In May 2024 the National Gallery entered its Bicentenary year with a wide-ranging programme (NG200) to mark the 200th anniversary of the Gallery’s foundation. Among the many successful initiatives across the 200 years of the Gallery’s existence is a partnership with King’s College London, supported by US philanthropists Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, that has brought a significantly enhanced profile to research into art and religion.
Ben Quash, Professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College, says “the seedbed for so much of what's been possible at King’s has stemmed from the MA programme in Christianity and the Arts.” Initially, this was the result of a conversation with Nicholas Penny, the then Director of the National Gallery. Penny connected him with the Ahmansons and the crucial thing that their support enabled was the creation of the Fellowship in Art and Religion that uniquely offers students an opportunity to receive teaching from King’s in parallel with teaching from the National Gallery.
© The National Gallery, London
Quash notes that the MA was “the first and still is the only MA of its kind, as far as I know, in the world, which is jointly the fruit of a partnership between a major art museum and a Department of Theology.” As well as teaching on the MA, the range of activity the Fellows have initiated has included major exhibitions and the establishment of new national networks for those engaging with sacred art.
© The National Gallery, London
Roberta Ahmanson says she is “really pleased that the people that the programme has nurtured are developing their careers as art historians and are taking the thoughts and ideas that have been generated in the programme out to other institutions.” Recent Fellow Dr Siobhán Jolley says that the Ahmansons “are really passionate about the arts, really passionate about religion, and they want to encourage other people to have that same opportunity to enjoy both.” As a result, they “make sure that the types of positions they're sponsoring can reach as many people as possible.”
Jolley says “they're also very invested in giving someone like me the opportunity to bring my research and my particular set of expertise into the Gallery context.” The topic of art and religion, she says, “has been a research challenge at the National Gallery for a quarter of a century” but “we're in a fortunate position, because of this relationship with the Ahmansons, that we're looking forward to many more kinds of new and creative responses.”
Works by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio feature strongly in several National Gallery initiatives during NG200. In a recent exhibition, The Last Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was displayed alongside another late work by the Italian artist, Salome receives the Head of John the Baptist. Jolley was in conversation with the exhibition’s curator about bringing out the stories of St. Ursula and Salome, and about doing talks that shed light on these women's stories. She says “one of the benefits of this role, being in the curatorial department, is that I can be a useful resource and collaborate with people.”
© The National Gallery, London
Jolley’s role has also involved her in the Interfaith Sacred Art Forum and Sacred Art in Collections pre-1900 Network. The former is for faith community leaders and theologians and the latter for curators and art historians. She explains that these networks explore “the interplay between the texts and traditions of religions and belief systems, and the works that express it.” With Caravaggio, that meant asking, is he “just illustrating the Bible or is he doing something else, such as helping to construct meaning in a different way?” As part of NG200, Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus has been at the Ulster Museum in Belfast where, “in a community that is still steeped in the history of sectarianism and conflict, they have been thinking about what it means to put a shared meal, a shared Eucharist, and a point of coalescence, at the centre of a community conversation.”
© The National Gallery, London
Such conversations are a regular feature of another innovative initiative to have emerged from the partnership between the Gallery and King’s with the support of the Ahmansons. The Visual Commentary on Scripture (VCS) is a free online resource that provides material for teaching, preaching, researching, and reflecting on the Bible, art, and theology. Quash explains that each VCS exhibition “brings together, in a juxtaposition, three artworks that probably have never been exhibited in the same space.” “Brought together in a new way and brought together with the biblical text,” he argues, “you're dealing with something potentially catalytic that will make a new thing happen theologically, and the reason I emphasise the theological is because theology is a forward moving seeking after truth, not just an exercise in historical study.”
As a result, he describes the VCS as a “huge extended experiment in seeing how people might read Scripture in new ways by reading it in the company of artworks” saying “it's also a great way to get students thinking about the liveliness of the Bible and the shared inheritance of biblical texts in art, music, literature, and film, and so many other art forms so as to actually understand our shared cultural heritage.” He adds that “there are people who simply use it for private devotion, and we get lots of amazing emails from people who say that it's sustained them in particular difficulties that they faced or it's helped them to enjoy the Bible in new ways or carried them through parts of the church year in exciting ways.”
Roberta Ahmanson agrees that the VCS is “becoming a great resource” and says that’s because “we're in a visual age” and “this is the visual commentary on the Scripture.” The artworks “are living commentary” as “the art informs the text as well as the text informing the art.” Quash explains that Howard Ahmanson “has a strong conviction that the changes in 21st century life being brought about through the internet and through social media mean that we're undergoing a transformation comparable to the transformation that was brought about by the printing press at the time of the Reformation.” “The printing press revolutionized the way in which people read the Bible and Howard is very interested in how this new revolution in terms of the online sharing of images all the time in huge numbers might again transform our relationship with Scripture.”
Quash thinks that part of Roberta’s aim “is to make people literate again in what Christian civilization has been and has meant to people and what it's made possible, by showing the symbolic DNA of that tradition, stripping it to its very profound core elements and the ways in which they've replicated themselves across the globe.” This led Roberta to invite a group of US academics, pastors and creatives on a two-week pilgrimage covering more than 2000 years of church art and architecture, and to document on film the creative theological responses of these “pilgrims” to the artworks they encountered. The aim was to address a tendency in western culture to prioritise words over the visual.
Their journey started at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, then continued on to Rome and other sites in Italy before winding up at Temple Church in London. Along the way, the group learnt how artists, architects and theologians worked in parallel for many centuries – from Saint Augustine’s vision of a New Jerusalem to Dante’s admonitions about the Last Judgment.
