A critical study for those interested in the intersection of art and biblical interpretation

With a special focus on biblical texts and images, this book nurtures new developments in biblical studies and art history during the last two or three decades. Analysis and interpretation of specific works of art introduce guidelines for students and teachers who are interested in the relation of verbal presentation to visual production. The essays provide models for research in the humanities that move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries erected in previous centuries. In particular, the volume merges recent developments in rhetorical interpretation and cognitive studies with art historical visual exegesis. Readers will master the tools necessary for integrating multiple approaches both to biblical and artistic interpretation.

Features

The oldest discovered statue, fashioned some fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, is of a bear. The lion was not always king. From antiquity to the Middle Ages, the bear’s centrality in cults and mythologies left traces in European languages, literatures, and legends from the Slavic East to Celtic Britain. Historian Michel Pastoureau considers how this once venerated creature was deposed by the advent of Christianity and continued to sink lower in the symbolic bestiary before rising again in Pyrrhic triumph as a popular toy.

The early Church was threatened by pagan legends of the bear’s power, among them a widespread belief that male bears were sexually attracted to women and would violate them, producing half-bear, half-human beings—invincible warriors who founded royal lines. Marked for death by the clergy, bears were massacred. During the Renaissance, the demonic prestige bears had been assigned in biblical allegory was lost to the goat, ass, bat, and owl, who were the devil’s new familiars, while the lion was crowned as the symbol of nobility. Once the undefeated champions of the Roman arena, prized in princely menageries, bears became entertainers in the marketplace, trained to perform humiliating tricks or muzzled and devoured by packs of dogs for the amusement of humans. By the early twentieth century, however, the bear would return from exile, making its way into the hearts of children everywhere as the teddy bear.

This compelling history reminds us that men and bears have always been inseparable, united by a kinship that gradually moved from nature to culture—a bond that continues to this day.

Palm mats and pilgrim tokens, manuscript illuminations and church frescoes, gold and enamel reliquaries and papier-mâché figurines, Russian icons and Mexican murals: What makes these works of art Christian? And what, as such, distinguishes them from other works? These are the questions at the center of this book, which is at once a sumptuously illustrated survey of Christian art over time and across the globe and a probing study of what "Christian art" really means, how it functions, where it arises, and whom it serves.

Rowena Loverance draws extensively on the vast international collections of the British Museum, with its remarkable examples of Christian art in the fourth-century Roman empire, the meeting of Eastern and Western art during the Crusades, Christian missionary art and its reception in sixteenth-century Africa, India, and Japan, and twentieth-century Christian popular art from Latin America and Oceania. The Museum's collections of decorative arts yield original and lesser-known Christian iconography, allowing the author to show how Christian and other artists have responded to a variety of visual traditions. Within the European convention, the book considers the assaults of post-Renaissance scientific and philosophical discoveries and concludes with an assessment of the current state of Christian art at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Many studies have shown that images—their presence in the daily lives of the faithful, the means used to control them, and their adaptation to secular uses—were at the heart of the Reformation crisis in northern Europe.  But the question as it affects the art of Italy has been raised only in highly specialized studies.

In this book, Alexander Nagel provides the first truly synthetic study of the controversies over religious images that pervaded Italian life both before and parallel to the Reformation north of the Alps. Tracing the intertwined relationship of artistic innovation and archaism, as well as the new pressures placed on the artistic media in the midst of key developments in religious iconography, The Controversy of Renaissance Art offers an important and original history of humanist thought and artistic experimentation from one of our most acclaimed historians of art.

This is a study of New England figurative language from 1600 to 1850, from the English and Continental origins of Puritanism to the symbolic writings of Thoreau. It enriches our understanding of Puritan thought and expression and traces the influence of Puritanism on later American writing.

A common link among the writers of this period was a system of prophetic symbolism derived from Scripture. The Bible was the source of figures and types used to illustrate divine guidance in human affairs, and its prophetic language provided the Puritans with a method for explaining and projecting the course of history. Mason Lowance explores these modes of prophetic and metaphorical expression and the millennial impulse in American thinking. In the process he provides a cohesive approach to such diverse writers as Bradford, Cotton, Taylor, Increase and Cotton Mather, Edwards, Freneau, Barlow, Dwight, and Emerson. His book will be welcomed by all students of early American thought and literature.

The first study of Christian murals created by indigenous artists in sixteenth and seventeenth century Yucatán.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Maya artists painted murals in churches and conventos of Yucatán using traditional techniques to depict iconography brought from Europe by Franciscan friars. The fragmentary visual remains and their placement within religious structures embed Maya conceptions of sacredness beyond the didactic imagery. Mobilizing both cutting-edge technology and tried-and-true analytical methods, art historians Amara Solari and Linda K. Williams reexamine the Maya Christian murals, centering the agency of the people who created them.

The first volume to comprehensively document the paintings, Maya Christian Murals of Early Modern Yucatán collects new research on the material composition of the works, made possible by cutting-edge imaging methods. Solari and Williams investigate pigments and other material resources, as well as the artists and historical contexts of the murals. The authors uncover numerous local innovations in form and content, including images celebrating New World saints, celestial timekeeping, and ritual processions. Solari and Williams argue that these murals were not simply vehicles of coercion, but of cultural “grafting,” that allowed Maya artists to shape a distinctive and polyvocal legacy in their communities.

Federico Borromeo, Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan (1564–1631), is well known as a leading Catholic reformer and as the founder of the Ambrosiana library, art collection, and academy in that city. Less known is the fact that the institution's art museum was the culmination of many decades of reflection on the aesthetic qualities and religious roles of art. Borromeo recorded his reflections in two treatises.

De pictura sacra (Sacred Painting, 1624) laid out the rules that artists should follow when creating religious art. Borromeo touched on dozens of iconographical issues and in so doing drew on his deep knowledge not only of church fathers, councils, and scripture but also of classical art and literature. In Musaeum (1625) Borromeo showed a less doctrinaire and more personal side by walking the reader through the Ambrosiana and commenting on specific works in his collection. He offered some of the earliest and most important critiques to survive on works by artists such as Leonardo, Titian, and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

This volume offers, for the first time, translations of the treatises directly into English as well as freshly edited Latin texts, an introduction, extensive notes, and an appendix on the Academy of Design that was established in conjunction with the museum. These treatises will be of great interest to students of the history of art, museums, and religion.

Icons and murals depicting the biblical scene of the Last Judgment adorned many Eastern-rite churches in medieval and early modern Ukraine. Dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, these images were extraordinarily elaborate, composed of dozens of discrete elements reflecting Byzantine, Novgorodian, Moldavian, and Catholic influences, in addition to local and regional traditions. Over time, the details of the iconography evolved in response to changing cultural resources, the conditions of material life at the time, and new trends in mentality and taste.

The World to Come lists and describes more than eighty Last Judgment images from present-day Ukraine, eastern Slovakia, and southeastern Poland, making it the largest compilation of its kind. Photographs show overviews and details of the images, and most are printed in full color. The icons and murals provide a valuable source of knowledge about the culture in which they were created: what was meant by good and evil, what was prophesied for the future, and what awaited in the afterlife.