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Monthly column on the arts: look on Him

A review of the exhibition at the National Gallery on the image of Christ

Seeing Salvation: The Image of Christ
National Gallery, London
26 February 2000 - 7 May 2000
Admission free.

The National Gallery has been accused of promoting evangelical Christianity with this exhibition.

They have certainly not damaged our cause. The image of Christ and the influence of that image on the world are discussed in seven sections presenting the biblical account of the life and work of Christ explicitly, neither ridiculing nor preaching, in the illuminating and thought-provoking captions that accompany the images. The splendid exhibition catalogue (unusually affordable at £9.95) adopts the same approach. As a result the power of the images and the story behind them are allowed to exert their own appeal and authority.

At the start three Christian graffiti from the Roman catacombs sit alongside medallions, painted texts and other verbal images of Jesus. On your way in, you encounter Holman Hunt's 'The Light of the World', but modern portraiture returns only later.

In between, symbols gradually give way to likenesses, although (suggest the organisers) the Bible gives no description of Jesus' facial appearance. Hardly a traditional evangelical view of Isaiah! Indeed, given Isaiah 53.2 it is surprising how many artists have painted Jesus as physically beautiful. Those who don't (and there are plenty in Seeing Salvation) often shock by a quite different visual rhetoric. Strozzi's unnervingly youthful risen Jesus, a real 33 year-old, gently guides Thomas's doubting finger into his wounded side. Hieronymous Bosch's quartet of mockers crowns Jesus with thorns in a terrible counterpoint of pain. An anonymous artist paints a hauntingly modern Jesus, looking out at you from the sixteenth century through eyes reddened from the tears that course down his cheeks.

Using conventions

Besides such portraits (which preach evangelical Christianity at you if any of the exhibits do) there are paintings that use the conventions of their time and the iconography that worshippers understood as easily as breathing. A wonderful Murillo portrays the infant Christ, asleep on a cross on the ground and clutching a skull. Over him two raptly serious angels ponder the symbolism. The painting uses themes from classical art but transcends them, both by the explicit language of the symbols and the emotional intensity of the way the child is drawn - Murillo has obviously seen many sleeping children.

Catholic pietism

Running through the exhibits is an aspect of Catholic pietism that I found jarring, for it represents symbols becoming routine. Manetti's picture of Catherine of Siena, for example, shows her receiving her stigmata via beams of light radiating from Christ's wounds. Velazquez's Christ challenges his onlooker with a literal line drawn from Jesus' eye to the onlooker's heart. A gaunt terracotta Christ displays his wounded side but at some time an extra 'wound' has been added - a cavity in the rib cage, probably to house a relic.

What one is seeing in such works is a dilution of meaning. Early symbolism was a language in which artists expressed the beliefs of the age. The painting became a discourse between the image and its beholder. But Catholic pietism too often became a series of triggers, a particular image or device prompting a specific spiritual exercise.

Even so, both are expressions of a faith that was widely held and understood. The seven animals on which St Francis stands are the seven deadly sins being trodden down. Everybody knew it. The Stations of the Cross needed only the briefest of captions. These stories were owned by the western world.

But the exhibition ends in a different world. As a selection of 20th-century images of Christ the last section is almost arbitrary. There are two fine Stanley Spencers, but not his magnificent painting of Christ holding a Scorpion, though this probably reflects that it is a small-budget exhibition drawing mainly on what was available.

Very noticeable is the fact that the language is here often no longer a language of faith but one of convention. Spencer's astonishingly powerful Cookham Resurrection and 'Christ Carrying the Cross' are all about 'spiritual exultation' but say very little about the biblical Christ, whose presence in them is minimal.

Sentimentality

Salvadore Dali's 'Christ of St John of the Cross' seems to be supremely detached from the world he saved, despite the rubric that accompanies it, and owes far more to the knee-jerk sentimentality of Holman Hunt than to the old masters that have preceded it - or, indeed, to Graham Sutherland's sketch for the Coventry 'Christ in Glory' or Mark Wallinger's simple statue that was erected in Trafalgar Square last year.

See this exhibition if you possibly can. You will certainly leave with different memories than mine. Maybe you will take away what you brought with you; maybe this exhibition will change you profoundly. But see it, and try to leave time for the fact that having seen it, you will probably want to go again.

David Porter