The passion and the paintings

The pathos of the Easter story has inspired some artists to create their best and most affecting work, from Michelangelo to Dalí, Giotto to Inchbald. Michael Prodger highlights both the heart-stopping and the heart-breaking -and the sheer bravura of it all

- Michael Prodger

THROUGHOUT history, artists have found in the Easter story everything they might want. After all, it contains not only spirituality and, in the resurrection of Christ, the greatest of all miracles, but human emotion at its highest pitch and the body—scourged, crucified and resurrected—at both its most abject and most transcendent. From the first depiction of the Crucifixion in the 2nd century AD, the events surrounding Christ’s death have been a life-giving force in art.

The profundity of the Easter narrative has also pushed painters and sculptors to make some of their best work. Michelangelo was so proud of his Pietà (1498–99) in St Peter’s that, when he heard an onlooker ascribing it to another sculptor, he brought a chisel and hammer back to the basilica and carved his name into it; it is the only work that bears his signature. Giotto’s fresco showing the Kiss of Judas (1304–06) in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua remains a heart-stopping psychological moment seven centuries after it was painted. Even Salvador Dalí dropped his game playing and put aside his melting clocks when he painted a haunting aerial view of the Crucifixion, Christ of Saint John of the Cross, in 1951.

Not that their efforts have always been appreciated. Between 1505 and 1515, the German painter Matthias Grünewald created one of art’s most distressing paintings, the