The Power and the Glory

When William Holman Hunt's garish picture of a majestic, bejeweled Jesus Christ toured the British Empire in 1905, the response was rhapsodic. People queued for hours to admire The Light of the World, a stridently literal picture of Christ brandishing a lantern and knocking at the door of the human soul. One viewer, a J.H. Roy from Dunedin, New Zealand, wrote that "the vast crowd stood gazing in silent wonderment, and many in adoration, as though held by some irresistible magnet." Such was the strength of the Christian faith--and the power of religious imagery.

Nearly a century later, at a time when churchgoing is in steep decline, London's National Gallery is testing the endurance of Christian art's appeal with its latest exhibition, "Seeing Salvation: The Image of Christ." Along with a tie-in book and bbc television series, the show (which runs until May 7) marks the new millennium by surveying the portrayal of God's son over the past 2,000 years. With 79 works, mostly from British public collections but also borrowed from elsewhere, the exhibition argues that Christian imagery has formed the foundation of Western culture. Gallery director Neil MacGregor insists the show is not about organized religion, but rather Christianity as a cultural and historical force. "This is the visual language in which the great artists--Rembrandt, Michelangelo--have spoken to us about the biggest things," says MacGregor. "Christian imagery has given European art a visual vocabulary in which to talk about love and loss and hope."

The exhibition is divided into seven thematic rooms, each focusing on an artistic problem posed by Christian theology. In the Sign and Symbol room, the evolution of Christ's image starts from the 3rd century, when artists wondered whether they should depict him at all. Artifacts show Christ represented merely by letters and symbols, such as a fish on a Roman funerary slab or the Good Shepherd in a small marble statue. But Francisco de Zurbarn's The Bound Lamb (1635-40) is by far the most powerful. Almost a still life, it shows the pitiful creature trussed on a stone slab ready for sacrifice--a deeply moving allusion to Christ as the "Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29).

If that symbolism seems simple, more complex iconography is used to illustrate the incarnation, for artists had to portray the dual nature of Christ--at once God and man, both savior and sacrifice. While the 15th century panel attributed to Benedetto Bonfigli naively plunks the crucifixion next to the nativity as a reminder of the baby's fate, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Adoration of the Kings (1564) cleverly places the naked Christ Child amid the filth of flawed humanity, recoiling from the third king's prophetic offering of myrrh, which is used to prepare the dead. On the facing wall, the infant's humanity is made especially explicit in a small 15th century Netherlandish panel which shows an intimate domestic scene of the Virgin caring for her son, with diapers in the foreground. Says MacGregor: "He's actually playing with his willy to make it absolutely clear that this is a perfectly ordinary little boy."

As for the adult Jesus, most people seem sure of what he looked like, even though the Bible makes no mention of his appearance. He supposedly had a thin, bearded face and fair brown, shoulder-length hair parted in the middle--an image traced back to a medieval relic known as the Veronica, a cloth miraculously imprinted with Christ's face. When worshipers were told they could knock up to 10,000 years off their time in purgatory by praying in front of it, copies multiplied and Christ as we know him was born. One of the exhibition's most extraordinary works is Claude Mellan's The Veil of Saint Veronica (1649), an engraving of Christ's face made of one single undulating line spiraling from the tip of his nose. Indeed, so ingrained is this mythical image that even last July--when Mark Wallinger erected his sculpture of a 1990s Christ with cropped hair and barbed-wire crown on Trafalgar Square's empty plinth--many passers-by declared that the artist had got it all wrong.

This well-known image of Christ, explains MacGregor, made a personal relationship with him seem possible. Also, the emphasis shifted in the 13th century from a triumphant Christ to a selfless, suffering one--which paved the way for such provocative works as Christ as the Man of Sorrows (1520s), a tearful, imploring picture of Jesus, and Christ on the Cold Stone (about 1500), a sculpture of him just before crucifixion, naked and in utter despair. A quick glance around the room leaves no doubt as to the origin of Catholic guilt. "But you can do something about it," says MacGregor, a devout Anglican. "You can behave better."

The viewer's response may depend on religious background. A growing indifference to religion is reflected in waning church attendance across Europe; clearly people are becoming more ignorant of the theology that underpins the paintings, and much of the symbolism is lost on a modern audience. To anyone with a Christian education, the macabre pictures of pain and suffering may make perfect sense, but to a non-Christian many of them could seem gruesome and even perverse. In Francisco Ribalta's Saint Francis embracing the Crucified Christ (about 1620), Francis kisses Christ's side wound with a look of almost erotic ecstasy; prayer sheets feature whips and crucifixion nails; Bernardo Strozzi has Christ guiding Thomas' finger into his bloody gash.

Religious art is confrontational--but that is the point. "They are pictures that are meant to interrogate us," says MacGregor. "What is our reaction to innocence brutalized, to a helpless child, to a person in need?" He is adamant that everyone can relate to Christian art, that archetypal images such as the crucifixion and the piet have become a sort of visual shorthand for universal human experiences. "I wouldn't call myself a raving religious nut, and I don't go to church, but I can still appreciate the art," says one visitor from Dover, 62-year-old Joyce West. "Unless you're completely illiterate, these things have got allusions, nostalgic reminiscences, tattered memories," agrees cultural commentator Jonathan Miller, who is Jewish in origin. "If you prize the great rich past of European imagination you cannot possibly rid yourself of that."

In the show's final room hangs perhaps the most celebrated religious painting of the 20th century: Salvador Dali's controversial Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951), an awesome aerial image of a crucified Christ suspended above the world. When the Glasgow Art Gallery bought it in 1952 for the then exorbitant price of $13,000, critics dismissed it as "skilled sensationalist trickery" and "calculated melodrama." But 50,000 people flocked to see it in the first two months. In a letter printed in the Scottish Art Review, Dali said he didn't want to elicit "emotion through ugliness. My principle preoccupation was that my Christ would be beautiful as the God that he is."

In contrast, Stanley Spencer's The Resurrection, Cookham (1924-26) was received with almost universal acclaim. The intensely optimistic picture has his family and friends rising from the dead, with Christ in the center as a loving, merciful maternal figure, cuddling two babies. "This is meant to be the cosmic resurrection," explains MacGregor. "This is the whole world reborn through the love of Christ." The Cookham villagers are pictured clambering out of their tombs and leisurely boarding a Thames pleasure boat for their one-way trip to Paradise.

For some believers, "Seeing Salvation" will no doubt inspire the same rapture that Hunt's picture did almost a century ago. But even if others emerge convinced of their atheism, the show will surely have challenged, even for a moment, the way viewers see themselves. And isn't that what great art--regardless of its religion--is all about?