Filling in the Gaps

Of the many visual manifestations of Christ’s divinity in the Gospels, the one directly following his death is particularly forceful. Christ’s earlier transformation of water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana, for example, was a relatively restrained affair. Although Jesus’s first miracle can be imagined as straightforward to film, with a cinematic cut from a clear liquid glistening in the sun to a deep red wine pouring thickly from serving jugs, the Gospels refrain from such realistic detailing. Their focus is not precisely on representing the event as it actually was, but rather on the miracle being performed at all, and what this tells us about the generous wedding guest. Colour, texture, the direction and gradation of natural or artificial lighting, the placement of a few shocked onlookers to reinforce the miracle’s visual power could have filled out the picture, but instead the Word gets rather quickly to the point, to move swiftly on.

Similarly, the visual effect of Christ’s death lacks rich description, such as might be imagined if the evangelists had written realist novelistic accounts or shot Hollywood films. Yet St Matthew’s conjuring up of the moments after Christ’s final breath momentarily draws attention to itself:

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.

(Matthew 27: 51–4)¹

On the one hand, we are not told the potentially gruesome details in this remarkable passage. The destruction of the temple could have crushed bystanders, the splintering rocks maimed or killed with much gore and spectacle, the arisen saints may have been perfectly presentable, but also zombie-like or putrid. At the end, the focus shifts unambiguously to the central point: these horror or disaster story-like events indicate that Jesus was the real thing. And yet it is hard, at least from our modern-day, realist fiction-informed perspective, not to read this passage without feeling its immense visual force.

The lack of detailed description in the Gospels has hardly discouraged nearly two millennia of the Word becoming the Image, partly driven by the inherent visual energy in the texts. From our current historical vantage point, making sense of this vast field of sacred and secular production becomes more problematic the more closely it is considered. Despite their common sources, there is a world of difference between such disparate works as Gaudenzio Ferrari’s fresco Crucifixion (1513) and Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ (2004), to name but two examples. To realise an informative, worthwhile study of visualised Gospel stories and characters, it might be best to focus on a particular cross-section of activity.

This is the approach taken by Jefferson Gatrall in his new study The Real and the Sacred: Picturing Jesus in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Gatrall focuses on realist portrayals of Christ in two literary genres prevalent in the nineteenth century: the ‘Jesus Redivivus’ tale and the Jesus novel, while also skilfully bringing in consideration of several realist painters and the birth of the Jesus film in 1897.² Gatrall’s scope is relatively international: he is as informed and interesting about Russian works, particularly those by Dostoevsky and the painter Nikolai Ge, as he is about French, German, British, and American ones. We follow his unforced, ruminative, yet clearly conceived discussions about Honoré de Balzac’s Jesus Christ in Flanders (1831), Max Liebermann’s The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple (1879), Charles Dickens’s The Life...