The Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery, reviewed on the Arts pages this week by Laura Gascoigne, is full of wonderful things; one of them is a circular bronze relief depicting the Descent of Christ to Limbo, intended for the church built for Agostino Chigi, the Croesus of the day, in Rome, but which never quite made it from northern Italy.

The Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery, reviewed on the Arts pages this week by Laura Gascoigne, is full of wonderful things; one of them is a circular bronze relief depicting the Descent of Christ to Limbo, intended for the church built for Agostino Chigi, the Croesus of the day, in Rome, but which never quite made it from northern Italy. It shows Christ with the just who had, until the Crucifixion, been barred from Heaven. He is stretching out to take the hand of one of them, a bearded man. He was, I think, Adam.

The Descent into Hell is professed by every one of us when we say the Creed, and testified to by St Paul, but it has almost no traction in the contemporary Church, possibly because we’re terrifically iffy about what happens to the unbaptised after death. However, in the medieval Church, it was one of the most dramatic episodes in the mystery plays, where Christ comes and hammers at the gates of hell, with the demand that they open up to let in the king of glory. He’s preceded by worried devils who observe that things aren’t looking good. And then the gates do lift up and let him in, all crucified, but triumphant. And almost the first thing he does is make his way to Adam, sitting in the darkness, whose sin created all the trouble in the first place. And he reaches out his hand to say, “Come, my darling”. It is one of the most moving episodes in the story of salvation.

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