ICON

Station I: Jesus is Condemned

Our own mortality has always inspired great art. The challenge posed to artists has been to convey compassion without sentimentality and to evoke contemplation, not on the loss of life but on its meaning.

At Prospect Mausoleum in Toronto, artist Sarah Hall has done this with a series of stained-glass windows that depict, at the client's request, the Stations of the Cross. In the context of a burial place, the stations serve as both metaphor and comfort. They are a metaphor for the journey that all mortals make: We are condemned to die. And they comfort us: God knows what it is like to die because Christ has died and is

now risen.

The success of these windows, though, derives from more than just their iconographic scheme. Only half of the material can be touched - the glass and its leading. The other half is intangible - the pure light that passes through the glass and remains trapped in it, engorging it with intense brilliance. This window beckons us to move above and beyond the earthly event that is depicted with such tactile immediacy in the bronze sculpture inset. The strongest meaning of Christ's condemnation is found not in the depiction itself but in the world that lies through the archway in the window's centre - a brilliant ecstatic landscape of light.