Here's the reflection from today's
'Inspired to Follow: Art and the Bible Story' session based on the
National Gallery's
'Sin' exhibition:
Text: Genesis 3: 8-24
Image: Jan Gossaert (Jean Gossart). The Virgin and Child. 1527. © The National Gallery, LondonJan Gossaert was a French-speaking painter from the Low Countries. He was one of the first painters of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting to visit Italy and Rome, which he did in 1508–09, and a leader of the style known as Romanism, which brought elements of Italian Renaissance painting to the north. He worked most of his professional career as a court artist devoting his attention to biblical and devotional themes, mostly those of Adam and Eve, the Virgin and Child, and episodes from the Passion of Christ. What was new to Northern art of the time was his introduction of mythological themes with nude figures portrayed with heightened eroticism. His interest was in the human body exploring myriad possibilities for the interaction of figures, and pursuing a sculptural approach to them. These aspects of Gossart’s art played an important role in his paintings and drawings of Adam and Eve and the Virgin and Child.
In this small painting, the Virgin Mary is seated on a grey stone bench surrounded by a wooden frame; an altar-like space. Christ stands on his mother's lap poised for action, arms held out pre figuring the cross. The focus is his incarnation but the crucifixion is also in the frame. Mary wears a red mantle and uses both hands to gently restrain the naked Christ Child as he leaps forward with his arms outstretched. Inserted into the moulding of the arch are the gilded letters of a Latin inscription which cast complicated shadows on the concave surface behind them. The inscription paraphrases Genesis 3: 15, which describes how, after tempting Adam and Eve, the serpent was told by God that Eve’s descendant – Christ – would once day crush its head.
In the book for the ‘Sin’ exhibition, Joost Joustra, the curator, writes: ‘We can translate Gossaert’s inscription as: ‘The seed of the woman has bruised the head of the serpent.’ In the same passage where Saint Paul referenced an idea of Original Sin, he developed the idea expressed here of Christ being the enemy of evil (Romans 5:18): ‘Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all’, the latter ‘one man’ being Christ …
A … sonnet … by the Roman jurist Marzio Milesi celebrates … the hopeful message …: On account of Adam’s sin miserable humanity strayed in anger from its maker, but when God was made man, humankind was reborn, and hoped [the Saviour] would reopen for it the path to heaven. Whence that serpent who was the cause of original sin was trampled down and oppressed by the mother and the son ...’
This picture, then, is a Nativity image that connects us with the creation stories of Genesis where the serpent symbolizes the devil, temptation and sin. God's promise as recorded in Genesis is that all these will be overcome when the head of the serpent is trampled underfoot. The picture makes this connection in order to show Christ to us as the second Adam achieving this victory over sin. Christ is shown incarnate as a child, with arms outstretched prefiguring the crucifixion and, by means of the altar-like setting, as the body that is taken in the Eucharist.
All these are part of the picture and in the frame when it comes to understanding the way in which Christ conquers sin. The artist can, however, only point us to these things. The image cannot explain or interpret them and they have, of course, been understood and interpreted in a variety of different ways throughout church history.
Which model or models of the atonement we use depends, in large part, on what we understand the problem of sin to be; is it, for example, a breaking of God's law requiring penal substitution or is it an issue of isolation from God, from ourselves, from others and from creation? There are many models for understanding the atonement, but here at St Martin's, we work on the basis that the fundamental human problem is that of isolation. The Genesis stories themselves can be understand as describing the reality of our being out of relationship with God and others and don’t have to be understood as literal statements of how that dislocation and isolation occurred.
In this picture we see relationship depicted and shared. There is the wonderful relationship between the Christ-child and Mary. Christ is energetically reaching into his future but is supported and held by Mary in doing so. Mary is not holding her child to herself but giving him support while offering him to us the viewer.
Similarly, Christ is reaching out to us as we view the image. As we have mentioned Christ is offering himself in relationship to us here on a twofold basis. Firstly, as God come among us as one of us; God having moved into our neighbourhood to be God with us. Secondly, God with us in the body that we take into our lives at the Eucharist in the bread we consume; God with us in life, in death, and in the Eucharist. That is how God tramples the serpent's head and destroys sin.
Inspired to Follow – Autumn 2020:
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