Picturing others as children can prompt similar moments of identification. It is no coincidence that, next to scenes of the Crucifixion, Jesus’s babyhood is the most frequent theme in Christian art, his infant innocence and sweetness contrasting poignantly with the way we know his story will end. Images of Jesus sleeping in his mother’s arms subliminally reinforce his counsel that we should learn to regard all our fellow human beings as if they were children. Our enemies too were once infants, in need of attention (rather than bad), fifty centimetres long, breathing softly on their stomachs, smelling of milk and talcum powder.
Though our destructive powers increase with age, though we shed the ability to elicit others’ sympathy even as we acquire a greater store of things to be pitied for, we always retain some of the artlessness and lack of guile with which we began. In recounting one man’s journey from the manger to the cross, Christianity tells a quasi-universal story about the fate of innocence and gentleness in a turbulent world. We are most of us lambs in need of good shepherds and a merciful flock.
6.
The unreliability of our native imaginative powers magnifies our need for art. We depend on artists to orchestrate moments of compassion to excite our sympathies on a regular basis; to create artificial conditions under which we can experience, in relation to the figures we see in works of art, some of what we might one day feel towards flesh-and-blood people in our own lives.
Francisco de Zurbarán, The Bound Lamb, c. 1635. (illustration credit 8.14)
What separates compassion from indifference is the angle of vision: Helen Levitt, New York 1940. (illustration credit 8.15)
The possibility of responding compassionately to others is crucially linked to our angle of vision. According to our perspective, we may see either a self-righteous husband lecturing his wife or two wounded and humiliated individuals equally unable properly to articulate their distress; a proud battalion of soldiers in a village street or a frightened girl hiding from invaders in a doorway; an old man walking home with a bag of groceries or a former gold medallist in free-style swimming transformed into a stooped, sallow figure unrecognizable even to himself.
Looking at a photograph by Helen Levitt of four boys in a New York street, we are likely to find ourselves longing to comfort the grim-faced, stoic young man in the corner, whose mother perhaps only half an hour ago did up the many buttons of his handsome coat, and whose distressed expression evokes a pure form of agony. But how very different the same scene would have looked from just a metre away and another viewpoint. To the boy at the far right, what appears to matter most is a chance to take a closer look at his friend’s toy. He has already lost any interest in the overdressed crybaby by the wall, whom he and his classmates have just slapped hard for a bit of fun, on this day as on most others.
Similarly, a compassionate response to Mantegna’s hilltop panorama depends on how we are guided to look at Calvary. The sunny early afternoon, with its wispy clouds floating across a pale blue horizon, might have seemed exceptionally pleasant and trouble-free to the soldier walking home with his pike resting on his shoulder, and looking forward to a supper of an omelette or a chicken leg. Gazing at the valley before him, with its vineyards and rivers, he would hardly have registered the usual moans emanating from the low-lifes up on the crosses. For his fellow soldiers seated on the ground, meanwhile, the most pressing question on the day of the death of the son of God might have been who was going to win five denarii in the game they were playing on the face of a shield.
Andrea Mantegna, Crucifixion, 1459. (illustration credit 8.16)
The range of possible perspectives in any scene — and the range, therefore, of responses available to the viewer — reveals the responsibilities which fall to the makers of images: to direct us to those who deserve but often do not win our sympathy, to stand as witnesses to all that it would be easier for us to turn away from. The gravity of the task explains the privileged place accorded in the Christian tradition to St Luke, the patron saint of artists, who, legend tells us, was the first to depict the Crucifixion, and who is frequently represented in Christian art with brushes and paints in hand, taking in what the Roman soldiers pretended not to see.
7.
While bitter debate must always surround the larger question of what makes a good artist, in the context of religion the criteria are narrower and more straightforward: a good artist by Christian standards is one who successfully animates the important moral and psychological truths which are in danger of losing their hold on us amid the distracted conditions of daily existence. Christian artists know that their technical talents — their command of light, composition and colour, their mastery of their materials and media — find their ultimate purpose in calling forth appropriate ethical responses from us, so that our eyes can train our hearts.
A reminder of what courage is actually like: Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633. (illustration credit 8.17)
Militating against this mission are all manner of visual clichés. The real difficulty with the ideas which underlie compassion is not that they seem surprising or peculiar, but rather that they seem far too obvious: their very reasonableness and ubiquity strip them of their power. To cite a verbal parallel, we have heard a thousand times that we should love our neighbour, but the prescription loses any of its meaning when it is merely repeated by rote.
So too with art: the most dramatic scenes, painted without talent or imagination, generate only indifference and boredom. The task for artists is therefore to find new ways of prising open our eyes to tiresomely familiar yet critical ideas. The history of Christian art comprises waves of assaults on the great old truths by geniuses who tried to ensure that viewers would be astonished anew and provoked to inner amendment by the humility of the Virgin, the fidelity of Joseph, the courage of Jesus or the sadism of the Jewish authorities.
All such efforts ultimately have a twofold purpose, in accordance with the basic precepts of Christianity: to encourage a revulsion towards evil and to excite a love of goodness. In both cases, inferior art is problematic, not for strictly aesthetic reasons, but because it fails to promote appropriate emotion and action. It is no easy thing to keep making hell vivid: the attempt can easily yield just another vat of burning flesh, one more in a redundant series which, in its formulaic horror, ends up touching no one. It takes more than bloodthirstiness to revive our disgust at cruelty. We can grow bored of seeing yet another painting of the seventh circle of hell or another photograph of the killing fields of Gaza — until a skilful artist stops us in our tracks with an image that finally brings home to us what is truly at stake.
If we’re not careful, even hell gets boring. We need talented artists to evoke the moral commitment we otherwise lose touch with. Top: Fra Angelico, Last Judgement (detail), 1435. (illustration credit 8.18)
Above: Abid Katib, Shifa Hospital, Gaza, 2008. (illustration credit 8.19)
Just as evil must continually be made new to help us sense its power, so too must goodness. Accordingly, Christian artists have tirelessly striven to render virtue vivid, to pierce through our cynicism and world-weariness and to lay before us depictions of individuals whom we should all wish to be a little bit more like.