Bible Books

014

The Bible and Its Painters

Bruce Bernard, Introduction by Lawrence Gowing
(New York: Macmillan, 1983) 300 pp., 200 color plates, $24.95

There have been many picture books on art and the Bible, some lavishly produced; yet most of them remain essentially coffee table books, intended for a pleasant hour’s diversion rather than as a challenge to the mind and the eye. Bruce Bernard’s volume is not of this genre. It is a fascinating volume that skillfully reproduces a dazzling variety of paintings on biblical themes. It is a feast for the eyes, but it also provokes the mind.

In Bernard’s volume 141 selected biblical texts are given in the order in which they are found in the Bible (including the Apocrypha), and 200 paintings illustrating these texts are placed next to them. Paging through the book and thoughtfully studying the plates—representing approximately 100 artists—we are overwhelmed by the immediacy, the exuberance and the freedom of invention used to illustrate the biblical stories. We ponder the relationship between the often spare and laconic biblical accounts and the details included by the artists as they flesh out the story. The author of the book has on occasion reproduced two paintings inspired by the same texts, and in these cases the question of the artists’ differing interpretations is thrust upon us forcibly. We are sent back to the text and its meanings for us, but with the stimulus of the artists’ understanding visibly before us. We ponder the relationship between the Old and New Testament texts—a relationship always implicit in these paintings, which were all done by artists within the Christian orbit.

In limiting his scope to paintings from the 14th to the 19th centuries (no sculpture, mosaics or manuscript illuminations are included), Bernard focuses on the period when narrative painting dominated Western art, a period that includes the work of the great Italian illustrators Giotto and Duccio, the pre-Raphaelite-style artist Ford Madox Brown (p. 61), the French Salon painters Baron François-Pascal Gérard (p. 64) and Léon Bonnat (p. 86) and the English Royal Academy artists, such as Sir Edward Poynter (p. 102) and William Dyce (p. 58).

Bernard further focuses his choices of narrative or story-telling paintings, eliminating devotional works such as Madonna and Child paintings or paintings of the Crucifixion unless the painting clearly shows the artist’s narrative intention. Since the emphasis is on events, the Psalms, the major and minor prophets and 015the New Testament Epistles are not included in this collection of narrative paintings. This focus for the paintings is, of course, also reflected in Bernard’s choice of texts. The stories he extracts from the full biblical text emphasize human passions and ambitions and perversity, as well as human faith and nobility, tenderness and tenacity. The portrayal in these paintings of the complex and contradictory human traits possessed by the biblical characters brings the biblical stories to life and challenges our understanding.

The organization of The Bible and Its Painters is determined by the order in which the texts appear in the Bible. The paintings—linked as they are to the texts—jump back and forth across time, so that Masaccio’s early 15th century “Expulsion from Eden” (p. 29) is opposite Thomas Cole’s painting of the same subject 400 years later. Masaccio’s naked Adam and Eve are convulsed with shame and guilt and stride away from the narrow gate to Eden into a barren land. Their classically derived bodies fill the fresco except for the upper zone where a red-clad angel with a sword is seen hastening them on their way. On the other hand, the American artist Thomas Cole, in representing the same event (p. 28), pictures for us a great panoramic landscape with a dewy and serene garden glowing with supernatural light at our right (symbolically the side of good) and, on our left (symbolically the side of evil), a gloomy landscape of precipices, dead trees, crashing waterfalls—the domain of the two tiny exiled figures of Adam and Eve. For Masaccio the meaning resides in the two figures—a sense of shame and irreparable loss conveyed by their bodies and psyches. For Cole, the story is told through the depiction of nature, the contrast between the radiant, tranquil beauty of Eden and the tempest-tossed trees and precarious rocky outcroppings of this world. Such differences of interpretation by the artists bring the reader back to the biblical texts and a thoughtful rereading of the familiar words.

The paintings cited by Cole and Masaccio are both well-known works. However, Bernard has included some paintings that will be unfamiliar to most readers. One that was unknown to me, and for which I thank the author, is Fernand Cormon’s (1845–1924)

016

“The Flight of Cain” (p. 32). Sir Lawrence Gowing, Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College, London, discusses this immense academic^a painting in his introduction to the volume. Cormon, he says, “made an unforgettable image of the abject primitivism to which Cain and his family reverted” after Cain killed Abel (Genesis 4:8–16). A ragged, aged Cain is seen trudging doggedly forward, a restless and driven creature, followed by those who bear a litter on which women and children and a dead beast sprawl. We seem to hear the thud of the men’s bare feet on the barren ground, but that is the only sound suggested by this alien band abroad in a vast wasteland. The painting gives vivid new meaning to the term “lost souls.”

Rembrandt is, according to Sir Lawrence Gowing, “the hero of [Bernard’s] book because he is the most responsive of all painters to what is age-old, immemorial and unchanging in the Judeo-Christian standpoint.” Eighteen of Rembrandt’s paintings are reproduced, the largest group by an individual artist. Since we have a total of 850 extant works on biblical themes by Rembrandt, such a large number of his works in this book is appropriate. 017Rembrandt was the most obsessive of all illustrators of the Bible. Not only did he do many large paintings on Old and New Testament themes; he also did more than 600 drawings. Since the market value of drawings was negligible in Rembrandt’s day, the drawings, as Jakob Rosenberg observed in his two-volume work on Rembrandt,^b clearly manifest the artist’s inner urge to deal constantly and intensely with religious subjects of the most varied sort. Bernard’s volume reproduces eight Old Testament paintings and nine New Testament ones, five of which are concerned with the passion of Jesus.

I have named but a few of the almost 100 painters whose vision and talents span a wide spectrum in this selection of pictures. In addition, among the familiar artists represented are Goya and El Greco, Titian and Tintoretto, Fra Angelico and Jan Van Eyck, Caravaggio and Vermeer, Velasquez and Murillo, Michelangelo and Raphael. Among the author’s choices are a few Salon works of portentous banality and melodrama, such as Solomon J. Solomon’s “Samson and Delilah” (p. 90) wherein a bare-breasted and bug-eyed Delilah waves before Samson his own locks of strength-giving hair, as his eyes are about to be gouged out. This painting and a small number of abysmally bad paintings are among the some 200 reproductions in the volume. Strangely their inclusion does not diminish the value of the volume. The author is aware of the difference in quality, but interested in the way the painter has dealt with his subject matter. The fascination of this book is in part due to its faults as well as its virtues. One possible shortcoming of the book is that the commentary for each plate is too modestly offered in smaller type at the end of the volume, and the commentaries are uneven in the amount and kind of information provided. However, the tone of these comments has a rather charming informality, as if the author were chatting with the reader, expounding his own viewpoint as well as giving art historical background for his choices.

Sir Lawrence Gowing’s graceful introductory essay should be read with care, referring from his text to the particular works of art he discusses. His ruminations on the relationship between the scriptural texts and the artists’ interpretations of the texts bring the reader back again and again to the biblical passages that inspired the paintings, as well as to the wealth of beauty and the wonder we experience in the presence of the paintings themselves.