Grace Works

The twentieth century generated duelling crescendos of confident Modernist art and hitherto unimaginable human violence. A stalling of artistic confidence in our new millennium may have been inevitable. The career of conceptual artist Martin Creed (b.1968) illustrates this hesitation, which is perhaps best expressed in Work No. 232, comprising the words, ‘the whole world + the work = the whole world’, originally affixed in neon to the entablature of Tate Britain to inaugurate the museum’s renaming (from the Tate Gallery of British Art) in the year 2000.

Work No. 232 could be read as rebuffing the cultural ‘works’ within the museum, which add nothing of justifying substance to the global status quo. Romans 3:20 is a similar neon message irrevocably affixed to the annals of human striving: ‘no human being will be justified in his sight by works’.

This is not to say Creed’s art lacks a positive analogue corresponding to the latter section of Romans 3. Work No. 203, ‘EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT’ was another neon message appended to Tate Britain’s entablature. The work was originally conceived for the Clapton Portico in east London, and Creed explicitly attributes its inspiration to the Salvation Army ‘barracks’ that formerly occupied the ruined and then repaired building (Creed 2006). Creed’s message was deliberately placed as a palimpsest over the word ‘SALVATION’ that once covered the same entablature, as if to translate the word into a modern idiom.

It could be mindless optimism or just a cliché. It could even betray a certain anxiety. On the other hand, perhaps this ‘gospel’ side of Creed’s message, when brought into conversation with Romans 3:21–26, might be understood as a translation of the crucified God’s words to Julian of Norwich (1342–1416): ‘All things shall be well’ (2006: 23).

When both of Creed’s works were installed in Tate Modern, moreover, this law/gospel encapsulation of the tension in Romans 3 occupied the same building at once.

References

Creed, Martin. 2010. Martin Creed: Works (New York: Thames and Hudson)

Julian of Norwich. 1999. Revelations of Divine Love (New York: Penguin Classics)

TheEYE: Martin Creed. 2006. (Illuminations media)

When Constantinople, once the capital of the Byzantine Empire, was finally taken back from the Latin Crusaders in 1261, it is fitting that a newly commissioned mosaic in its chief church would employ a venerable Byzantine theme, the Deësis (which is also, in Greek, a more general word for intercession). With a haunting human tenderness that anticipates (and indeed inspired) subsequent developments during the Renaissance, anonymous Byzantine mosaicists revisited this theme on a massive scale in the south upper gallery of the city’s chief church, Hagia Sophia.

Traditionally, the composition of Christ flanked by Mary and John the Baptist (identified by the Greek inscriptions as ‘Mother of God’ and ‘the Forerunner’ respectively) is understood as the moment of final judgement where the believer will petition Mary and John the Baptist for mercy. But the meaning of the Deësis encapsulates the duelling themes in Romans 3 as well.

This iconographic type can be traced at least as far back as the famous sixth-century icon of Christ at Mt Sinai, which illustrates the tension between law and gospel. Christ’s darkened, book-bearing countenance—almost scowling—bears the message of law on his left (Romans 3:20); but the very same face is illumined with a graceful hand of acceptance on the right (Romans 3:21).

In Hagia Sophia’s Deësis, the dynamic to Christ’s left expands to include John the Baptist who illustrates law (Matthew 11:11), and Mary on Christ’s right to indicate gospel (Galatians 4:4). Commenting on Romans 3, the second/third-century theologian Origen connected the law’s inability to fulfil its prescriptions directly to the words of John the Baptist:

Paul establishes rather than terminates the law. When the superior glory of Christ is revealed, that glory brings to an end what had previously appeared and was called glorious. These considerations are reflected in the statement, It is necessary that he increase, and that I decrease (John 3:30) (Patout Burns and Newman 2012: 81).

The resigned countenance of John the Baptist may therefore testify to the law’s accurate but powerless diagnosis of the human condition (Romans 3:23). On the other hand, the gesture of Mary, damaged at Hagia Sophia, would have shown her pointing—as she does in Constantinople’s famous Hodegetria (‘she who shows the way’) icon—away from herself to the cure (Romans 3:24).

References

Cormack, Robin. 2000. Byzantine Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Cutler, Anthony. 1987. ‘Under the Sign of the Deēsis: On the Question of Representativeness in Medieval Art and Literature’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 41. Studies on Art and Archeology in Honor of Ernst Kitzinger on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday: 145–154.

Patout Burns, Jr., J., and Father Constantine Newman. 2012. Romans: Interpreted by Early Christian Commentators. The Church’s Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)

The heat of obligation and the cool of acceptance are contrasting currents that generate an interior storm in human experience.

The third chapter of Romans records the Apostle Paul’s famous division of these mixed dynamics, and in this archetypically Protestant image, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) offered the most noteworthy visual attempt to do the same. In both Paul’s letter and Cranach’s art, Jew and Gentile humanity, prodded by the devil and death, are driven by Moses’s tablets into a furious swirl of condemnation (Romans 3:23, 27 is inscribed in the German vernacular in the bottom left of Cranach’s composition). On the right, however, this accusation is silenced by the righteous flow of Christ’s blood that covers the relieved sinner (Romans 3:28 is printed just below the composition-unifying tree).

Working closely with Martin Luther, Cranach began his law and gospel series in 1529, for which he created so many variations that no two panels are completely alike. This particular woodcut version responds to the compressed spatial demands of a portable print, adding a Deësis (John the Baptist and Mary flanking Christ) on the side of law, but also a Virgin Mary on a hilltop on the gospel side, to illustrate grace. John the Baptist is here less prominent than in other versions, turning more of his back to the viewer as if to illustrate his humility: he is not to be the focus of our attention.

Unlike Cranach’s other attempts, the encampment of the brazen serpent (Numbers 21:4–9) has here migrated to the gospel side of the panel, perhaps to illustrate that the distinction between law and gospel is not as simple as the division of the Old and New Testaments. Another surprise is the inclusion of the dove, reminiscent of Luther’s statement, ‘The Law never brings the Holy Spirit; therefore it does not justify, because it only teaches what we ought to do. But the Gospel does bring the Holy Spirit, because it teaches what we ought to receive’ (Pelikan and Lehmann 1955: 208–9).

References

Dillenberger, John. 1999. Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press)

Noble, Bonnie. 2009. Lucas Cranach the Elder: Art and Devotion of the German Reformation (New York: University Press of America)

Pelikan, Jaroslav, and Helmut T. Lehmann (eds.). 1955–1986. Luther’s Works, vol. 26 (St Louis: Concordia)

Rosebrock, Matthew. 2017. ‘The Highest Art: Martin Luther’s Visual Theology in Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio,’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Fuller Theological Seminary)