ART / Images worthy of worship : Iain Gale on an exhibition that reveals how modern British artists continue the age-old struggle to depict Christ's divinity

'On Good Friday', says the artist Maggi Hambling, 'I find it very difficult to think about anything else but the image of Christ on the Cross.' Every year on this day for the past seven years, she has painted a picture of Christ. The one that she did in 1989 is currently on show in Northampton. We recognise Him instantly: the beard, the long hair, the cross he carries to his death (and by implication his resurrection). The power of this and other works by modern British artists to move us to contemplation of the divine is currently examined in an exhibition based around Graham Sutherland's Crucifixion in St Matthew's Church, Northampton, commissioned in 1945 by Walter Hussey, the great patron of Church art.

Sutherland faced a problem which has perplexed artists for almost 2,000 years. Most people have their own mental image of Christ, but how can we know what He really looked like? To Hollywood, He is a square-jawed college kid; to the Japanese, a sleek- haired, clean-cut oriental. Our own image, the British Christ, is a concoction of the bearded Christ Pantocrator, the grave-faced young man of Renaissance humanism and the spaniel-eyed 'friend of little children' of countless Victorian engravings. But no image of Christ can be a portrait in the modern sense of the word. It is the only occasion when an artist depicts a specific person without investigating his character. The artist is constrained by the need to conform to prototype and symbolism.

Despite the savagery of Sutherland's Crucifixion, in both this and his Christ in Glory of 1954, he subscribes to the same conventions as the artists of Byzantium and the Northern Renaissance. In the latter painting, Christ is de-humanised in an image of terror and divine majesty whose roots lie in the need for early religious art to convert and control. His face is blankly ruthless, his power accentuated by the mad chorus of grotesque birds which cavort around his throne. The character of Christ remains uninvestigated. Any feeling of pathos or compassion is dependent upon the viewer's knowledge of Christian theology.

Sutherland's approach does not advance our understanding any further than Beryl Cook's cartoon Nativity, peopled with types rather than characters. Cook's Virgin has the friendly plumpness of one of her suburban housewives. The child dandled on her knee is eager to play with the two chubby angels. But the picture is transformed by Renaissance symbolism. We're in a stable with the ox and ass. The Virgin is in her blue robe. The Holy Family wear haloes. This isn't Bromley, it's Bethlehem. Cook's work becomes an affirmation of the joy of Christ's birth.

As icons such images succeed, although taken to an extreme they can tread a perilous divide between religion and superstition. Mystically imbued with the religious power of their subject, they impel devotees to queue to touch the toe of a marble saint or a gilded statue of the Virgin.

In the face of such problems, artists have sought to universalise Christ. Such an approach is seen in Glynn Williams' Mother of the Dead of 1985, which, inspired by the slaughter in Beirut, makes a powerful pieta. William Roberts sets his Crucifixion on a battlefield, while in that of Stanley Spencer, Christ is viewed from behind. Spencer concludes that there is no need for us to see His face.

Henry Moore advances this approach. Increasingly aware of the danger of representation, Moore essays a Madonna and Child in 1943, whose faces are almost without expression. Forty years later he presents us with the same subject, but this time banishes all figurative references. His Madonna and Child of 1983 communicates its meaning to us through form alone. In this work Moore articulates the difference between the religious image and an art with a spiritual content. He defined his purpose: 'The Madonna and Child should have an austerity and nobility and some touch of grandeur . . . which is missing in the everyday mother and child.'

For Moore there were 'universal shapes' to which everyone was attracted and which had the power to reach our inner sensibilities. The hypothesis had been proposed by the critic Clive Bell in his theory of 'significant form', published in 1914. Jacob Epstein's Maquette for the Madonna and Child, on view here, recalls the criticism levelled at the artist's Risen Christ when it was shown in 1920, and Bell's response. To the Catholic critic Father Vaughan, the sculpture seemed 'some degraded Chaldean or African . . . some emaciated Hindu or badly-grown Egyptian.' To Bell such considerations were irrelevant when compared to the aesthetic achievement of the piece. What was important was its 'universal quality'. Mastery for the artist was to be achieved by a combination of traditional symbolism with an attempt to convey the virtues and emotions central to Christianity - faith, hope, charity, love, duty, compassion - through the very form or formal arrangement of the object.

In Sarah Raphael and Craigie Aitchison's paintings the figurative is subjugated to overall composition. Christ becomes merely a small element in the flat colour-field. As objects for contemplation such images can work on a similar level to Rothko's huge abstracts, and ultimately they prompt the question as to whether the Christian church needs figurative imagery at all.

Even in an apparently ecumenical age, this central argument of the Reformation still produces a vociferous reaction. The Reverend John McIndoe, Minister of St Columba's Church of Scotland, London, is in no doubt. 'In the Genevan tradition of our church the principle of simplicity is emphasised. Any art, even the abstract, is subjective and within the sanctuary this cannot be preferred over the objectivity of the majesty of God revealed within the worship of the people.'

The case for the icon is put by Father Jim Brand, of the Church of Our Lady and St Michael, Garston. 'I'd call art part of the church's anthology of prayer. For centuries the Gospel was preached through art. People learned through images. If you don't offer art which is theologically accurate then people will make their own. Idolatry is in the human DNA and if we're not careful we can mistake the image for the person.'

But it is possible to detect a meeting of the two churches in a greater spirituality. Mr McIndoe will acknowledge that art does have a religious significance: 'Simplicity has its own artistic integrity and, carefully applied, can invoke the beauty of holiness. Christ is the incarnation himself and therefore any representation is not automatically excluded.'

His words are echoed by Father Brand, in a thought which offers the simplest interpretation of how we might perhaps best address the image of Christ: 'We can see Christ in everything around us. Our Lord had to look like someone. So what if it's a baseball player. He was human. Each person is an icon of Christ; every person a living portrait of Him.'

'Images of Christ' is at the Art Gallery and St Matthew's Church, Northampton to 16 May (open today, Easter weekend, Monday). It will be shown at St Paul's Cathedral, London from 1 June-31 July.

(Photographs omitted)