The audacity of Christian Art: So near and yet so far: Visions and thresholds | National Gallery

We've been exploring how artists use pictorial paradoxes to convey the humanity and divinity of Christ. Part of the challenge lies in showing the visibility of Christ as a man who lived on earth, while also indicating the invisibility of God eternal. This simultaneous proximity of the divine presence and the utter transcendence of God - this near and far, visible and invisible - makes life difficult for painters. But Christian experiences of God are often described in very visual terms: words like revelation- which literally means 'unveiling', vision, insights, enlightenment. So there is also very exciting, visual material for artists to work with. One particularly fruitful artistic device was the curtain. This painting by Andrea del Verrocchio and Lorenzo di Credi was made in the 1470s and shows the Virgin and Child with Two Angels. They're set in a landscape, and framed by a pair of rich damask curtains, edged with fur. And the result is rather incongruous. It is hard to imagine a context in which these soft interior furnishings could be parted to provide so immediate and close-up a view of the Virgin and Child. To understand what might be happening here, there are a couple of things it's worth bearing in mind about curtains. The first is that at the time of Christ, the great Temple in Jerusalem kept its inner sanctuary hidden hidden behind a curtain or veil. The gospels recount how at the moment of Christ's death, the temple curtain was torn in two; meaning that through Christ's sacrifice, the barrier between man and God had been removed. The second is that at the time this work was made Christians often kept sacred paintings behind curtains. They could then be revealed during the liturgy, on feast days, or during private devotions. So we might imagine the painted curtains in this picture as pulled apart to reveal a painting. On one level this is just the pictorial equivalent of the practice of keeping paintings behind curtains, framing them with revelatory associations. On another level, it makes a claim about the way in which paintings depict revelation. It says that the paint can, as it were, unveil itself to show us something deeper within the image. And beyond that, it draws our attention to the fact that this is only paint. We are not looking at Christ. We are looking at his painted image. Just as we are not looking at real damask and fur, but at painted curtains. Using curtains to signify something revelatory also draws attention to our position as viewers. We are on one side of the curtain, the Virgin and Child are on the other. The curtain is the threshold. And once you start noticing such thresholds, you find them everywhere: in solid, external frames, but also in painted, 'internal', frames and steps which the viewer has to cross in order to reach the painting itself. Like Verrocchio's curtains these can be quite ambiguous. They create transitional areas between us as viewers and the painting. They invite us to ask questions about where we are, what we're looking at, and how close we can get to it. The subject of this painting is 'The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele' and it shows a Franciscan friar, Gabriele as he experiences a vision of the Virgin and Child. It was made in the late 15th century by Carlo Crivelli, whose snail we saw in Episode 2. The Virgin and Child appear in the top right hand corner and one of the ways that we know they are a vision, apart from the fact that they're floating in the sky, is that they are enclosed in this golden mandorla. The rest of the scene doesn't have a gold background, but they do - they're floating in their own heavenly bubble if you like. Except that they aren't quite. The figures project outwards from their mandorla into the earthly world. They're coming towards the friar who sees them as he's praying. We have a sense of two 'worlds' - an earthly and a heavenly sphere - which the Virgin and Child can bridge. Humanity, and divinity. But what is this heavenly bubble, this bridge between heaven and earth floating between? On either side there are garlands of large, heavy fruit. And when we look carefully at the fruit, we can see that it casts shadows on the picture as if the painting were 'behind' it; as if the garlands were three-dimensional objects hanging between the picture frame and the painting. Crivelli has created an additional space in his picture, somewhere between the frame, and the image of Gabriele having his vision. This space separates us from the picture in the same way that the mandorla separates the friar from his vision. It marks out a different territory. We are both close to the friar and his vision, and distant from them. He is both close to the Virgin and Child, and separated from them. The Virgin and Child can project forwards, out of their mandorla, into the friar's world. Can we, the viewers, project forwards, out of our world, into the picture? Like Verrocchio, Crivelli is issuing a theological challenge, in a visual form. The painting asks us: 'How close can we get to God? Can we see God? What kind of revelation, what kind of insight into the divine might we be privileged to receive?' These aren't questions to which we can give definitive answers and these paintings are - I think deliberately - inconclusive. They leave us in an ambiguous place, one step removed, wondering if we can ever cross the threshold and see the vision for ourselves.