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.

Review

Art

Culture

4 September 2025

5 min read

Genesis Tramaine: the painter whose faces catch the spirit

New York's expressionist devotional artist

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

AN experessionist painting shows a face with a large open smile and many eyes.

Oh! Ye’ Faithful, 2024

Almine Rech.

Genesis Tramaine begins her presentation as part of the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025 by singing ‘Amen’, a gospel song popularised by The Impressions in the 1960s. Her presentation about her art is essentially an act of testimony, such as might be given in a Southern Baptist Church in the USA.

Tramaine is an expressionist devotional painter from the US who is deeply inspired by biblical texts and whose work is held in permanent collections, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The large expressionist heads she paints are not representational portraits but expressions of spiritual energies and forces within the person, often inspired by and showing biblical figures and saints, as well as church people, family and friends.

She speaks about having met the Gospel before meeting God, as she attended a strict Southern Baptist Church while growing up. She drew from the back of the church and also wrote thoughts and impressions in notebooks. She says that she loved church but that it fell out of place in her life as she grew up.

One day, far from home and needing help, she called her Nana on the phone, who said to seek first the kingdom of God. She found quiet in herself and prayed more, finding herself in conversation with herself. On one occasion, disturbed, she couldn't sleep and was experiencing physical manifestations. At this time, she says, she saw all of herself and surrendered to God. In the morning, she read Matthew’s Gospel - seek ye first the kingdom of God.

The words in the Bible started to make sense to her as a story reading itself to her and she began drawing faces. Her Bible had white images of Christ and Mary, so the words didn't match the images, and this was a spur to paint the women and children of the Bible revealing the beauty of black women in particular. She read the Bible in the King James Version, stopped trying to fit in and found the strength to play with and disrupt narratives. The tools and materials to do this were all one’s that she found in the Bible.

Eyes are our organ of vision, so faces sporting dozens of eyes are those which, like the saints, achieve the greatest insight into the true depths of reality.

Her current exhibition at the Consortium Museum, Dijon, France, is entitled Facing Giants’ and addresses these issues head-on. She has said of the exhibition: ‘I think it’s important that you paint a real narrative, an honest reflection. I don’t think [my saints] look like saints as they have been given to us...[those] were false narratives. The images of saints that we know and that are projected at us are all white with blond hair—and we all know that that is not true.’

She has explained that: ‘These are biblical saints who have faced giants whether those giants are actual giants or giants like fear, love, acceptance or non-acceptance, the giants of facing God and not being accepted, giants of judgments… those who have sat in the mud, if you would, and found a way to persevere. And I wanted to spend as much time as I could with those energies and those narratives, as a tool of self-encouragement and as a tool of encouragement for others.’ She feels these energies literally, speaking of entering the room where she paints with a sense of a whole other people - silent saints – being present with her when she is at the canvas.

While Tramaine emphasises the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in her work, critics have noted her stylistic closeness to graffiti art and she herself has explained that she was familiar with graffiti in her childhood in Brooklyn. Eric Troncy, Director of the Consortium Museum, relates her work stylistically to the expressionism of George Condo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Willem de Kooning. Tramaine, though, speaks of other influences including Sister Gertrude Morgan, Romare Bearden, and David Hammond. In the McDonald Agape Lecture, she spoke of Hilma af Klimt and Jack Whitten as inspirations, as well as gaining inspiration from the significance of the Iyoba Idia of Benin in Nigerian culture.

One of the distinctive features of Tramaine’s portraits is the plethora of eyes that often feature. Eyes are our organ of vision, so faces sporting dozens of eyes are those which, like the saints, achieve the greatest insight into the true depths of reality. Some more recent images have also featured a plethora of open mouths and teeth. Troncy writes that: ‘Her figures, it seems, have started to smile. To shout, perhaps; to sing—why not?; and to talk—most definitely.’

This is interesting, in part because, when I asked her in an earlier interview about her influences, she began by speaking about her love of gospel music, including that of Jonathan McReynolds and Le’Andria Johnson. She says this Jesus focused music ‘encourages me to praise from the depth of my soul; to paint, let go and trust from that space’. While she’s ‘not quite sure what happens’ then, ‘Black folk say I catch the spirit’. She speaks of losing time as you paint, saying that you can't be present when painting as you have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space.

This is, in part, why she began her McDonald Agape Lecture presentation by singing.

Her testimony is essentially simple, direct and profound: ‘I've wanted to be an artist since I was a child. I took my prayers seriously, which means I began to develop a relationship with Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior … I asked God if I could paint and pray, help and give, as an offering of service for the rest of my life. And the paintings began to mature. I committed to the relationship that painting offers spiritually, in Jesus’ name.’

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