蜜芽传媒

When the National Portrait Gallery first opened its doors nearly 170 years ago, the first portrait given to it, the Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare, set the tone: this was to be a collection that focused on British people of influence and above all of achievement. And if you visit its magnificent collection of Tudor portraits, you get a sense of what portraiture became post-Reformation: people shown at their most powerful, bejewelled, flexing their political muscles and showing off their wealth.

This week, the gallery鈥檚 patron, the Princess of Wales, visited with primary school pupils and opened a new interactive storytelling trail for young children. They were invited to create their own self-portraits 鈥� and think about their own emotions.

Digging deep, being willing to be open is a very different take on portraiture from most of what is on display in the gallery. And it strikes me that the children鈥檚 creations take ideas of how to depict people back to much earlier thinking.

The western tradition of portraiture grew through the spread of Christianity. The earliest Christian art used only symbols to represent the son of God. Later the emergence in the medieval era of apparent relics 鈥� the Turin Shroud, said to have an imprint of Christ鈥檚 crucified body after being wrapped around his corpse 鈥� and the veil of Veronica, a cloth said to have been used to wipe Christ鈥檚 bloodied face, on the way to his crucifixion 鈥� increased people鈥檚 appetite for images of Christ as means to devotion. Above all, they wanted to put a face to Jesus鈥� teaching, even if it were an apparent impression or imagined, something that was a reminder of him being an actual person like them. While some paintings expressed the triumph of his resurrection, most were about his sacrifice and his suffering. The children in the National Portrait Gallery this week were picking up on this much older idea that depictions of people are not just about status but about vulnerability too.

Next month, the National Portrait Gallery will hold a major exhibition of portraits by Edvard Munch, the Norwegian expressionist, famous for The Scream. He uses portraiture to explore what he called 鈥渢he study of the soul鈥� and in doing so he too reveals the vulnerability of humanity.

That vulnerability, evoked so powerfully in many of the paintings of Christ, helps form a narrative of a life that connects, even now in the 21st century, with human experience. And the more of humanity the painters depicted in him, somehow the closer, it seems to me, that they offer an insight into the divine as well.

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