlety Brueghel tells the story which Benedetto Bonfigli spells out so crudely -- in his conventional Italian stable scene with a crucified adult Christ plonked beside it. We do not know what part Brueghel played in the theological controversies of the 16th century, but this picture of the 1560s surely reflects not only the theological conflicts of the times but also the experience which in literature we associate with Montaigne and Shakespeare and Cervantes, the sense of human experi-
Herbert Art Gallery & Museu
'Christ in Glory', 1953, by Graham Sutherland ence and our awareness of suffering and death being the central business of art. Looking at this horrible picture of Brueghel's I involuntarily remembered Lear's lines to Edgar on the heath 'Thou art the thing itself': a grim Ecce Homo.
This is only one of dozens of examples provided by these images of how intelli- gently our forebears confronted, in visual terms, problems which were philosophically intolerable and imponderable: the problem of suffering, the existential awfulness of our knowledge of death.
Paradox within paradox confronts the vis- itor moving between each carefully juxta- posed (and usually familiar) artefact. There is the paradox that faith and sight are in fact quite different things. There is the paradox that, in depicting the theological reality of Christ, artists are very much not attempting a realistic portrait of the histori- cal Jesus. An early sign of the unravelling of faith — not its confirmation — is in the extraordinary late-15th or early-16th-centu- ry diptych of a head of Christ with a letter purporting to be from Pontius Pilate's pre- ms decessor Lentulus, describing the actual appearance of Jesus. This extraordinary object, on loan from Utrecht's Museum Catharijneconvent, by being placed in the middle of so many expressions of the ineffable myths of the Incarnation, reminds us of what Christian art — by extension Christianity itself — is not. Yet this 'fundamentalist' object — coming midway in an exhibition which takes us from Holman Hunt's 'Light of the World' to Dali's 'Christ of St John of the Cross' — confronts the central tragedy of Christianity's self-undoing: namely that by making falsifiable, and false, his- torical claims, it gradually made itself unbelievable. The 'Letter of Lentulus' must have seemed so realistic to its origi- nal forger: to us it has all the plausibility of one of those Victorian spiritualist photographs of ectoplasm.
We live now in a post-Christian age, whether we are practising Christians or not. I think this exhibition is all the more important for that reason. One wonders how many congregations in Christian cathedrals or chapels in the next 12 months will see, or hear an exe- gesis of the Faith which even approach- es this exhibition in terms of its range and profundity. In many cities of Britain and Europe, the Church seems positive- ly ashamed of images in glass and stone and painting which for centuries have helped the faithful to pray and to under- stand. It is left to the art historians to recover what the priests and ministers ignore or actually despise. As I have already said, the greater pro- portion of these exhibits are old friends. That is evidently deliberate. Instead, how- ever, of seeing Bellini's 'Madonna of the Meadow' as something as familiar as wall- paper as we walk through the Venetian room in the National Gallery, we are here reminded of its chilling iconography, the pale, colourless child lies in the rich blue folds of his mother's cloak foreshadowing the Pieta. Velazquez's gruesome 'Christ after the Flagellation contemplated by the Christian Soul' becomes something more than a 17th-century curiosity; by this stage of the exhibition we are psyched up to learn again — or if we are strangers to Christianity to taste for the first time — the inner drama of faith itself.
And with what skill and wit the curators have chosen the artefacts to place beside the famous paintings. I had either never seen or never noticed in the British Muse- um the ivory, dating from the 5th century — circa 420-430 — showing scenes of Christ's Passion. The Rex Judaeorum stretches out on the Cross with the strength and ease of an athletic warrior bracing himself to battle with Sin and Death. Beside him, hideously realistic, the figure of Judas has hanged himself on the tree, the 30 pieces of silver at his feet. Or again, in the penultimate room of the exhibition, the 1705 Monstrance from Augsburg, encrusted with the Last Supper in silver, reminds us that the Mass in all its mystery and joy is totally incomprehensible, and indeed meaningless, outside its own con- text of worship.
So we pass into the final view to be con- fronted once more by the (to me vulgar and unpleasing) Dali, the hamfisted (I fear) Stanley Spencer, the uninspiring `Ecce Homo' of Mark Wallinger in Trafal- gar Square, and we ask — does Christian art (by extension Christianity) have any future?
The secret perhaps lies in Graham Sutherland's study for his great tapestry in Coventry Cathedral, the only 20th-century art work which, to me, stood comparison with its great predecessors. This cocoon- like figure, both blessing and suffering, tri- umphant, but as a vulnerable butterfly is triumphant, is profoundly haunting, and is certainly one of the images which will recur in the minds of those who remember, and return to this brilliant exhibition. How lucky we are that nearly all these pictures are not only in public galleries, but are in London. And how doubly lucky we are to have Neil MacGregor as the director of the best national collection in the world.
Seeing Salvation: The Image of Christ is at the National Gallery from 26 February until 7 May. A four-part television series Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art will be shown on BBC 2 from 2 April; there is also a book by Neil MacGregor with Erika Lang- Pillar to accompany the series, published by BBC Worldwide, £25.
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