Jots & Tittles

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Bloody Biblical Heroines on Exhibit

When Michelangelo painted Judith slaying Holofernes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he made it a three-part story: The headless Holofernes dies at right; Judith and her maid busily pack up the head at the door of his chamber; outside, Holofernes’s ineffective soldier-guards sleep. When Italian painter Orazio Gentileschi retold this story in about 1608, he left out the soldiers and he left out Holofernes. What remains is the too-large, bloody head being carried away by Judith and her maid. Ten years later, Orazio’s daughter, Artemisia Gentileschi, herself an artist, turned to the subject once again: Like Orazio, she omitted Holofernes and the soldiers. She focused not on the head, however, but the two women, looking back. Holofernes’s greying face appears only in the shadows, in a basket slung like a load of laundry on the maid’s hip. Artemisia’s Judith and Her Maidservant is a strange and dark psychological portrait.

The work of both Gentileschis is featured in an exhibit now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) has long been recognized as one of Caravaggio’s most accomplished students. In recent years, however, Artemisia (1593–c.1653) has eclipsed her father. The subject of two recent fictional biographies and a movie, Artemisia is popularly hailed as the greatest (or even the only great) female Renaissance painter. She is the first woman known to have made a living in art. Unlike other female artists of her time, Gentileschi did not paint portraits and still lifes, but biblical, allegorical and mythological scenes, especially those with female protagonists.

Again and again Artemisia turned to the toughest, most troubled, and most tortured women of the Bible. The current exhibit includes four of her paintings of Judith, three of Susannah, one of Lot’s daughters, one of Bathsheba, one of Esther, one of Jael and three of Mary Magdalene.

The exhibition of 50 paintings by Orazio and 35 by his daughter continues until May 12, 2002. It will then travel to the St. Louis Museum of Art, where it will remain from June 15 to September 15, 2002.

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BR Welcomes New Columnists, Allows Wright to Relax

With this issue we bid farewell to five-year contributing columnist N.T. Wright (Canon Theologian of London’s Westminster Abbey) and welcome Mary Joan Winn Leith, associate professor at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, and Ben Witherington, professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky and at St. Andrews University in Scotland. In the next issue (and every other subsequent issue), Paula Fredriksen, professor of religion at Boston University, will join longtime columnist Ronald Hendel, chair of Near Eastern studies at Berkeley.

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The Bible in the News

Where do busy reporters turn when they want a turn of phrase from the New Testament? Much like their cartoonist colleagues, they mine the richness of quotations collected in the Sermon on the Mount, especially the third of Jesus’ Beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).

Not so, according to headlines in the New York Times, “And the Meek Shall Inherit Nothing,” or the Omaha World-Herald, “And the Baby-Boomer Meek Shall Inherit Little,” both referring to the $12 trillion that is being passed, not always harmoniously, from the older generation to the next. As one bitter boomer described the division of a family estate: “We fought like Cain and Abel.”

The “meek” are frequently portrayed in the popular press as something decidedly less than “blessed.” So, “the meek may inherit the earth, but the brash continue to buy Porsches” (as reported in the Financial Times of London); “the meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights” (a dictum widely attributed to J. Paul Getty); “the meek might inherit the world, but they never get the good seats” (observed by a South African who often found himself seated in a back row with two nuns); and “the meek may inherit the earth, but they won’t win many tennis tournaments” (as observed by tennis coach Brad Gilbert).

It has even been suggested, more than once, that the original saying had “geek” in place of “meek.”

But all is not lost, even in the seemingly cynical popular press. So we have: “When it comes to starting your own business, there is a lot to be said for humble beginnings. Not by accident do the meek inherit the earth”; “even the meek can inherit the Super Bowl now that rebuilding is easier than ever”; “the meek shall inherit SUVs”; and, from the animal kingdom, “Meek rams often inherit the sheep. A biologist finds the tough guys sometimes fall short in the sperm department.” An uplifting thought? Perhaps.

Finally, according to a report in Australia’s Herald Sun, throughout most of his life, Albert Einstein “hung portraits on his wall of two scientists, Newton and Maxwell, as role models to inspire him. Near the end of his life, Einstein replaced them with portraits of Albert Schweitzer and Mahatma Gandhi. Einstein said he realized he needed role models, not of success, but of humility.” Don’t we all?

Bloody Biblical Heroines on Exhibit