Good morning. It’s that time of year when holidays beckon and we’re bombarded with hints and tips on how to buff up our bodies to dazzle on the beach. How refreshing, then, to read in the news this weekend about an online exhibition called Rarely Reframed. It recasts Dutch Masters paintings to depict disability in new ways. Each portrait’s subject is visually different from modern beauty norms. According to its creator, Ceridwen Hughes, it aims to help us question our ideas about visual perfection.
These new portraits show people who’ve experienced stares and mockery because of obvious visual difference. One of the participants is Jono Lancaster, who has Treacher Collins Syndrome. "Growing up", he says, "there were times when I was feeling very scared, and I questioned what my future would look like."
Christian art has often been complicit in depicting visual difference and disability badly. Consider Hieronymous Bosch’s famous Garden of Earthly Delights, which depicts the moral effects of sin. Its final panel shows Hell and is full of distorted and deformed bodies, in contrast to the classically perfect ones in its depiction of the Garden of Eden.
But Christianity is not a one-way street. It also offers a picture of being human which challenges conventional ideas of physical perfection and celebrates those who differ from the norm. The book of Genesis says that all humans are made in the image of God. This is no mere abstract idea, but a fundamental assertion about what it is to be human. It suggests that none of us need measure ourselves against another, but rather delight in the body God has gifted us.
As someone who is both disabled and whose visual appearance doesn’t fit neatly into societal conventions of beauty, I’ve not always found that easy to accept.
The theologian Charlotte Naylor Davis has faced the same issue. She says she doesn’t want anyone to reduce her to nothing more than her disabled body. At the same time, she writes, 'how I relate to God has been defined in some ways by this body.’ I take this to mean that she has found just how richly her disabled body can reveal the image of God. And over time, I’ve also found hope and promise in my difference.
We live in an era which can harshly judge anyone who deviates from conventional beauty standards. The portraits in the Rarely Reframed exhibition challenge those conventions and celebrate difference. However, for me, what makes them both striking and beautiful is the glimpse they offer into the richness of the image of God and the glorious variety of humanity that we can all share.