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

Sport

Wildness

23 January 2025

4 min read

The surfers seeking the stoke of cold water enchantment

The reverence of waves breaks over beach-bums and ancient monks alike.

Riley Ellis

Riley is a writer and journalist, originally from Oregon.

A sufer carries a longboard into the waves

Surfing Oregon's coast.

Megan Nixon on Unsplash.

Long before Malibu or the post-industrial North Shore of Oahu, surfing held an integral role in Pacific Island societies. As Ben Finney and James Houston explain, surfing was a religious practice for ancient Hawaiians. With stocks of morning glory, they lashed the ocean’s surface, chanting “Arise, great surfs from Kahiki.” This compelled the spirits - animating the swells - to foster good waves, therefore good “stoke” (to use a modern idiom).

When I first started to surf, I detected such enchantment. Almost nothing brought me closer to transcendence. On good days, my Sabbath rituals would be galvanized by peeling waves paired with a cold saltwater plunge, somewhat like those Russian Orthodox plunges on January 6th (minus the ice).

And despite the rapid secularization of the West, surfing remains a precious religious ritual. For Christians, Buddhists, New Age spiritualists, etc.—anyone who meets the ocean on her own terms. All speak with reverence about the waves.

Surfers tend to be deeply serious people, distanced from their hash-smoking, dread-headed depictions in pop culture. Some might argue that they take themselves too seriously, one day conducting American counterculture and the next protesting the Vietnam War on the grounds that war disrupts the proverbial Tao.

Such is the genius of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic surfing motif from the film Apocalypse Now. Here, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, trying to find a rational explanation for the Vietnam War, declares “Charlie don’t surf!” with an odd tone of vulnerable bravado. Somewhere in this declaration, we find a longing for peace and transcendence, despite the chorus of machine guns and napalm that inevitably follow. For him, surfing was an antidote to chaos—a sort of victorious peace ritual following the horrors of battle.

Despite the chaos––constant chorus of swells and seagull cries––the ocean remains noiseless in a spiritual sense. She quiets anyone nearby.

Jaimal Yogis, author of Saltwater Buddha, forthrightly connects surfing to enlightenment. In Hawaii, he studied dharma and traditional philosophy, living like Jack Kerouac and Kelly Slater combined: “[mastering] all the waves (internal and external).” There exist many paths to enlightenment, Yogis adds in his follow-up A Surfer’s Guide to Buddhism. Surfing is just one route through the ocean of suffering, albeit more appealing than ancient asceticism.

Surfing, Peter Kreeft claims, is akin to Buddhism in that they both contain unique words for their unique “highs”: ‘stoke’ and Nirvana. In a little book called I Surf, Therefore I Am, Kreeft regards surfers as Aristotelian disciples, chasing life’s greatest good (happiness) before anything else. In that respect, surfers live truthfully to the Ethics.

The activity of surfing, he says, transports a person into timeless happiness. ‘Stoke’ is a mystical ebullience, ecstasy of a sacred kind because ‘stoke’ is not a fleeting thing. It sustains itself both during and after the activity which creates it––a pure and lasting joy. “Maybe surfing brings us back to the timelessness of Eden,” Kreeft says.

Ancient Celtic monks found the seashore ideal for spiritual refuge, regarding their pilgrimage to the sea as following Christ into the desert. Visiting the ruins of one of these seaside monasteries, Dr. Ed Newell (author of The Sacramental Sea), felt himself overcome by its solitude. The ascetic life on the isle of Papa Stronsay seemed spiritually claustrophobic, he says.

These monks were not surfers (to our knowledge). They were beach bums. They recognized a simple, solemn truth about the sea: its intense solitude. Despite the chaos––constant chorus of swells and seagull cries––the ocean remains noiseless in a spiritual sense. She quiets anyone nearby, leaving them, as Kierkegaard puts it, silent and “nothing before God.” If we can learn from the lilies and the birds then surely waves and pelicans offer similar wisdom.

When I moved away from the coast for school, this was the most intense realization. Now, my life is full of constant noise. I thirst for that vast silence that nourished me back home. And while Kreeft is right, that ‘stoke’ never truly dissolves, adjusting to life away from the waves has been a terrible trial. During the first week in the dorms, the thought of rolling swells kept me awake and staring at the ceiling. I would instinctively open my window, only to realize that there was no distant sound of crashing waves to put me to sleep. There was, and has been, something dislodged ever since leaving the sea.

And so, today, I skipped class and stood at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. A fierce storm – bearing the name La Ninia – raged across the Oregon Coast. Sideways rain pelted my face. Though coated in a 5mm wetsuit, my fingers were already painfully numb before stepping into the sea, which was probably 5°-10°C.

I paddled past the breaking waves and rediscovered what was missing. The part of myself that never made it to university. I ditched my nine-foot fiberglass longboard for a moment and thought about nothing: floating, staring into the blankness of the gray sky. My body went numb and became weightless, the existential burdens vacating with each rise and fall of the swell. Once again, I was alone and silent before God. And despite losing myself in the vastness––the overwhelming silence––of that moment, I found myself entirely.

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