Outside the National Gallery a familiar spring ceremony is being performed: people are unfurling themselves on a few centimetres of grass and trying to soak up the sun. Inside the gallery another ritual is in progress. A group of us are knotted around a crucifixion scene by Raphael for one of the gallery's Easter talks. In front a member of the education staff is explaining the painting's peculiar, even hypnotic serenity. "Some crucifixions are all about horror, about pushing you away," she says. "But Raphael is all about drawing you in."
Looking more closely once the talk has finished, I stand there dumbly, puzzling away at how a scene of torture can be rendered so calmly. The group of witnesses flanking the cross wear expressions of devotion rather than desolation - Mary calmly looking out of the frame towards the viewer, Mary Magdalene gazing aloft in wonder, the yellowy pink of her silk robe becoming blood-red in shadow behind her. Christ's face is difficult to read, perhaps wracked in private pain, just possibly already dead. Beneath his outstretched arms a pair of angels (near mirror-images of each other) balance dashingly on tiny turrets of cloud, collecting the blood that streams from his hands. It's all about poise, serenity, symmetry: crucifixion as lyrical symbol rather than gory reality. And about the superlative brilliance of the painter, too - Raphael, I read afterwards, was just 20 when he painted this, his first ever altarpiece commission.
Four of the gallery's other Passion scenes are clustered in a small room near the centre of the building. There's another small crowd around the gallery's Easter painting of the month, Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked, a close-cropped depiction of the long journey to the cross.
It's a strange, arresting image, four citizen-soldiers surrounding Jesus as if they're about to bundle him into a police van. One is determinedly forcing a crown of thorns down onto the prisoner's head, an armoured fist just millimetres from his skull. Another wears what looks weirdly like a pit-bull collar, studded with spikes. Jesus himself stares directly out, forgiving but somehow quizzical.
You're made to feel complicit - as you do with another painting nearby, Gerard David's Christ Nailed to the Cross, in which a clump of workers pound nails into his hands and pull the ropes taut on his feet. Again Christ looks accusingly out, this time from his ignominious position on the floor. But the pathos of the moment is undercut by a peculiar detail directly in front, a toy dog snarling at a skull. Don't think you're guaranteed to follow Jesus to heaven, the painting seems to say; your mortal remains are more likely to end up being gnawed on.
It's a chastening exercise, this little lunchtime pilgrimage, even for an unbeliever. It's fascinating how Christianity's most familiar image is reimagined so variously - within the few square feet of this room it's both a crowd scene packed with leering spectators and an image of isolated sorrow, witnesses desperately clutching the cross as the Roman soldiers head back home.
But it's in the basement, away from the real-life crowds and following the tip-off of a friend, that I find the most startling image of the lot: Delacroix' Christ on the Cross, one of several versions of the scene the artist painted. It's harrowing, there's no other word: menacing clusters of cloud all but filling the frame, a mounted soldier thundering in from the left. But it's the people huddling at the foot of the cross that you can't look away from, all folded into one corner of the painting - collectively collapsed, exhausted, despairing. Drawn in or pushed away? I'm not sure I can tell the difference any more.
