Review from The Hon Rowan Williams – Archbishop of Canterbury

“The decoration of many Oxbridge college chapels is fairly austere, and Christ’s is no exception. But often it is precisely against a muted and restrained background that an artistic work may speak most eloquently, uncluttered by the merely decorative. That is very clearly what Tom de Freston’s panels achieve in this space where worship has been offered for 500 years.

The theme of the Deposition, the taking down of Jesus’ body from the cross, was a regular one for the great painters of the Middle Ages and afterwards. It posed not only a technical but also a theological challenge. Technically, there were anatomical matters to get right, the sheer interest of visually managing the various physical tensions involved in shifting a dead body down from a height. Sometimes it allowed a painter – like Van der Weyden – to do remarkable things with the composition of figures, so that the drooping corpse of the Saviour is visually ‘echoed’ by the body of the Virgin Mary as she faints with grief. But the theological challenge is no less serious: how does this particular image suggest that the dead body being handled and tidied up for burial is not just another cadaver? Van der Weyden’s ‘echo’ is one way, implying that the pattern established in the death of Jesus is one that shapes the lives and experiences of those closest to him, those who have lived by faith in him. But there are other ways.

De Freston’s solution is a powerful and original one: it is (put very simply) to juxtapose a passive and an active image in a physical medium that seems to be like deep water. A body drops, passively, losing its controlled shape against the resistance of the water: the limbs stray, the head is down. A body rises, pushing through the depths and, as it were, shedding bubbles of breath and trails of light, moving with immense, almost agonised, energy towards the surface of the water. But the contrast between active and passive is not a crude one. The first image also evokes a deliberate journey into darkness, the limbs having a suggestion of walking where you can only feel, not see, your way. And the effort and anguish of the upward thrust in the second panel reminds us that this action is inseparable from the passion, the sacrifice.

This draws on the whole historic association of the death and resurrection of Jesus with descent into watery chaos, the chaos that existed before the Word and the Spirit bring light and life, as recorded in Genesis 1 – and so too the association with baptism as our rescue from chaos by the descent of Jesus into these waters. The Church of England’s baptismal service speaks of ‘the deep waters of death’ where Jesus meets us.

Like any Christian shrine, this chapel is centred upon the paradox of a God who changes the world by his passivity, his suffering. Both the reality of the suffering and the radical power of the change have to be held in mind and heart, and it is this paradox that is celebrated at Easter – which is why it is right that the installation of these panels should be in the context of this festival, the heart of all Christian faith.”

Rowan Williams has been Archbishop of Canterbury since 2002. He was born in
1950 and brought up in Swansea. From 1984-86 he was Dean and Chaplain at Clare
College, Cambridge and then from 1986 to 1992 he was Lady Margaret Professor of
Divinity at Oxford. He served as Bishop of Monmouth from 1992 and Archbishop of
Wales from 2000. Dr Williams is a Fellow of the British Academy and is the
author of several books of theology; he is also a frequent broadcaster. He is
married to Jane, a writer and teacher; they have two children.