Art - Ned Denny is captivated by sculptures that gaze into the world of living things

More or less without exception, the distant past reaches us in monochrome. A photograph of a Victorian picnic on a long-extinguished summer day is a patchwork of blacks, whites and greys, the full-leafed trees rendered as looming masses of shadow. In this case, the absence of colour is a quality of the medium; those early photographs must have looked curiously ancient even to those who had posed for them. More usually, though, colourlessness is something wrought by time. The passage of two millennia stripped the statues of classical Greece down to bare marble, from which we once derived an entirely false notion of Greek sculpture as an art of whiteness and serenity. In fact, their surfaces would originally have glowed with lurid and not necessarily even naturalistic pigments. According to Plato, the eyes were red. The statuary in the Royal Academy's Aztecs show has undergone a similar transformation - divested of their dazzling paintwork, those feathered serpents and goggle-eyed skulls can be coolly appraised as artefacts, admired as examples of fine carving. And the same is true of the great cathedrals of northern Europe, whose ornamentations of strange growths and even stranger beasts, now barely discernible in the uprush of grey stone, would once have been picked out in reds, blues and verdant greens.

So, even those things that have survived unmutilated pursue among us a kind of half-life. They have become, you could say, corporeal ghosts. This is what we're used to, and so seeing a statue that retains its paint can be disconcerting. It almost seems a lapse of taste, something more pertaining to a cult than to aesthetics. Maybe, even, a little sinister. In fact, as I walked through "Wonder: painted sculpture from medieval England" at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, I began to understand what the iconoclasts of the Reformation got so worked up about. This is sculpture that looks back at you, not locked in the remoteness of stone but with a gaze that links it into the world of living things. So convincingly, indeed, that you can also see why the medieval world abounded with stories of statues coming to life (there's a touching one about a Virgin, who, being stripped of her gold and jewels by thieves, clamps her arm around the Christ child on her lap when they try to filch it for a good luck charm). When reverence turned to suspicion, and a spate of image-breaking swept the country in the 1530s, it was done with a fervour that itself appears like a perverse form of worship. They must have seemed more sacred than ever as they gazed impassively out of the "fires of joy" in which, as a contemporary account tells us, they were "burned with great wonder".

And it's the gaze that is, without a doubt, the uncanniest thing about these polychromatic sculptures. The exotic colours, gold leaf and gemstones with which their bodies were adorned would have given them, in the flickering candlelight, an almost supernatural presence; but it is the relative simplicity of the painted eyes that humanises them. Just as the eyes in a living face are where consciousness seems to focus, the "windows of the soul", so these fictitious gazes seem to impart to wood and stone the qualities of thought and feeling. In one of the pieces on display, the Seated Virgin (c.1330-1360), her blue-eyed, downward look is so powerful that she seems hypnotised by it. The whole sculpture, you feel, is centred on and held up by those invisible eye-beams. What we have here is a combination of painted image and sculptural form that is almost unheard of nowadays. If it seems slightly creepy, it is because it comes close to showing us what we are. Namely, sentient matter, the things that see.

Still, we have to be careful about inferring from these battered figures what the medieval response would have been to their glittering newness. They may have retained some of their colour, but they aren't exactly unscathed. The body of the aforementioned Virgin is ravaged and armless, which surely has something to do with the nobility of her unextinguished gaze. Similarly, the limestone heads found packed in the wall of a Somerset church stare out at us with a liveliness only intensified by their shattered noses and missing jaws. They have become symbols of endurance, of unspeakable hardships stared down and lived through. In a sense, then, the iconoclasm that tore them down and used them as building rubble has merely made of them something new. And, even more ironic, it is to their being buried in the church walls, away from the prying hands of Victorian "restorers", that we owe the survival of the painted eyes. What was for medieval worshippers an image of unearthly perfection has become for us an image of rebirth.

"Wonder: painted sculpture from medieval England" is at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (0113 234 3158), until 5 January 2003

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