Pesellino: making the vital visible

Great art doesn’t just delight, it educates. Andrew Davison recalls learning deep wisdom from a child as he reviews the Pesellino exhibition at the National Gallery, London.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A painted altarpiece depicts a crucified Christ surrounded by followes, angels and soldiers.

The Pistoia Santa Trinita Altarpiece, Francesco Pesellino.

The National Gallery

My favourite idol features prominently in National Gallery’s new exhibition of paintings by Francesco Pesellino (1422–1457). I say that by way of provocation: I don’t really think it’s an idol, but that is how it was described to me – by a ten-year-old – in one of the best conversations I’ve ever had as a teacher.

That was fifteen years ago. I was in the gallery to give a theological tour, as part of a Confirmation class for Westminster Abbey. Half an hour in, we came to Pesellino’s Pistoia Altarpiece. It’s a glorious painting, but I was unconvinced by what it sets out to do, with its dead Christ within a portrayal of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is about the nature of God, as love and life, and there’s no death there.

Not that I mean to single out Pesellino for criticism. He isn’t the only painter to represent God that way. Massacio’s version is one of the most significant works of the early Florentine Renaissance, resurrecting linear perspective in painting. Just down the road from the National Gallery, at the Courtauld Institute, there’s a similar painting of the Trinity by Botticelli. They’re all magnificent, I just think that if you’re going to try to depict God, the emphasis should be on life.

Standing before Pesellino’s painting fifteen years ago, with those misgivings in mind, I asked the dozen or so kids in the Confirmation class what might be wrong with what the painter as trying to do. One child replied instantly: ‘Please Father, it is an idol.’ Dread rose within me. This child was an Arab Christian. Had he, I wondered, grown up in a culture that treated religious art as idolatrous? Had I offended his conscience continuously for the past half hour, with painting after painting? Best to find out. ‘Have the other paintings been idols?’, I asked. ‘No’, he replied. ‘Why not? Why is this one bad?’ His reply came without pause: ‘Because there’s God the Father in it.’ This was getting interesting. ‘So’, I asked, ‘it’s OK to show Jesus, like the other paintings we’ve seen today, but not God the Father?’ ‘Yes’, was his firm opinion.

These are deep waters, and this was a thoughtful child. To this day, the Orthodox Churches generally forbid depicting of God the Father in icons. Then came one of the most glorious moments of my life as a teacher. ‘Why’s that?’, I asked. ‘Why can we paint Jesus, but not the Father?’ The boy stood silent for some moments. ‘Because’, he said, the cogs of his mind clearly turning, ‘because… because God has made an image of himself in Jesus… You could see Jesus… so you can paint him.’ This was no pre-packaged answer. He was not recycling anything he’d been told before. He was recapitulating the arguments of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (at Nicaea, in AD 787) in real time.

The eight century was a turbulent time when it comes to religious images. They were supressed in the Byzantine Empire from around AD 730, with a firm condemnation in AD 754. Twenty-three years later, at Nicaea, the church reversed the ban. The decisive argument was formulated by St John of Damascus (AD 675 or 676 – 749): ‘When the Invisible One becomes visible to flesh, you may then draw a likeness of His form.’ It’s the same position as our young theologian in the National Gallery had got to on his own.

In this way, Christian art rest on Christmas: on the Incarnation, on God’s coming-into-the-flesh. Heir to the Judaic prohibition of ‘graven images’ Christianity – or most of it – made its peace with depicting holy things, and art in churches, because of Christmas, where we see ‘God made visible’ in Jesus.

In the mystery of the Word made flesh

the light of your glory has shone anew upon our minds

that seeing here God made visible,

we may be caught up in love for God whom we cannot see.

Those are words from the central acclamation of Christmas (the Eucharistic preface) at Midnight Mass (and at Holy Communion for the rest of Christmastide). ‘Seeing here God made visible’.

The events of Christmas form one of the two poles of Christian art. Some delightful examples feature in the Pesellino exhibition: a virgin and child and an Annunciation. The other supremely worthy subject for Christian art is the crucifixion and all that surrounds it. As I have noted, in the current exhibition the crucifixion features in his Trinity altarpiece. God’s humanity is most clearly witnessed at the beginning of Christ’s life, and at the end.

In the intervening years, I have mellowed towards Pesellino’s painting, and that way of depicting something about God. Painting the eternal reality of God is impossible, but in Jesus we see what we need to see. There is no death in God, but the crucifixion is what God’s life looks like when it is made flesh in a world full of evil. The crucifixion shows God’s embrace of human life to the furthest extremes of suffering and degradation. It shows the life of God overcoming death. We can hold onto what the crucifixion offers in a painting like this one, while remembering that the Resurrection underlines the priority of God’s life over death. One painting can’t say everything.

Those fifteen years ago, I was aware that I’d been in a remarkable exchange, one that I would not forget. As I found across my time as a curate, children ask the best theological questions. That might be reason to go to see the Pesellino exhibition with a child. Alongside the paintings I have mentioned already, there are also two gloriously child-friendly panels, each showing multiple events from the life of King David. They offer a sort of fifteenth century comic strip, except that the events are fused into one long scene. Pesellino was a master at painting animals. Magnifying glasses are provided to help you search them out.

Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed, The National Gallery, London, until 19 March.

Article

Art

Faith

Music

14 August 2024

5 min read

Music and religion belong together

The connections between music and faith and the mystery within.

Oliver Wright

After 15 years as a lawyer in London, Oliver is currently doing a DPhil at the University of Oxford.

A pianist plays in the foreground and a seated singer gestures with eyes closed behind

Rachel Chaplin accompanies Evi Dobner.

J.S. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Elgar. The list could go on and on. That is – a list of composers and musicians who wrote music for and played music within the Church. The roots of Western classical music are in the church, as Jeremy Begbie shows in his book Resounding Truth. In fact, it was only relatively recently that ‘popular music’ meant music outside of the Church. The Church has been a great sponsor of the arts throughout modern history, not least in the great Michaelangelo. It is time for that sponsorship of human creativity, in all its forms, to return (see the Renaissance project of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, for a new initiative on precisely this).

Why is it, though, that music and religion can sit so closely alongside one another? And why, in this day and age, might it be time for the two to reconnect?

For all its form and structural devices, there will always remain a horizon of mystery about music. Roland Barthes called music a field of signifying and not a system of signs. In other words, even in its most programmatic examples, music-as-sound has a kaleidoscopic range, which refuses to be pinned down to one meaning or another. This is why Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century found music so useful in the elaboration of his religious idea of Gefühl – an inward yearning and feeling, or, as he also called it, the intuition of the universal. And it is for this same reason that Karl Barth in the twentieth century, a passionate listener to Mozart, was so cautious of using music constructively within his theological system.

Even in its most programmatic examples, music-as-sound has a kaleidoscopic range, which refuses to be pinned down to one meaning or another.

In that sense, music is well placed to carry the new wave of Christian apologists like Elizabeth Oldfield, James K.A. Smith, or even this website, seeking a new direction away from rationalism and clever abstract truth-claims. God is both more real, and more mysterious than that. Music, in fact, can lead the way for language itself. To release language from the captivity of pointing to apparently clear and obvious truth is a distinctly Christian move. After all, we remember that truth is not what a rationalist, or an empiricist, or a logical positivist would want, but is a person, Jesus Christ. And language, like music, can embrace such a mystery. The word ‘God’, as the theologian Gerhard Ebeling once wrote, brings to utterance the mystery of reality. To refer to God is the most pure possibility of language. It affirms the presence of what is completely hidden. “To speak about God”, Ebeling continued, “means to speak about reality as a whole and therefore to speak about humanity, who is exposed to reality as a whole. Conversely, to speak about God is to deny that one can speak about the world as a whole as such, by speaking only about the world, or that one can speak about humanity as such at all by speaking about nothing other than humanity.”

Whilst music without words, then, has often been assumed to be the most numinous, there is no reason why music with words should be any less numinous. Language paired with music knows a not-just-of-this-world reality. Even the most didactic settings in church hymn books engage right-brain activity, shape the memory, and therefore contribute to life formation. Ignoring that function in the shrunken assumption that the goal is simple mathematical truth is a form of sub-human, less-than-creation, folk-lore.

The word ‘God’, as the theologian Gerhard Ebeling once wrote, brings to utterance the mystery of reality. To refer to God is the most pure possibility of language. It affirms the presence of what is completely hidden.

We must celebrate, then, a whole new generation of composers who have written glorious music for Church choirs setting texts from the Bible, amongst them, Sir James MacMillan, Judith Weir, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Arvo Pärt, Alexander and Joanna Forbes L’Estrange, and Deborah Pritchard.

And to their number, we can also now add a professional oboist, Rachel Chaplin, whose beautiful new album ‘Music from an Inner Space’, seeks to guide the listener into religious contemplation. This is an account where words and music both contribute to create a space for contemplation and prayer.

The words are most often taken from the Psalms, given stunning new accounts in these compositions for strings, trumpet, piano and soprano voice, but also in the composer’s own settings such as the remarkably poignant See Him. Psalm 51 is rendered with a bubbling brook of cleansing water rather than the deathly painfulness of Henry Purcell’s setting. A short verse from Psalm 23, ‘he leads me beside quiet waters’, manages both to be consoling and to feel unsettling, urging the listener into a new and uncomfortable space. Like a tree gives Psalm 1 one of its best-ever accounts, with a confidence, a liveliness, and a sense of purpose normally missed.

The simplicity of the vocal settings, combined with the immense skill of the accompanying players, promises for this music to be heard more widely, and reconstructed in different contexts, private and public, within and without the church. What’s more, the care of the musical curation is matched by the composer’s sourcing of paper for the liner notes, artwork for the album cover, and accompanying beeswax candle, specially designed for the album. Listening should not just be on the go. Listening should go with what Charles Taylor would call attention: stopping, lighting a candle, and breathing, still, for more than the length of time it takes to boil a kettle.

Many of us enjoy listening to music of all kinds. Most of us recognise feelings and emotions which appear to go beyond the data and push notifications which the world loudly proclaims to us. Choosing contemplation and prayer over production and wealth-creation can usher us into a form of life which is more human. Music and religious feeling were made for each other.

You can catch Rachel and the group performing the album at the Greenbelt Festival on 24 August 2024.
More details at www.rachelchaplinmusic.com