The Sacred Made Real, National Gallery

The head of John the Baptist floats in darkness, lips blue, eyes rolled back, the severed neck so realistic that the trachea, oesophagus and paraspinal muscles can be clearly differentiated around the jutting bone. With its explicit gore and hypereal materiality, its air of heightened theatricality bordering on camp, this feels in some ways the most contemporary exhibition currently showing in London. And the irony is that at a time when we’re positively inundated with powerful exhibitions devoted to major living artists – Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Anish Kapoor, Sophie Calle – everything here is nearly 400 years old.

While polychromy, the painting of sculpture, died out in most of Europe during the Renaissance, it took on a terrifying new realism in 17th century Spain. Flesh glowed, wounds gaped, the use of glass eyes lending a visionary gleam. At a time when humanistic relativism had been creeping into painting and sculpture for a good two centuries, here was art that said, ‘This is real! Here is the tortured body of the Saviour just feet away from you.’

The National Gallery has brought together 16 of the finest of these wooden images – many of them seen outside Spain for the first time, some still used in religious processions – presenting them alongside 16 related paintings by artists of the order of Velásquez and Zurbarán.

Isolated from their generally garish original surroundings, the spotlit images throw huge, ominous shadows in a display that evokes the pervasive mysticality of the period. Zurbarán’s St Francis in Meditation, showing the saint kneeling in prayer holding a skull – a painting many pass in the permanent collection without even noticing it – is thrown into context by Pedro de Mena’s figure, St Francis Standing in Ecstasy. The saint’s cowl appears to levitate around his cadaverous features, his glass eyes blazing, mouth parted to reveal tiny ivory teeth. To be close to God, it appears, is to to be close to death.

Juan Martinez Montanes’s Saints Ignatius Loyola and Francis Borgia are astounding creations: two balding, bearded men, like as twins, framing a doorway in shining black cassocks, pondering sacred objects which are missing in the current exhibition, giving them a surreal air. While these figures are in effect life-size puppets – the garments are cloth, only the heads and hands carved – they are also believable as intellectuals, intense scholars you might at a pinch encounter in the Madrid of today. Indeed, while we tend, from a northern European perspective, to regard such images as inherently primitive – manifestations of the kind of popular belief that finds Mexican peasants crucifying themselves – the people who made them were very far from simple craftsmen.

Seen in a portrait by Velásquez, Montanes looks like an urbane civil servant. The division of labour between the sculptors who created these images – generally from several component parts – and the painters who gave them the patina of life through the minute layering and distressing of tempera, was strictly maintained. Montanes worked with the painter Francisco Pacheco, teacher of Velásquez, and Velásquez himself probably painted such sculptures early in his career. Yet while the exhibition creates a plausible argument about a dialogue between forms – painters giving sculpture life, the experience adding to the three-dimensionality of sculpture – this seems an academic side avenue in an exhibition that is all about physical and emotional immediacy.

While it is rewarding, among some much lesser paintings, to see Zurbarán’s huge Madonna of Mercy from Seville and his powerful Crucifixion from Chicago, even they play second fiddle to the sculptures. As we progress towards the crucifixion, the blood and guts component increases. Blood streaks over the wheals on Christ’s body in Pedro de Mena’s Ecce Homo – one bludgeoned eye half closed – and spatters from beneath his loincloth in Montanes’s Crucifixion.

The long, pale body in Gregorio Fernandez’s Dead Christ is without doubt utterly dead, the face blue, mouth gaping, mounds of bloody flesh surrounding the wounds of the Cross. There’s not a trace of the beatific here: even the most jaded viewer is bludgeoned into a state of awe.

This is an extraordinary, mesmerising exhibition that packs as powerful an emotional punch as you’ll encounter this, or just about any other, year. If not all of the images are equally potent – Fernandez’s Ecce Homo has a slightly generic baroque feel – it’s arguable, in fact, if any of them are "great" in the traditional sense of revealing new aspects the more you look. Yet, magnificently restored, they live with an intensity that feels almost incredible in objects so removed from our time and cultural experience. Their challenge to our own time is in providing an example of art that pushes to the maximum on every level, in which there is no irony, no abstracting distance between the artist’s intentions and the final emotional impact. We can write off an image like de Mena’s Mary Magdelene meditating on the Crucifix as an anthropological curiosity or a piece of preposterous kitsch, but that doesn’t entirely negate the intense feeling radiated by this extremely strange image. It is in knowing  what to make of that and what to do with it that the challenge lies. At a time when most exhibitions provoke no response beyond "Is that it?" this is art that does almost too much.  

Its challenge to our time is in providing an example of art of maximum content, in which there is no irony, that has no abstracting distance between the very leveleleven is without irony,
While the ‘Dead Christ’ provides the natural climax, the most challenging image, to my mind, de Mena’s Mary Magdelene meditating on the Crucifixion in which the saint naked except for her long tresses and a kind of wicker skirt, leans forward gazing at a small crucifix with an expression of tragic, theatrical intensity. Except that this intensity isn’t theatrical at all. The image challenges because it is so difficult to know how to take it. Had it been translated into marble by de Mena’s Italian contemporary Bernini it would be easy to accommodate as a purely aesthetic experience. As it is, we either write it off as an anthropological curiosity or a piece of preposterous religious camp or we accept the intensity of feeling radiated by this extremely strange image at face value.
If this is an exhibition that changes the way we see art, as has been suggested, that isn’t just because of the view it gives us of a long ignored tradition or because of the way these centuries old works recall contemporary artists like Ron Muerk or the Chapman Brothers – neiother of whom feel particularly contemporary. It’s in the example it gives of art that does exactly what it says, without irony, with no abstracting distance between the artists’ initentions and what we actually see.
Thirty or even twenty years ago, these images could have been seen only as grotesque kitsch, but now when religious observance has sunk to an all time low, it is somehow easier for us to accept these images for what they are. In comparison with the deadending is-that-it? factor of most contemporary art, these are images that give you almost too much.