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

Culture

Death & life

Digital

Easter

17 April 2025

4 min read

Do you have a right to be remembered?

Our desire to be in control might not survive our demise.

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

A composite show a smiling woman next to a small illustrate of someone walking off into the distance.

Kristyna Squared.one on Unsplash .

“Madam, those that are about to die salute you.”

Words attributed to Roman captives and criminals fated to die before the emperor, were used (ironically) by Councillor Kieron Mallon at the last Council meeting of this term of Oxfordshire County Council last week. ‘Madam’ was the Council’s Chair, wishing everyone well. Elections are on the way.

Easter is also on the way, and in the period leading up to the commemoration of the resurrection of Christ from the dead, nearly 2,000 years ago, Christians are invited to think about their own mortality. ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return’ were words my priest intoned to me as he marked a cross with ashes on my forehead on 5 March, Ash Wednesday.

Ash already emblemizes a belief in rebirth, even before the power of the story of the Christ’s resurrection is considered. I for one felt immensely hopeful on Ash Wednesday this year. Having just secured a new place to call home, and one year into my job as Democratic Services Officer to Oxfordshire County Council, looking after the likes of Councillor Mallon, life felt pretty swell.

My priest and I spoke about the ways in which death and hope are joined at the hip. The ancient Greeks believed that a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of the one before it. So do we. I have found myself, so far this year, visiting people and places I strongly associate with former lives, from friends I lived with as an undergraduate to a town I went on holiday as a child to the beach where my late Granny’s ashes were scattered. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

More specifically, the Christian believes that ‘whoever loses their life for [Christ’s] sake will find it’, in the sense that true self-discovery arises when we let go of the ego, when we allow ourselves to be changed. Thinking about mortality, therefore, changes life, in so far as we are better equipped to surrender and salute the Saviour. That worldview has shaped public servants in years gone-by.

An overwhelming majority of people in the course of human history have been forgotten.

I recently heard Dr Ian McGilchrist, the psychiatrist, describe the desire to control everything in life as the ‘besetting sin’ of the age in which we live. The desire to be remembered, rather than reborn, captures it better in my mind. Mankind has always wanted to remain in control. Souls will always be reluctant to surrender. However, what we have now is a world in which people feel uniquely entitled to make impact.

People feel that they have a right to be remembered, but it is not so. An overwhelming majority of people in the course of human history have been forgotten. Moreover, the past can be especially compelling when we have a window into a world in which people did not necessarily expect to make any kind of worldly impact whatsoever. Theirs was a happier place.

The twentieth century was described by Philip Rieff in 1966 in terms of the ‘Triumph of the Therapeutic’. He wrote, ‘Religious man was born to be saved’, but ‘psychological man is born to be pleased.’ ‘Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going’. Therapy enables that objective. But therapy to what end?

Counselling can be construed as a device to regain control. The counselled, if fixed, can go about trying to change the world, trying to make an impact, resuming the rather pleasing but never-ending mission to be remembered. For anyone of a religious sensibility, however, that is not the objective. Rather, new life is given only for the whole resurrection story in our own lives to be repeated.

Around the time that Rieff wrote his book, the historian Herbert Butterfield, a Christian, wrote this. ‘Those who lived when the world was static – when the silhouette of the ploughman against the horizon hardly changed in the passage of a thousand years – may have something to teach us, who only know a breathless, rapidly changing world and who seem to be having to pluck what we can from life while running at full speed.’

Social media has surely exacerbated this condition because it connects us to others at the cost of contemplation about what life – and death – really entails. It is a place where we try to evidence to others the impact we are having, where we write our own eulogies and our own epitaphs and have access to the whole world whom we expect to read the same.

Life changes to a much greater extent these days, in this place, than it did for the ploughman in the passage of a thousand years, or captives and criminals in the Roman world, including Jesus Christ who was identified as one such. However, if we can somehow create conditions to focus less on having impact in and on a volatile world, and being someone who ought to be remembered, we will find that we have more hope.

In turn, we will change the world for the better, but despite ourselves, and for me that is what this period leading up to Easter is all about. We may find that others who are about to die salute us too, for the good deeds we have done that may well be forgot.

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