Amazon.co.uk:
You've mounted a major National Gallery exhibition, presented four
BBC TV programmes, written a book and are delivering a nation-wide lecture
programme. Why this four-pronged celebration of Christian Art just now?
Neil MacGregor:
One third of the entire National Gallery collection is Christian
Art and every collection of paintings in every city in Europe tells the same
story. It is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of European culture.
This is our CULTURAL inheritance and it's vital that we make that clear. The
National Gallery isn't trying to evangelise or convert anyone to Christianity.
In fact one of the challenges is to find ways of presenting this monocultural
legacy to a multicultural society. These images affect the way we think and
respond to almost everything else we see. Whether we are Christian believers or
not we are conditioned to respond to, say, images of suffering when we see it
in a photograph or film of a war zone or of some dreadful natural disaster, in
a particular way which combines compassion and empathy with a sense of personal
responsibility. The exhibition, which has taken us three years to prepare, and
its spin-offs, are the National Gallery's contribution to Millennium year and
2000 years of Christian Art.
Amazon.co.uk:
You have co-written the book Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ
in Art
with Erika Langmuir. Have you worked closely together?
MacGregor:
Yes, very. Erika was head of education at the National Gallery.
Then she became Professor of Art History at the Open University so she was an
ideal person to work with on this project. She really understands how to
communicate with people who come to an art gallery or an art book at different
levels. Some are beginners. Others are advanced students of art. Many come
somewhere between. Places like the National Gallery and the British Museum were
forerunners of the Open University, in a sense. Students of all ages were, and
are, welcome to study and learn here abundantly without previous
qualifications.
Amazon.co.uk:
So have you confined yourself in the exhibition to images of
Christ which normally belong in the National Gallery?
MacGregor:
No, although many of the key works do. Titian's Noli Me
Tangere
, which shows the risen Christ meeting Mary Magdalene in the garden,
lives here permanently, for example. We have also borrowed from other British
galleries and from collections elsewhere in Europe - such as Zurbaran's
Agnus Dei
which usually lives in the Prado in Madrid. The TV programmes
and the book are able to sweep wider than the exhibition itself because in
these we've been able to include art which can't be moved or borrowed like
Rubens' Deposition of Christ
, the altar piece in Antwerp Cathedral, or
Gozzoli's Chapel of the Magi
in the Medici-Riccardi Palace in
Florence.
Amazon.co.uk:
Given that other cultures--Jews and Muslims for example--don't
allow visual images of God, what especial problems have artists in the
Christian tradition found in trying to convey faith and belief in pictures?
MacGregor:
The artistic problems were and are huge. How do you show in a
painting the mystery of the incarnation--a human baby who is also God and born
to suffer? Then there's the extraordinary relationship between suffering and
witnesses of suffering in Christian art. You, the onlooker, have caused the
horror which you see in the painting so you feel responsible when you look at a
crucifixion or flagellation scene--or at that pitifully dejected figure in the
sculpture, Christ on a cold stone
, which is in the exhibition. Yet, in a
sense, you are also the beneficiary because your behaviour can reduce this
suffering. Another problem is how can painters depict the risen Christ and make
it visually clear this character is both dead and alive? It isn't pretty art,
by the way, and some of the subject matter is very tough, ugly and unpleasant.
It puzzles, for example, the Japanese or Hindus, whose cultures do allow visual
imagery, that so much of our art is so painful.
Amazon.co.uk:
Can you explain how you think these paintings can speak to
non-believers?
MacGregor:
Anyone looking at a nativity scene, such as Jan Gossaert's The
Adoration of the Kings
or Robert Campin's The Virgin and Child in an
Interior
can sense the affection for a child and joy at his birth mingled
with the certainty that at some time in the future this innocent child--any
child--will suffer. That is a universal message. So is the central tenet of
resurrection or the survival of love beyond death. It doesn't have to be Christ
and Mary Magdalene. There is a profound message, a supreme myth of hope here
for anyone who has ever loved and lost. The pictures are meditations which will
help those who contemplate them to understand themselves better. They are not
just illustrations.
Amazon.co.uk:
Are you saying that you can separate response to artistic images
of Christ from religious experience and understanding?
MacGregor:
No, not at all. But the 20th century, for all sorts of
understandable reasons, saw retreat from faith and an increasing ambivalence
towards organised religion. That has led to a growing habit of discussing
Christian art in terms only of its composition, period or quality of painting
while ignoring what the artist was actually trying to say. And that is to miss
the whole point. It's come about, I think, because we live in an age of
discarded religion which hasn't yet been allowed to become a myth. So there is
no frame of reference and the meaning of paintings of Christian scenes gets
side-stepped.
Amazon.co.uk:
Is that exclusive to Christian Art?
MacGregor:
Yes, I think it is. If you take, say, Titian's Ariadne and
Bacchus
here in the National Gallery, it is very clear that this is based
on a classical myth. The universal message is that the unhappy Ariadne needs
comfort. We've all been in that position and needed a Bacchus to rescue us. On
the other hand every one of us has been Bacchus--in the form of drink, sex,
good living or whatever he represents--to someone else's Ariadne. We don't have
any problems with that because we are clear in our minds that it's a myth. But
faced with, say, Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ
the tendency
is to discuss perspectives and constructions and to avoid the deep waters of
the painting's inner meaning--although, of course, it's crucial.
Amazon.co.uk:
Do visitors to the National Gallery actually know the Christian
background now, given that scripture is not taught in schools as thoroughly as
perhaps it once was?
MacGregor:
No, they don't. I attribute that to the fact that in British
schools we've never managed to separate the culture of Christianity from
religion. I think it's because, unlike other European countries, we have this
link in Britain between the established church and education. A daily act of
corporate worship and regular religious education lessons are compulsory in
British schools--but that's not the same thing as being rigorously taught the
Christian background for cultural reasons.
Amazon.co.uk:
That seems to bring us to the inevitable question about your own
religious position?
MacGregor:
It's hopelessly confused! I am a committed believer and a regular
attender at Christian church services but my affiliations are various. I grew
up in Scotland in the Calvinist tradition where there were no images. Religion
was a matter for argument, debate and study as a way of struggling for the
truth. It wasn't visual. Then I got interested in art, especially religious
subjects. My work on French 17th-century paintings led me to read a great deal
of Catholic theology which I found fascinating and sustaining. Today I usually
go to Anglican services in London. If I'm in Scotland then I return to my
Calvinist roots. When I'm in Europe I go to Catholic services. I don't want to
be seen as any kind of religious ex-pat!
Amazon.co.uk:
Where do you see Christian art going now that it's in its third
millennium?
MacGregor:
Artists will probably take Christian ideas and themes and
represent them in an increasingly abstract way--but with the old resonances and
references unmistakably there to anyone conditioned in the tradition. I also
think some of the most interesting developments will be in the post-colonial
world. The Spanish imposed their images of Christ in South America. The
British, the French and the Dutch did the same in India, Africa and the Far
East. You see an awful lot of reproductions of Holman Hunt's Light of the
World
in Britain's former colonies. But now, re-established as independent
countries, former colonies are creating their own images of Christ born out of
their own cultures and will, obviously, go on doing so. We show a bit of this
development in Peru in the TV series and mention it in the book. There is an
absolutely fascinating research job to be done in exploring this new and
growing source of Christian iconography.
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