Frank Kermode’s Bury Place Papers, a collection of his essays for the London Review, will be out before Christmas, as will Concerning E.M. Forster.
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Vol. 22 No. 9 · 27 April 2000
pages 8-9 | 2755 words
How did we decide what Christ looked like?
Frank Kermode
- The Image of Christ edited by Gabriele Finaldi
National Gallery, 224 pp, £14.95, February 2000, ISBN 1 85709 292 9
This National Gallery exhibition has a catalogue of extraordinary splendour and is accompanied by four programmes on BBC2’s new Art Zone slot. In the Gallery itself there are further aids to understanding in the form of a film show, CD-Roms and audiotapes. A BBC book accompanies the series, and Neil MacGregor, the indefatigable director of the Gallery, not only does the TV presentations but is making a hectic lecture tour (Glasgow, Liverpool, Cardiff, Belfast: admission free). We are talking about as professionally orchestrated an art offensive as we are ever likely to see.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 11 · 1 June 2000
From Alfred Jowett
'In a way one regrets the loss' of the 'day to day business transaction' of 'insuring against too protracted a stay in purgatory', Frank Kermode says in his piece about images of Christ (LRB, 27 April). At the end of the 1970s my family and I were staying at a modest hotel on the Italian Riviera. Our bedroom was unremarkable except for a little holy picture card placed in one window. This promised 40 days' indulgence from purgatory for anyone who said the prayer (overleaf) for the conversion of heretics. I don't know whether the chambermaid knew that I was an Anglican clergyman, but I still have a wonderful picture of a devout girl clocking up 40 days out of purgatory every time she made our double bed.
Alfred Jowett
Sheffield
From Anthony Beck
Frank Kermode is quite right to question whether the 'indefatigable' Neil MacGregor achieved a valid compromise between the Christian and the humanist viewpoint in the Seeing Salvation exhibition at the National Gallery. He concludes that 'there is a fundamental difference between the kinds of devotion each side is prepared to offer.' That humanism, or rationalism, is supposed to imply devotion of any kind demands justification. What was plain about the exhibition was that sponsorship from religious organisations effectively banished any seriously sceptical tone from the display.
Anthony Beck
London SW6
