Unspeakable images: When words fail | The audacity of Christian art | National Gallery

No single painting of Christ in the canon of Christian art can adequately express what Christians believe about him, but this final episode considers how a painting can point beyond itself, encouraging the viewer not to take the image at face value but to engage with the mystery it presents.

Chloë Reddaway explores the use of blank spaces as a radical way of indicating divine activity and looks at the value of unfinished works in stimulating the viewer’s imagination with a close look at Michelangelo’s unfinished masterpiece, ‘The Entombment’ (around 1500–1).

‘The audacity of Christian art: The problem of painting Christ’ is a seven-part series in which Dr Chloë Reddaway, Howard and Roberta Ahmanson Curator in Art and Religion at the National Gallery, explores the theological and artistic challenges involved in painting Christ as fully human and fully divine, and reveals some of the ingenious and surprising ways in which Renaissance artists responded.

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The National Gallery houses the national collection of paintings in the Western European tradition from the 13th to the 19th centuries. The museum is free of charge and open 361 days per year, daily between 10.00 am - 6.00 pm and on Fridays between 10.00 am - 9.00 pm.

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