Bible Books

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At the beginning of the 21st century, precisely when the limitations of the historical-critical approach to the Bible have become clear to nearly everyone, there has simultaneously arisen the corresponding realization that the examination of the world that produced the Bible is not nearly so satisfying or important as appreciating the world that the Bible produced. Ph.D. programs in biblical studies suddenly find the history of interpretation an important topic, not simply as a way of studying the esoteric lore of scholarship, but as a way of understanding the reception and effect of the biblical texts—receptionsgeschichte and wirkungsgeschichte for those who need a German designation for full legitimation. Even more important, we are starting to grasp that the uses of the Bible in the liturgy and other practices of the church are far more impressive examples of reception and influence than the lucubrations of commentators. And, finally, we are beginning to see the analysis of music and art as serious modes of biblical interpretation.¹

The authors of this handsome volume on Renaissance art drawn from the infancy accounts in the Gospel of Luke both teach at Baylor University—Hornik in art history, and Parsons in New Testament. This is a genuinely interdisciplinary effort and represents a welcome conversation between fields that share so much history and yet seldom have much to say to each other. Although the authors clearly want to demonstrate expertise in their respective fields—copious notes to each chapter provide guides to further reading—they declare as well a pastoral goal: “to retrieve the religious significance of some of this art, especially for those whose lives are shaped and informed by the Christian tradition … counterbalancing the bombardment of our senses with visual images … and various forms of mass advertising, with images shaped by and prepared for people who identify with the Christian tradition.”

By including “examples of the ‘afterlife of [the Lukan] stories as they are reconfigured for a different time and place,” the authors hope to reveal what the Bible “has meant at critical moments in the Church’s history.” They open with a discussion of the peculiar tradition that Luke the evangelist was himself a painter. Beginning with the New Testament allusions to Luke as a physician and companion of Paul, the authors trace the odd transmutation of him into a painter (especially of the Virgin Mary), which becomes a popular artistic subject in the Renaissance. They examine examples of this theme from Rogier van der Weyden and Vasari, and suggest that the roots of the tradition may simply lie in Luke’s unquestioned literary artistry and the special attention he devotes to Mary in his Gospel.

The remainder of the book is devoted to four scenes from Luke’s gospel in conversation with a specific artistic rendering: the Annunication by Leonardo da Vinci (Luke 1:26–38), the Visitation by Jacopo Pontormo (Luke 1:39–56), the Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds by Domenico Ghirlandaio (Luke 2:8–20; see painting), and the Presentation in the Temple by Ambroggio Lorenzetti (Luke 2:22–38). For each subject, the biblical text is provided, together with a set of brief interpretive comments, and some remarks on the subsequent history of interpretation of the scene. There follows an introduction to the artist and the circumstances of the specific painting under discussion, as well as other paintings 042devoted to the same subject. A close stylistic and iconographic analysis of each painting yields the “biblical interpretation” to be discovered within the artwork.

Although the chapters appear to be laid out in mechanical fashion, the conversation is often lively and genuinely interdisciplinary in character. Each study shows the possibilities of the approach for showing how the biblical text was heard through the ages, how interpretive traditions developed through art that both were and were not related to specific literary traditions, and how such “readings” can offer insight not only into what was heard in the text, but even what was said by the text.

In Ghirlandaio’s Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds, for example, we see how even a small iconographic detail can represent a sophisticated trope on the entire Gospel. The manger before which the infant is placed is clearly also a sarcophagus: the birth of Jesus already anticipates his death. Although the authors state that this insight is unprecedented and not continued, it nevertheless resembles the trope in Orthodox iconography of having the cave of Jesus’ birth blend with the cave of his burial.

Early representations of the Annunciation place Mary at a well or at the spindle, following apocryphal gospel accounts. But Leonardo follows the tradition begun in the 14th century of placing Mary at a lectern, with the fingers of one hand in the pages of a book. The authors refer to a sermon by pseudo-Bonaventure that suggests that Mary may have been reading the Isaiah passage about the virgin birth at the moment the angel appeared to her.

A similar intertextual sensibility appears in Pontormo’s Visitation, which depicts the moment when the newly pregnant Mary greets Elizabeth, and the elder woman immediately and spontaneously identifies Mary as “mother of the Lord.” As the authors note, the scene is the “first public recognition of the moment of incarnation.” In many ways, their study of this painting best reveals the potential of engaging art as a form of biblical interpretation. As they authors note, the minor figures in the painting and its flanking inscriptions provide clues to an extraordinarily subtle typological reading of Scripture, in which the figures of Mary 043and Elizabeth echo those of Abraham and his beloved son Isaac. It is not uncommon for the near-Sacrifice of Isaac to be connected with the Crucifixion of Jesus in Christian art. Pontormo’s work is unprecedented, however, in that it pairs the Visitation with the Sacrifice, and Mary with Abraham. Mary is thus celebrated not only because she is the mother of God, but because she has a faith as strong as Abraham’s.

A book constructed in this fashion is likely to impress experts in the respective fields of art history and biblical studies most in the area the experts know the least. As a biblical scholar, I find the comments on the text adequate and accurate but not especially insightful, whereas the discussion of the art works intrigues and impresses me. I suspect that the opposite reaction might well be found among art experts; they may find the iconographic analysis obvious but the biblical exegesis informative. It is more difficult to assess how the book will work for those readers whom the authors most want to reach: biblically based Christians who are ignorant of the book’s capacity to shape culture, and hungry for images that can compete with those offered by contemporary commerce. Some of the technical language—I have in mind especially the deciphering of inscriptions—may repel them. But the images themselves may well draw them in and hold them, as they have so many before.

At the beginning of the 21st century, precisely when the limitations of the historical-critical approach to the Bible have become clear to nearly everyone, there has simultaneously arisen the corresponding realization that the examination of the world that produced the Bible is not nearly so satisfying or important as appreciating the world that the Bible produced. Ph.D. programs in biblical studies suddenly find the history of interpretation an important topic, not simply as a way of studying the esoteric lore of scholarship, but as a way of understanding the reception and effect of the biblical texts—receptionsgeschichte and wirkungsgeschichte for […]