It is Good Friday as I write and I somehow got fixated by a complex Bronzino entitled The Descent of Christ into Limbo. Painted in 1552, it is said to contain unofficial likenesses of the grand ducal Medici and hangs in the Refectory of Santa Croce. It is a very rare iconographical subject in art. In fact, offhand, I can think of no other.

It occurred to me that since the existence of Limbo has been negated by Vatican II, the subject of the glorious painting is now obsolete and those ‘unbaptised’ spirits that had been waiting for the resurrection since the beginning of time must have been somewhere else but not in Limbo which as a child, in pre-council days of course, I had imagined to be a vast dimly lit nursery full of bawling babies waiting for redemption. I also remember, more recently, that the late Jean Paul II was requestioning the existence of Limbo but since then I never heard anything again. I suppose that partially explains the rarity of the episode as the subject of a painting.

There is so much in life that requires nothing but blind faith to swallow. Yet after I examined Bronzino’s masterpiece, somehow the interim period between Good Friday and Easter Sunday made sense. It also is a terrific storyline; one which was, with slight variations, emulated in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for instance. This is why I had declared, some years ago while the Da Vinci Code controversy was raging, that while history is debatable, faith is indisputable. How can anyone explain let alone prove the Virgin birth?

Then of course there’s the greatest act of faith of all: the Resurrection, also the subject of a wonderful Bronzino altarpiece in the Annunziata in Florence. The defeat of death is singular in the history of mankind, but is it mythological like that of Osiris? This is why the Descent into Limbo moves me far more than the subject of the resurrection. We are seeing redemption at work and what it means physically; one particular figure is caught, frozen in time, kissing the feet of Christ and it is precisely this figure, half hidden, that I somehow invariably home in on whenever I look at the painting.

A third Bronzino altarpiece, the Deposition, hangs in that utterly amazing post modern museum in Besancon and this set of three, one more beautiful than the other, tells the story of a deliverance, a transformation of death to glorious life. This is what we as human beings all yearn for. We have not, despite all our technology, found out what happens after our bodies cease to function and decay into dust and ashes. Whoever we are and whatever we have achieved in life, from the greatest king to the most abject pauper, our end is distressingly similar, ending in a death rattle and that strange veil that seems to descend instantly over a dead person’s body.

Yet I am convinced that despite this there is something to the Latin phrase non omnis moriar, I will not altogether die, which rings true. While we are alive it is almost impossible to imagine that one day, maybe tomorrow, maybe this afternoon, our bodies, for reasons yet unknown, may cease to function and our spirit, if such a thing exists, will enter another dimension that is altogether inaccessible if it exists at all. While personal experiences I have had in my life have indicated that, yes, there is a form of existence after death and that spirits, quiet or unquiet, do coexist with us, yet my logical brain negates this utterly and totally while my emotive side wants it desperately to be true.

These are questions that I seem to ask myself every Easter and which seem to have no solution except in what is blind faith, which is why I would imagine why Christ said that to attain the Kingdom of Heaven we must become like children again.

It is indeed heartening to know that even in this materialistic world of ours there are times like Easter when all logic and acquired knowledge are thrown on the back burner and the ancient traditions that commemorate the greatest mystery of all time come to the fore. There is in fact so much that we don’t know. So much that we humans, in our painfully acquired wisdom, have put together and established as dogma. The basic rules and regulations by which we Europeans live, whether Christian or not, have been welded together over the last couple of millennia by what we call the great Doctors of the Church, of which I would imagine St Paul was the first and the greatest. Therefore while the social mores by which we live have been laid down by the all-pervasive influence of Christianity, our political ones have always been based on Greek democracy which oddly enough also requires blind and unreasoning faith to believe in without taking it with a sack of salt.

Am I being cynical? I would not like to think so. If we want to lead happy and tranquil lives we must have these standards to aspire to whether or not they are humanly realisable, for it is these same aspirations that raise us to the rank of homo sapiens and enables geniuses like Bronzino to create a work of art that after almost five centuries still speaks to us of Love, Hope and most importantly, Faith.