The audacity of Christian art: Time and eternity: Yesterday, today, and always | National Gallery

In the last episode we thought about place, and we looked at ways in which artists have played with location and architecture to highlight the paradoxical task of depicting Christ. In this episode we're going to look at the related question of time. Like place, time is an important theological category and, like the Incarnation, it can be hard to get one's head around. God is eternal; human life is temporal. In Christ those two meet, and the artist has to try to present both. Ercole de' Roberti, who was working in the late 15th century, makes a very sophisticated attempt - bringing together three different people and time frames in two paired scenes; all packed into this little painting. In it we see the dead Christ on the right, supported by two angels. He's being contemplated by Saint Jerome, who is kneeling on the left. Jerome was a hermit saint who lived in the desert and we see him here beating his breast with a stone in penitence. His relationship with Christ appears, visually, very direct. He is looking straight at him. And if we didn't know that Jerome lived in the 4th century and that he meditated in the wilderness, we might think he was, literally, in front of Christ's tomb. In the background is Saint Francis, who was born in the 12th century. He's experiencing a vision of Christ whom he sees crucified and enfolded in the wings of a seraph. This is the moment when Francis receives the stigmata - wounds like the wounds of Christ - and in the distance there is a tiny scene of Christ being taken down from the Cross. Francis' wounds are related to the wounds of the Crucifixion, in the composition and in the narrative. And in the same way, Jerome's naked penitence reflects the dead and naked Christ whom he's contemplating. The painting invites us to resist the expectations we have about normal time and chronology. This isn't a 'realistic' depiction of a single point in time. Instead it's a visual network of connected events from different times. It can be hard to express this in a linear text, but a painting - like a vision - can bring together events from different times and places, in one simultaneous image. It also makes the point very clearly that although Christ's physical body is no longer on earth, and his historical suffering is over, his presence and the spiritual significance of his suffering, live on in the lives of these saints. The relationship between one time-scale and another can also be played out in the materials the painter chooses. Using a gold background, for instance, can create a sense of sanctity or a heavenly setting. This painting of Christ being taken down from the Cross was made by a German master, known today as the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece, in around 1500. The figures are painted in vivid detail and the ground that they're standing on looks realistic, but the background isn't the landscape behind the Crucifixion. It's gold, heavenly, timeless. And it's been painted to look like a sculpted niche or tabernacle - a setting for a sacred statue, or the cupboard where the hosts for the Eucharist were kept. The figures here are taking the place of carved, wooden figures. The painting is playing with the distinction between golden otherworldliness in the background, and realism in the foreground and with a fictional shift from a three dimensional form, sculpture, to a two dimensional one, painting. So what is the timescale here? Is this a narrative account of the end of the Crucifixion? Well, yes, that's what's happening. But also, no, because this world is framed by a golden niche which creates a timeless background for the 'event'. Time and eternity are being brought together in the way that Christ's humanity is apparent in his limp, wounded corpse, while his divinity shines behind him in the golden background. The time and the timelessness are emphasised by the skull and the ointment jar at the front. Mary Magdalene was believed to have anointed Christ's feet with ointment while he was still alive. This is understood as a preparation for his future burial. The skull is a reference to the place where Jesus was crucified - Golgotha - which means 'the place of the skull', and also to the skull of Adam, the first man who committed the original sin by eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. The sins of mankind are redeemed by Christ's death on the Cross and Christ himself is often referred to as a Second Adam: he redeems Adam, and all his descendants. The skull in the foreground relates an event at the beginning of Christian history to the defining moment of salvation and its eternal implications. In this painting, the iconography and the different materials - gold background, fictive carving, realistic foreground - connect past, present, and future, to remind us that Christ had a human, temporal life, but that he remains God the Son, part of the eternal Trinity. Yesterday, today and always.