The title of this book suggests that it studies early illustrated Bibles—certainly an interesting and worthy topic, especially where it might illuminate the way early Christians (Jewish converts and gentiles) appropriated and interpreted Jewish scriptures and traditional stories. The book is actually much broader than that, and thus appealing to a broader audience, but potentially frustrating in its multiple focus points.
The central theme of the book is the transformation of pagan visual traditions into Christian ones during the transformation of Roman (and, more broadly, Mediterranean) culture and society as the western Roman empire declined politically. The book thus awkwardly bridges the more familiar story of the “fall of the Roman empire” and the rise of Catholic Europe out of that rubble with the more important, but less well known, story of the continuation of the Christian Roman empire in the east. (Many of the same artifacts and topics are dealt with in the larger and more lavish exhibition catalogue, Byzantium 330–1453, from the Royal Academy of Arts in London, published in 2008.)
Picturing the Bible deals with much more than texts; it includes a broad range of early Christian art and artifacts (on topics beyond biblical texts and stories and in multiple genres—sculptures, medallions, everyday objects, reliquaries, vases, crosses, church decorations in mosaics, murals, carvings and liturgical objects, even epitaphs and graffiti, as well as manuscript illustrations. The “pictures” thus range from minute (a carved gem) to monumental (a sculpture of the Emperor Constantine), from private use (a magical amulet) to public, and from deliberate and intentional to ephemeral and accidental (early graffiti mocking the crucifixion), and from sacred to mundane (a household lamp).
As an annotated catalogue for an exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, in its second half the book discusses specific objects that were available for loans, while its first half—the scholarly essays—deals thematically with broader questions: the meaning of the images (particularly where they depart from scriptural accounts), their role first in the underground Church and then the imperial, official Church and, more surprisingly, Jewish visual symbolism. (Jewish religious art—or visual representations of any kind—had previously been thought to be scant and unimportant.)
About the beginning of the third century, purely Christian images began to appear, but these almost never included crosses, the Crucifixion, the Nativity, or other scenes that became key to Christian narrative representation. The Baptism of Christ was the first purely New Testament image to appear, followed by the Adoration of the Magi in the fourth century. The themes that appeared most often in early Christian visual art were Christ as the Good Shepherd, Jonah being regurgitated by leviathan (as a prefiguring of the Resurrection, Jonah appeared ten times more frequently than any other biblical figure), and Noah and the Ark. Even those depictions of figures familiar today—Moses, for example—differed significantly from what we expect from later Christian art. Moses was shown striking the rock with his staff to bring water, not as lawgiver in front of the burning bush or as savior leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. Some choices of images may reflect not the appeal of certain stories but simply the availability of the texts to early Christian communities: Daniel is depicted, but not Joseph, Joshua, or David; Susannah but not Solomon.
Syncretism of pagan traditions did not bother the early Christians, and explains some apparently odd choices. The Good Shepherd carrying his lamb was a clear echo of pastoral depictions of Dionysus. More surprisingly, depictions of Jonah resting nude under his vine were not uncommon, and are not adequately explained by the frequency of the Jonah-whale-resurrection motif. (Why depict this part of the story, why is Jonah nude, and why reclining?) When shown against customary depictions of the sleeping youth Endymion, however, the borrowing is convincing. (Endymion was always shown nude because he was a model of classical male beauty.) Biblical figures might also be depicted alongside those from classical myths—Jesus alongside Bellerophon and the chimera, for example.
Illustrations of stories or events from the Hebrew Bible greatly outnumber those from the Christian scriptures, showing not only how aggressively the early Christian communities appropriated and repurposed the Jewish tradition (the promise of God to Noah, the covenant of God with Abraham, the allusions to resurrection in Ezekiel's vision of bones), but also how much richer, more colorful, and more concrete these stories were than the Christian texts. It is harder to illustrate the theology of Paul than to show Noah and the ark.
Surprisingly, there are few crosses. Crosses may have been used, either as private, personal jewelry or as the focal point of liturgical services, as early as the fourth century, but crosses of any kind are rare before the sixth century, when the symbol was adopted to support imperial authority—the cross then appears both as the emperor's scepter and on coins.
The imperial support for Christianity (and vice versa, the use of Christian symbolism to support the emperor) marked an important transformation for Christian art, not only in bringing it up from the underground (literally, from the catacombs as funerary art) and facilitating the infusion of vastly more material sponsorship (the creation of large and richly adorned churches). The image, too, of Christ changed as he became, in new depictions, an omnipotent God.
Lastly, Picturing the Bible turns to illuminated codices, and again the surprise is in how much the early Christian tradition differed from what we expect from medieval Christianity. Christian Bibles departed from antique tradition, first, in their form—the codex itself—and then in their uses, as a liturgical object (to be placed on the altar, seen and not heard—antique texts were designed as scripts for spoken texts) and later as an object for private reading. While it became natural, in medieval Europe, to expect that biblical illustrations would accompany the text they are keyed to, this was a relatively late development. Bible production of late antique Christianity promoted the development of vellum and precious inks, as well as such innovations as capitals to mark textual breaks, charts to organize texts and lists, tables of contents, and section divisions. The flat pages of the codex (in contrast to rolls) provided a new space for larger portraits and illustrations, and the covers of codices could testify to the treasures of the Word within through their own richly jeweled decorations.
The biggest gap in this book is the absence of icons—even if none were available for the exhibition, it is a bit disorienting to have no discussion of their origin and the role they played in visual tradition. And as this book is meant mostly as an introduction to the subject of early religious art, it would have been very helpful to have a more explicit discussion of differences in philosophical approach, between “art” (as it is understood by modern art historians) and images (as they were understood by pre-modern believers). An excellent articulation of this is found in Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Though somewhat heterogeneous in its explication and topics (as the result of contributions from six authors), overall Picturing the Bible presents a rich account of the strange transformation in the visual tradition of what have become, by now, familiar biblical stories.
