The audacity of Christian art: Christ is not like a snail: Signs and symbols | National Gallery

In these films we're asking the question, 'How do you paint the figure of Christ as both fully human, and fully divine?' This has been the great challenge to artists working in the Christian tradition and they've come up with many answers to the problem. This episode looks at the visual language of signs and symbols symbols known as iconography and how it can help in the seemingly impossible task of painting Christ. We're in the National Gallery's Conservation Department to look at this altarpiece showing the Virgin and Child with Saint Francis and Saint Sebastian. It was painted by the Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli in 1491 and it's a style of composition known as a 'sacra conversazione' a 'holy conversation' between the saints. We can see Saint Sebastian on the right, pierced with the arrows of his martyrdom, and Saint Francis displaying the stigmata the grotesque wounds in his hands, feet and side, which are like the wounds of Christ All the figures have golden halos to indicate their holiness and the Virgin and Child are sitting on a glorious marble throne, dressed in gorgeous clothes and surrounded by flowers. Iconography works through symbolic association and some associations are more obscure than others. These lilies, for example, are a symbol of the Virgin because their whiteness stands for her unstained purity. The carnations, or pinks, are a bit more complicated. They are a symbol of divine love and also of the Passion of Christ because carnations smell a bit like cloves, and cloves look a bit like nails, and Christ was nailed to the Cross. But what if symbolic associations were based, not only on things which are like each other in some way, but also on things which are unlike? Because there's something rather surprising in this painting. On the floor, next to St Francis' foot, is a large snail. Now, what on earth is a slimy gastropod doing on the edge of a holy conversation between the saints? Christian painting, like Christian language, is always faced with the problem that words and pictures are insufficient for communicating about God. But people still want to talk about God, verbally and visually and one way of doing this is to acknowledge that our attempts are inadequate. So some theologians have argued that using symbols which are not like God may be one of the best ways to talk about God. The fantastically named Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, writing in the late 5th century, specifically advocated the use of dissemblance rather than resemblance as a way of referring to God. For instance, Pseudo-Dionysius said that an earthworm can be a symbol for Christ. And it can do this because, rather than satisfying us as an image, it prompts us to recognise and look beyond its inadequacy. The earthworm is the most humble of all creatures. Christ was even more humble. But Christ isn't like an earthworm. And as we are thinking about how Christ is not like an earthworm we're also thinking about what he is really like. As a 'dissemblant' symbol, the earthworm, points us towards the mystery of the Incarnation. So, what about Crivelli's snail? What does it mean as a piece of iconography? The standard iconographic response has been to say that snails were believed to reproduce asexually which makes the snail a metaphor for the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary by her mother Saint Anne, which allowed the Virgin Mary to be born without sin. Another suggestion is that snails were believed to be fertilised by drops of dew, just as the earth is rendered fertile by rain, and that this is analogous to Mary's virginal conception of Christ. On the other hand, the snail is sometimes associated with sin and especially lust. More adventurous art historians have suggested that a large snail on the edge of a painting is meant to be seen not as a snail in the painting, but as a snail on the painting. We're not meant to be sure where the painting ends and our reality begins. Or perhaps the snail is like the tiny lady kneeling at the foot of the throne. She's the patron who commissioned the painting and she's small because she doesn't presume to stand among the saints. Perhaps the snail is there to encourage the viewers, including the Franciscan friars who worshipped before this altarpiece, to be humble like the snail. Whatever we make of all this, the snail has no obvious place here. Christ isn't like a snail. The snail surprises us. Its strangeness makes us ask questions. And once we are questioning what we're seeing, rather than simply accepting it, we're drawn into recognising the paradox in front of us. The paradox of the Incarnation Christ human and divine - and the paradox of attempting to paint that. In fact, we become acutely aware of the limitations of paint to communicate the divine, even as the paint attempts to do precisely that.