The Audacity Of Christian Art by Paolo Dala
Virgin and Child (Madonna and Child)
Giovanni Bellini (1480 - 1485)
Louvre (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)
How do you paint figure who is fully human, and fully divine? How do you show, in paint, that the person in a painting is human like you and me, and also God? It’s an amazingly daring thing to even attempt. But artists working in the Christian tradition have done exactly that for nearly two millennia... My background is in theology and I’m particularly interested in these paintings within a religious context. What do they say about God, and how do they say it?
...one of the greatest questions in Christian art: How do you paint Christ? Before starting, it is important to know that Christians believe in one God who is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This is the Trinity and God the Son is Jesus Christ. Christians believed that he was simultaneously fully human and fully divine. The Incarnation - the way in which Jesus Christ came down from heaven, lived and died on earth, was resurrected, and ascended to heaven again - has prompted some pretty complex theology. It has also prompted some extraordinary art...
Once you know the story (Thomas, an apostle of Jesus Christ), it’s not hard to sympathize with Thomas. He knew Christ was human. He knew Christ was dead. It took an encounter with the Resurrected Christ Himself to make Thomas recognize His divinity... the challenge facing an artist depicting Christ. In a way, using the story of Thomas is simpler for an artist painting for a Christian audience. They viewer can do the work if they know the narrative. But most of the time the artist has to treat the viewer a bit like Thomas...
The challenge of painting the united humanity and divinity of Christ is a uniquely complex one. In fact, there’s something extraordinary and audacious about Christian art. If we think of the historical context from which it emerged, it’s astonishing that it ever did. The Hebrew Bible has a prohibition against graven images and under the Christian communities developed in a pagan Greco-Roman World that was full of multiple deities who could change their appearance. But Christians believed that one particular man was God Incarnate. Not a deity who changes shape, not a man with magic powers, but fully human and fully divine. Now how on earth do you paint that? Christian art attempts to do something which no other form of art has ever tried to do and the Christian art is, in one sense, a history of artistic responses to this enormous challenge of painting Christ. It’s an attempt that which must, necessarily, ultimately fail. Neither words, nor images can fully describe God. Nor can they explain the human and the divine could be united in one person. Nevertheless, Christians have used both words and pictures to explore their experiences of God and their belief in the Incarnation. And just as some religious language explicitly acknowledges its own inadequacy, some painters have drawn attention visually to the paradoxical nature of attempting to depict Christ... The audacity of Christian art lies in this continued attempt to undertake a truly impossible task.
Howard and Roberta Ahmanson Curator in Art and Religion,
National Gallery (London, United Kingdom)
The Audacity of Christian Art: The Problem with Christ