Max Ernst's Pietà, or Revolution by Night, in Tate Modern, is a gateway to the psychological power of one of the great themes of European religious art.
Ernst's surrealist painting depicts a man – the artist himself – supported in the arms of a kneeling bowler-hatted figure. Neither the supported not the supporting figure seems fully alive: the grey flesh of the one held up is reminiscent of stone or a ghost, and the bowler-hatted helper is brown, like a figure of clay or wood. A device like a ship's intercom receives messages from this realm of the unreal – surely, in surrealist terms, the realm of dreams – while a somnambulating psychoanalyst, a Freud-like wraith, also wafts along.
Stone, clay and wood, the materials the painting seems made of, are the stuffs of statuary and, in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Pietà – a depiction of the pitiful moment when Mary supports her dead son Christ on her lap – flourished as a sculptural genre. Ernst, a German artist, is invoking a tradition that originated in late medieval Germany. The purpose of carved wooden representations of Mary cradling her crucified adult son was to harrow the heart and break the spirit: to make you cry. There is no more human way to portray Christ than as a corpse: the Son of God has here done the most human thing of all, and died.
It is however Michelangelo, taking up a north European image in Renaissance Rome, who captures the shock of this fact more acutely than any other artist. His Pietà is richly realistic and beautiful: his compassionate study of the lineaments of death in a young man's body catches your emotions by surprise as you notice the thinness of a leg, the slump of a shoulder's flesh. Death, so tenderly observed, becomes not a gothic horror but a devastatingly unarguable fact.
Ernst's painting draws on German art, but also on Michelangelo. He knew that Freud, inspiration of the surrealists, wrote about Michelangelo – and in fact Ernst read Freud's essays on Renaissance art in depth. Ernst's painting recognises something in Michelangelo's art – the unmanning of the dead Christ, the collapse in Mary's arms of conventional masculine pride as the dead youth exposes our final frailty. Ernst's painting, too, is a confession of frailty, of the weakness of reason and selfhood in a mind that is only part conscious, part knowable.
Ernst is interested in psychology, not religion. He offers a real insight into religious art – that the great Christian artists are not so much theologians as brilliant analysts of the human heart.
