True to Life.
To mark the year 2000, the National Gallery in London staged a major exhibition - Seeing Salvation - on the representation of Jesus in western art. The exhibition was held in the basement of the Sainsbury Wing. Everyone, not least the National Gallery, was taken by surprise at its popularity. Long queues formed for tickets and special late-night opening hours had to be introduced.
It was observed though that - while the exhibition was full of paintings of Jesus being scourged, being crucified and being buried - there were only two paintings of the Resurrection. Why should this be? Is the world short of Resurrection pictures? Apparently it is. Check the inventories of galleries and museums which show church art and you will find that the Crucifixions outnumber the Resurrections.
Given that the Resurrection is a vital part of the Gospel story for any Christian (the vital part for many Christians) this seems strange. While it is true that since the Middle Ages there have always been parts of the Church which have taken a disproportionate (even unhealthy) interest in the death of Jesus, one imagines that the 20th century might have focussed more on life.
One explanation is that artists can only paint what they know.
The Resurrection is completely different. The Resurrection of Jesus was not about the resuscitation of a corpse. Something so stupendously different happened on Easter Day that the Gospel writers fumble in their attempts to describe it.
None of this means that artists have never risen to the challenge. However, all of the examples I can find major on the idea of 'was dead / isn't dead anymore' *.
Almost any artist, any human being, knows about suffering and injustice, even if only as a third party. The elements of Jesus' betrayal, arrest, torture and death are too often part of common human experience. Some artists will have seen or experienced the physical and mental consequences of suffering. The appalling realism of, say, the Isenheim Crucifixion looks observed, not imagined.
Ian McKillop, a contemporary artist of religious paintings, tells the story of a commission he received for a traditional set of Stations of the Cross for a major place of worship. Having worked on the preliminary sketches, McKillop offered the church authorities free of charge an extra panel - one showing the Resurrection. They declined his offer.
Piero della Francesco's majestic and stately Resurrection, painted in Sansepolcro c1460, presents us with a victory scene. Jesus, strong and erect, steps out of the tomb amidst the sleeping bodies of his erstwhile captors. One can imagine that the artist drew on experiences of triumph to create this scene. But, although a number of artists copied this prototype, the Resurrection of Jesus is far more than a victory over powerful forces.
Some 40 years later Matthias Grünewald (he of the Isenheim Crucifixion above) painted this Resurrection on the same altarpiece.
Have a go at that exercise beloved by art history students everywhere:
compare and contrast Grünewald and Piero.
Grünewald's Resurrection is far more dynamic than Piero's. Jesus bursts from the tomb (a Roman sarcophagus) shattering the lid. The guards are not asleep. They are tossed aside and rendered void by the power of the event. The artist also seems to have combined the (literal) Ascension of Christ with the Resurrection (not a strange idea to modern scholarship, but probably more of an artistic device in the 15th century). Piero's keynote is Victory; Grünewald's is Power.
Any decent search engine will present you with countless versions of these two Resurrection themes: Victory and Power. In the past fifty years or so there have also been attempts to explore the Easter mystery through abstraction - abandoning figures, just as words finally have to be abandoned. Here is Melody Hawtin's Resurrection. What do you think?
The problem for any artist, it seems to me, is that the Resurrection is currently outside of human experience. There is no way to imagine it because the experiences we want to compare it with fall such a long way short of that astonishing new life the first disciples glimpsed in the Risen Christ.
Artists can only re-present to us a world which they know (or which bears similarities to what they know). I think that means that there are some experiences/realities which are beyond the scope of art. I would love to be proved wrong.
* I have not included here depictions of the meeting with Mary (Noli Me Tengere) nor the appearance to Thomas. It seems to me that these deal with experiences of encountering the Risen Christ, rather than of Resurrection itself.