Review

Art

Culture

6 January 2024

5 min read

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

Attention

Character

Culture

Film & TV

21 January 2025

4 min read

Traitors holds a mirror up to this obsession of ours

The attitude that is eroding empathy.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

The cast and presenter of a competition TV programme assembled in a montage.

BBC.

“So you’re basically calling me Harold Shipman or something?”

2025 may have barely begun but BBC One’s The Traitors has already offered a strong contender for TV moment of the year.

If you’re not familiar with the show – and if you aren’t, where have you been? – a group of strangers head off to a castle in Scotland to earn money through a series of challenges while show host Claudia Winkleman smoulders at the camera. Meanwhile, some competitors are designated ‘Traitors’ and can steal the money at the end of the competition, while the rest – the ‘Faithfuls’ – must unmask the ‘Traitors’, banishing one person each day. In return, the Traitors can ‘murder’ one Faithful a night.

It's stupid and ridiculous and melodramatic. I love it.

Something that has struck me this series is the inability of contestants to imagine that people might behave differently to them. Early on, Dr. Kas “Definitely-Not-Harold-Shipman” Ahmed raises a toast to a ‘murdered’ Faithful. “That’s sketchy,” everyone immediately thinks. “I wouldn’t have done that, and I’m a Faithful, so Kas MUST BE A TRAITOR!”

The group votes to banish him shortly afterwards.

The certainty with which contestants decide someone is a Traitor based on the most minute and innocuous details is incredible. Oooh, Glenda just coughed at an inopportune moment. Obviously a Traitor. Look at Keith taking the stairs two at a time. It’s like he wants to be caught!

The ‘Faithfuls’ seem completely unable to imagine people might be different from them. That they might think differently, or act differently. There is, in other words, a complete lack of empathy.

As the always-absolutely-right-about-everything Brené Brown tells us, sympathy is recognising someone else’s perspective. But empathy is feeling with someone; it is sharing that perspective. And it’s empathy that’s needed for human connection. And it’s empathy that is missing on The Traitors.

All of this ultimately reminds me of the work of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor is arguably the most influential living philosopher. Much of his work – especially in books like Sources of the Self, and A Secular Age – is concerned with explaining modern western societies, their characteristics, and where those characteristics emerge from.

Taylor claims that these societies have stopped privileging ‘exteriority’ and have started privileging ‘interiority’ instead.

What on earth does that mean?

In 1637, René Descartes says “I think, therefore I am,” and western philosophy never recovers. Descartes is looking for a foundation, a starting point from which he can make sense of himself and the world around him. But this is not easy. What’s to say he’s not hallucinating, or being deceived by a demon, so that the world around him isn’t as it seems?

What’s the one thing he can be sure of? That he thinks!

The fact he’s even thinking and doubting his senses tells Descartes that he is someone or something who exists and thinks. That sounds obvious, but it gives Descartes the foundation from which he can make sense of reality.

As a result of Descartes’ philosophy, we imagine that our very ‘selves’ are located entirely ‘within us’ somehow, with the rest of reality found ‘outside’ ourselves. This is a ‘gap’ of sorts, between us and the world, while the interior self becomes the place where the meaning of our existence is discovered and understood.

Modern life, Taylor says, therefore instils in us a sense of detachment from everyone and everything else. I have my interior world, you have yours. I can never truly know you, and you can never truly know me.

I could be the next Harold Shipman for all you know.

But it wasn’t always like this, Taylor argues. Modernity’s preoccupation with the inner self was preceded by a more outside-centred view of the world.

In this outside-centred worldview, I and the people around me aren’t simply unknowable black holes of interiority. Instead, we are both parts of a broader created realm. And, by virtue of us both being creatures located within something bigger than either of ourselves, this outside-centred view of the world becomes a point of commonality from which we can get to know each other.

Shared humility leads to connection, in other words.

All of this, I think, goes some way to explaining why I’m watching a seemingly lovely doctor having a quasi-breakdown over being misconstrued as a serial killer. The Traitors shows how obsessed we have become with our own interiority. We are inward-looking creatures now. As such, we are often slow to recognise the ways in which our shared place within creation only unites us.

While a little introspection and self-reflection is vital for healthy human flourishing, out-and-out navel-gazing only hinders our ability to connect with those around us. With a little help from Charles Taylor, The Traitors reminds me to get out of my own head and to see beyond myself. To look at the world around me, and to see the people with whom I share it.

To see them with empathy, not as unknowable voids of interiority, but as fellow creatures walking a shared journey.

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