Churches must help tourists to see as well as to look

Looking is different from seeing. Real gardeners do not see just greenery punctured by a few blooms - they see textures, dapplings, shootings, places vulnerable to early frosts. They see things that are not there - that a tangled red shooting will be a peony or that a diseased looking swelling will in time be a perfect rose. To see as they do requires an apprenticeship, or at least a good guide. Something similar is true of the beautiful old churches which readers may have the fortune to visit this summer, here and abroad. Thanks to years of patient restorations (and EU funding) many of them are now in excellent condition. But the leaflets prepared to take you around them are the same indigestible art historical fodder as ever. My theory is of an international conspiracy of atheists whose strategy is simple: provide the visitor with only tedious and forgettable detail and keep religious import to the minimum.

In the Church of Saint Anastasia in Verona is a pair of frescoes, one above the other. Above is the Baptism of Jesus by John. Jesus is facing us, naked and standing in what looks like a test-tube full of ink - for contrary to visual experience the artist has chosen to show us the river Jordan in cross-section and we are downstream. At the higher level of the river banks are John the Baptist and witnesses.

But why is Jesus in this dark ditch? Lack of painterly sophistication? The accompanying fresco below shows this is not so, for here again we face the naked Christ emerging from a well of darknesss. This is a Resurrection and Jesus is emerging from the inky blackness of a stone sarcophagus.

Suddenly we can see both paintings and see that they are meant for each other and for us - the limpid, pale form of the naked Christ addressing us on the one hand from the darkness of the water and the other from the darkness of the grave. The "test-tube" effect with the Jordan is not crude workmanship but deliberate, painterly intent. The water of the Jordan flows out of the fresco towards us.

Both paintings are about death and new life - that of Jesus but even more our own since in baptism, as the liturgy celebrated before these very frescos will proclaim, we die and in death we rise again.

Of this profound theological image that leaflet tells us only that the Baptism is attributed to Jacopino di Francesco, an early 14th-century painter from Bologna and one of the founding fathers of painting in the Po Valley. Finis. Not even a mention of the Resurrection. This is information for the short-term memory, a constantly fed, continuously dissolving fact-heap.

The tourists turn away. No one is telling them what to see as they look, and in this the religious authorities seem to collude - indeed they may well have written the leaflets. The official "religious input" we receive, in most cases, is a noticeboard near the entrance bearing a bright slogan such as "Jesus is alive! Alleluia!" I do not disagree, but in the context this is at best a plaintive squawk and an embarrassed gesture towards past grandeur and present decline.

Yet despite neglect and ignorance, gently shining forth for those who look is the life of the building, a life given to it by masons and painters and by those who have prayed in it over hundreds of years, a living breath that whispers in stone, or paint, or light - "Glory, Glory". We must try to see that.

Janet Martin Soskice in the column Credo. Janet is a lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Jesus College.

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