THE early Christians displayed a profound reticence about the Resurrection of Christ. They refused to depict Him rising from the tomb. Instead, they showed the women arriving at the tomb and finding it empty, an angel indicating that Christ was risen, as in the gospel account.

There is a splendid mosaic of this scene in the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, dating from the first third of the 6th century. The tomb here is no ordinary one. It is a depiction of the rotunda built over the site which, it was believed, Helen, the mother of the first Christian emperor Constantine, had rediscovered in the year 326. So this detail too would have reinforced the faith of those Christians. They were reminded that an actual site had been located and a church built upon it.

By the 7th century however, there had emerged what became the canonical icon of the Resurrection for the Eastern Church, the anastasis, known in the West as the descent into hell. It depicts Christ trampling on the broken gates, bars, chains and locks of hell, plunging His cross through the figure of Hades. By His side are various figures but His central action is to pull Adam, symbolising humanity, out of his grave. The basis of this image is provided by I Peter iii, 18-20, in which it is said of Christ that He was “Put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which He went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formallydid not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah.”

The main influence, however, was an apocryphal work, the gospel of Nicodemus, dated about 600. This tells the dramatic story of Christ’s descent into hell from the standpoint of two witnesses who were there. A great light broke into the darkness and Psalm 24 was shouted exultantly.

Art historians distinguish four types in the development of this image. My favourite is the one in the cemetery chapel in the Chora Church (now the Kariye Mosque) in Istanbul. It dates from the wonderful flowering of Byzantine art under the Palaeologian dynasty before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. To the right of Christ as we look at the fresco are kings David and Solomon, signifying the human descent of Jesus.

To His left is a crowd that includes John the Baptist, pointing the way, and Abel, the first murder victim and one of the first to be raised from the dead. But the scene is dominated by Christ in a beautiful, blue-and-white mandorla, pulling Adam out with His right hand and Eve with His left. Adam and Eve seem to float free, for they are about to join Christ in a joyous dance of life, the life that overcomes all evil and death.

The Christian West gradually lost its earlier reluctance to depict Jesus rising from the tomb. And there have been some very remarkable depictions, not least Piero della Francesca’s mural in the town museum in Sansepolcro. Aldous Huxley described it, without qualification, as “the best picture in the world”. For him it expressed the humanist ideal. He saw in the Christ figure, with its beautiful, muscled body, like a Greek athlete, a Resurrection of classical reality. More haunting than this is the resurrected Christ by Bramantino, now in Madrid. This Christ, still partially swathed in his white winding sheet and bathed in moonlight, has an unearthly pallor, except for the wounds and eyes, bloodshot with tears, staring directly at the viewer. This is a Christ that still bears the marks of death. By contrast, as Huxley observed, Piero’s Christ looks all set to live a fully human life on the human stage.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, 20th-century Christian art was dominated by depictions of Christ tortured on the cross. There is of course the sheer difficulty of depicting the resurrected Christ in a way that is not crass and literalistic. No less significant is our scepticism about any suggestion of a happy ending. Iris Murdoch once wrote that “all that consoles is fake” summing up the attitude of a culture soaked in Freud. Some of the most successful depictions focus on the relationship of the risen Christ with one of His followers, as in Graham Sutherland’s Noli Me Tangere in Chichester Cathedral. Equally good is the supper at Emmaus by Ceri Richards, above the altar at St Edmund Hall in Oxford. It is a fine picture, and avoids over-literalism by having Christ at the table against the background of a great cross of yellow light, emerging from it but not fully tangible. One of the disciples looks startled, the other slow and sceptical.

The best known example of this scene is of course Caravaggio’s in the National Gallery. What is particularly interesting in the Caravaggio exhibition in the gallery at the moment, is to see this beside a slightly later depiction of the same scene by the artist, now in Milan. In the well-known version Caravaggio went in for the dramatic: Christ raising his hands high over the bread to bless it and one of the disciples with his arms outstretched, the other clutching the arms of his chair with his hands. The less well-known depiction, while less dramatic, is more religiously intense. The attention of the two disciples is focused intently on Jesus. The face of Jesus and His hand raised above the bread have a prayerful quiet about them. The two servants in the background, one a woman, are attentive and subdued. The whole picture is indeed in more subdued colours. Even the meal on the table, just bread and a jug, seems more fitting than the fine meal of roast chicken and fruits in the better-known version. The Milan painting was created by Caravaggio after his flight from Rome in 1606 and clearly reflects a much more sombre, serious, perhaps even humble approach to the scene.

The Right Rev Richard Harries is Bishop of Oxford and the author of The Passion in Art (Ashgate). Order the book from The Times Books First for only £13.59 (rrp £16.99) plus p&p. Telephone 0870 1608080 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

Caravaggio: The Final Years is at the National Gallery, London (02077472885), until May 22