This pilgrimage has resulted in a film, exhibition, catalogue, and forthcoming book. Director Jody Hassett Sanchez says the film Heading Home: A 21st century Pilgrimage, is "now on the festival circuit and being well received.” The exhibition Heading Home: Glimpses of New Jerusalem, an exhibition of photographs by Scottish photographer Kieran Dodds, has been at the Ahmanson Gallery. Dodds wrote of the accompanying catalogue titled, Now We See: Glimpses of New Jerusalem – A Pilgrim’s Guide to Heading Home, that, “In this new small book, I have gathered fragments of a transcendent vision, many made during the dark ages of Europe (originally called dark because of our ignorance of them). These fragments reveal an overlooked story. Hidden in some of our most recognisable and celebrated buildings are cosmic ideas that have enlivened and enriched human society.”
Roberta Ahmanson’s forthcoming book Heading Home will be the culmination of her three decades of travel, studying the impact of the idea of the New Jerusalem on our world. She says that her desire “to see what imprint Christianity had left on the face of the earth and what its embodied legacy was through the 2,000 years since Jesus Christ” came from her experience of “growing up in a small Midwestern town in Iowa in a very conservative Christian family which was separatist, in that there was no smoking, drinking, or dancing, whatever.” Ever since, the desire to see “the breadth and depth and age of Christian faith” has been “deep in me.”
She then tells a story of a woman on the pilgrimage who had never been to Jerusalem previously. When invited to speak about her experience she said, with tears in her eyes, “I teach spiritual practices, spiritual disciplines, including pilgrimages, and I never thought I needed to go to Jerusalem. I didn't know what I didn't know.” Roberta “thought the whole trip was worth it” for that moment, because “she profoundly understood something she did not previously understand about the importance of the resurrection and remembering it and honouring it and living out of it to the Christian church for at least 1500 years. She got it.”
She thinks “Augustine was right when, in The City of God, he talked about Christians having dual citizenship; in the New Jerusalem in the kingdom to come, which is our ultimate citizenship, and our citizenship in whatever polity we live in.” Augustine also argued “that the city of God should be the template for what Christians do on earth.” So, she asks, “what’s that like?”: “Well, it's a garden city, so you're caring for the earth. There's no death, no dying, no pain, no sorrow, so you care for the sick and the suffering and the hurt. And, the other thing is, it's drop dead beautiful.” “So, we need to create beauty, we need to care for the earth, and we need to care for others. That's what we're supposed to be doing here.”
Towards the end of the film, Quash says: “You can look at these works and buildings as part of the story of art but they’re also part of the story of faith and if you’re not interested in that story, you’re only getting part of the picture. You don’t have to be a person of faith to think about how they’re part of the story of faith. You just need to have enough of an imagination to feel your way into why these things mattered.” He says that: “People like Howard and Roberta, because they want others to think about religious questions, will invest in work with the arts because that’s more likely to be a portal into religious questions than most other things in our present condition. And it's very attractive to people because it doesn’t lecture you. It's non propositional, but it does ask you to look towards big questions.”
“You can look at these works and buildings as part of the story of art but they’re also part of the story of faith and if you’re not interested in that story, you’re only getting part of the picture.”
He thinks that “people don’t really want to engage with religion in a confrontational way” but, “if you can create a context in which you might not look at religion directly, but in the same direction as religion, then you've got something different going on.” In a way, he thinks: “what art can do is look with you towards questions that religion is looking at as well. Then, it's like we're all – art, religion and me – looking together in the same direction at questions of what sort of world we live in and how to live in it well. Then, art becomes your ally and religion, potentially, becomes your ally as well, in thinking about those big questions. I think that that's exciting for people and they'll enter into the environment of religious questions if art holds their hand.” He also thinks, “there does seem to be a move amongst curators at the moment to be asking big questions through the kinds of exhibitions that they're scheduling.”
Jolley thinks that the partnership between the National Gallery and King’s College supported by the Ahmansons has helped those “working at the cutting edge of research” to “really push the boundaries and invite people to look at things in a new way.” Quash agrees that there's a new confidence in the value of dealing intelligently with sacred subjects and themes saying “that's been successively reinforced by many of the very well received exhibitions that have come after the Seeing Salvation exhibition in 2000, both in the Gallery and elsewhere, which have been ready to broach religious subject matter and ask religious questions.”
“...there's a new confidence in the value of dealing intelligently with sacred subjects and themes.”
He notes “a great review of the Saint Francis exhibition at the National Gallery by Jonathan Jones, where he signed off the review – which was a five-star review – by saying, ‘consider me converted’.” “He obviously didn't mean converted to Christianity, but converted to doing the exhibition in this way, which was thematic and really took on some very big themes about God, sacrifice, ecology, humility.” Quash concludes, “That's a really big impact in the public realm and within culture more widely.”
Roberta Ahmanson concludes, “The National Gallery has a great collection. It's great art and everybody knows it and the more that you can explain that art to people, that is keeping the knowledge of Christianity and its impact on culture for millennia alive and accessible. It's a cultural thing first and foremost. God knows how God will use that in somebody's life to make their life richer, deeper, better, bring them closer to God. But, first and foremost, it is sharing with a vast and diverse public this body of art and what it meant and its ongoing legacy. And that is a cultural highlight.”
National Gallery Art and Religion research - https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/about-research/art-and-religion
Christianity and the Arts MA - https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-taught/courses/christianity-and-the-arts-ma
Heading Home: A 21st Century Pilgrimage - https://headinghomethefilm.com/
Heading Home: Glimpses of New Jerusalem - https://www.ahmansongallery.com/
Now We See: Glimpses of New Jerusalem. A Pilgrim’s Guide to Heading Home - https://www.kierandodds.com/shop/now-we-see/
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