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

Assisted dying

Culture

Politics

4 October 2024

5 min read

Assisted dying and the cult of kindness

I witnessed an assisted death. We need to be honest in the debate about it.

Matthew Hall

Matthew is an author and screenwriter.

A tableau shows minature figures of two people, one sitting on a life size syringe and the other stands

Etactics Inc on Unsplash.

The Assisted Dying Bill is likely to be passed into law this autumn, the government having promised to ‘rush it through’. The debate will invariably be conducted in a fog of euphemistic language in which ‘compassion’ and ‘dignity’ will feature heavily on both sides, while the main point is likely to be missed: the legalisation of euthanasia or AD, marks a tectonic shift from a Christian to a post-Christian society and should be a wake-up moment for dozing Christians.

I was recently present when my aunt, an artist who had become a Canadian citizen, died by euthanasia in her own home while in the very early stages of motor neurone disease. She was 72, divorced, living independently, fully mobile (although she had lost the use of one arm) and was laughing and joking up to the moments before the doctor (or ‘The Killer’ as her son called him) injected the first dose of the lethal cocktail. It happened at 7pm on a Tuesday evening. She had made the phone call requesting her death at 3pm the previous Sunday – yes, a Sunday. Service of a kind our NHS can only dream of.

As a reluctant witness to what I consider a murder-suicide, I was nevertheless beguiled by the relatively clean ending (although there was some disturbing gurgling that apparently occurs as a result of the lungs filling with fluid) to a life that was about to become very difficult. Her two older siblings, including my mother, are each currently several years into slow deaths from combined Parkinson’s and dementia.

I am an almost daily visitor and a secondary carer to my mother, and while she is mute, benign and seemingly contented, the toll on my stepfather and on me is enormous. I often pray for it all to be over – it’s an endless grind and her former self would be utterly horrified to see herself this way! – and yet, as a Christian, I have to see purpose in it. One thing it certainly does do, is force carers to be selfless and compassionate in the strict sense of the word, which is ‘to suffer with’.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible.

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My aunt didn’t want the trial of becoming ill and dependent, and the Canadian government gave her an opt-out which she grabbed the instant she received her diagnosis. Confirmation by two doctors that she was terminally ill and of sound mind – almost a trifling formality – got her immediate approval. She was, to use her kind of language, ‘out of here’ a mere three months later.

How could she have been so cavalier and determined to die, despite the protests of her son, nephew and granddaughters? She was, in hindsight, a perfectly minted product of the 1960s who believed above all in doing her own thing - whatever felt right. Such notions were anathema to her Christian parents and their dutiful wartime generation but are now the norm.

Like many who came of age to the sound of the Beatles, she toured the spiritual supermarket and picked out the nice bits from Christian, pagan and Eastern religions – predominantly those that allow you to think that life is about ‘being in tune’ or feeling good about yourself. This did most definitely not include becoming immobile and having strangers change her nappy. She believed in an afterlife, ‘love’, aliens and reincarnation but definitely not in judgement or consequences for her suicide.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible, with the added bonus of leaving her assets to her family.

The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge.

Polls in Canada and the UK show that the vast majority would consider this a win all round. According to Opinium, 75 per cent of British adults support AD. In political terms this a ‘bridge issue’ almost without comparison, uniting 78 per cent of Conservatives with 77 per cent of Labour supporters, yet no issue should more starkly dramatise the unbridgeable chasm between Christian and secular world views.

The sharpness of this divide has, however, been successfully obscured by the insidious (and to my mind, diabolical) Cult of Kindness that has inveigled itself into both secular and Christian space. Imitating Christian virtues, it subverts them by subtly perverting language - by using ‘compassion’ when what is meant is ‘convenience’, for example – and by making ‘happiness’ rather than self-sacrifice the highest good. This leads both sides into dishonesty and self-delusion.

The biggest pro-AD lie is that it is merely an escape route for the tiny few facing the most intolerable suffering with no additional consequences. The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge. It is now the fifth most common cause of death and climbing by 30 per cent each year. Every seriously ill Canadian now feels some pressure to address the option. Cases of people choosing AD out of despair, depression or at the suggestion of a lazy or uncaring State official are already numerous. Those who have signed an advance consent waiver setting a date for their euthanasia in the event of their mentally incapacity, are now being terminated. In some cases, the demented refuse to cooperate and are euthanised under forced sedation. The State is already saving money and families are saving their inheritances. Life itself has been downgraded.

The Christian side indulges in even bigger untruths. Windy episcopal speeches about advances in palliative care avoid the hard fact that denying AD involves many suffering prolonged and painful deaths while family finances are destroyed and carers worn down to a husk. The pill can’t be sugared: thou shalt not kill is absolute, not an invitation for an ethical discussion. The point is so fundamental that to avoid it and be drawn into discussing the minutiae of legislation is a betrayal of the faith.

Christians won’t save the secular world from AD and its consequences, but the current debate is an opportunity for honesty and for Christians to save themselves from the delusion that the true virtue of compassion can be inverted to justify killing.

The Christian religion began with an agonising death of a kind which its scriptures exhorts its followers not to fear. It’s a tough message: God doesn’t promise the comfort we would like in this life. We do have the means and the duty to alleviate much suffering, but death as a consumer choice is simply off the table.