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.

Column

Community

Culture

Football

Sport

26 March 2025

4 min read

I’ll miss football’s disappearing cathedrals

Sharing the same physical space as those that go before is a spiritual act.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A CGI image of a son and dad holding hands on the concourse of a modern stadium.

The 'new' Old Trafford.

MUFC.

On the way back from a gig a few weeks ago, my dad asked me a question. “Are there any artists that you’d be so up for seeing that you’d pay anything for a ticket?”

Paul McCartney? Julian Lage? Stevie Wonder?

That’s about it really. Notwithstanding the fact that I’m running out of internal organs to sell to afford gig tickets nowadays, it struck me that a lot of the people I’d pay anything to see are now all dead. Some of them died long before I was born: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon (as part of The Beatles), John Bonham (as part of Led Zeppelin). And then there are the bands who split up before I was born, especially Waters-Gilmour-Wright-Mason era Pink Floyd and Gabriel-Hackett-Banks-Rutherford-Collins era of Genesis.

But there are a few artists I wish I’d had the chance to see in the fleeting moments we were alive at the same time. David Bowie, Jeff Beck, Gary Moore, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Neil Peart (of Rush), Jeff Buckley (although as a 4-year-old when he died, he probably would have been lost on me back them.)

I was thinking about this question again while watching the Merseyside football derby in February. It was a proper Merseyside derby. By this, I meant that it ended up with fans on the pitch, fights, two players being sent off, and both Liverpool’s manager and assistant manager being sent off too. A proper Merseyside derby.

It was also the last ever Merseyside derby to be held at Goodison Park. And that made me profoundly sad.

I’ve driven past Goodison a fair bit. You catch site of it looming over Stanley Park as you walk up to Anfield. But I’ve never actually been to a match at Goodison. And now I never will. Goodison will soon join a growing list of football grounds that no longer exist: Highbury, Maine Road, White Hart Lane, The Dell, the Boleyn Ground. All gone.

Along with Goodison, another stadium has been added to the scrap pile in recent days. You may have heard of it: Old Trafford.

Yes, Manchester United – who last month announced 200 redundancies at the club, having previously made 250 members of staff redundant last year – have made the decision to spend £2bn on leaving the historic and iconic, if crumbling, Old Trafford stadium to move to a new 100,000-seat stadium. Turns out I only have a few more years to go to Old Trafford before it becomes another page in my book of regrets.

Highbury. Maine Road. White Hart Lane. The Dell. The Boleyn Ground. Goodison. Old Trafford. These are football’s cathedrals, and they are disappearing.

And all of this reminds me about the kind of debates that pop up whenever a church building – whether active or defunct – is used for a purpose that some Christians find disrespectful or blasphemous. Church buildings are often contested spaces; what goes on within them is policed in a way that simply isn’t the case for many other public spaces. Should they host heavy metal gigs? Should disused churches be converted into housing, as this slightly bizarre article seems to revel in.

When I used to live in Nottingham, there was a bar in the centre of town located inside an old church. It’s a gorgeous old building and it has largely survived the conversion into a bar. It is, it must be said, a lovely place for a drink. But it’s difficult not to feel at least a tinge of sadness that, where that place once reverberated with the sound of praise and worship, it now echoes with the thrum of drinks orders and club music. It feels haunted with the presence of God.

Look, things change, I know that. I’m not so nostalgic as to think that everything needs to stay as it was when I was a child. But it’s hard not to wonder about the histories that are being lost, and the stories that are being forgotten, when we demolish or repurpose our church buildings, or our football stadia.

There is a reason why we preserve our history, and our cultural heritage. Sharing the same physical space as those that go before us is a supremely spiritual act. We visit castle ruins, old churches, and war-torn battlefields because they connect us to those that went before. We enter the stories of those people and realise that perhaps they aren’t so different from our own stories.

Come May, the Gwladys Street End at Goodison will have sung its last song. In the near future, Old Trafford’s Stretford End will fall silent, too. Liverpool’s owners FSG have come in for a lot of criticism since taking over in 2010. But, along with appointing Jürgen Klopp, their decision to renovate rather than move away from Anfield will surely go down in history as an unqualified success. It is a place that reeks of history, of stories past. And those stories shape and underwrite the club’s stories in the present.

Again: things change, I get that. But whether it’s the church’s buildings or football stadia, we lose these spaces – and the stories born within them – at great cost to ourselves.

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