The Word Painted: The Five Books of Moses Illustrated by the Masters

By Eleanor DeLorme and Charles DeLorme

Art historian Eleanor Pearson DeLorme and her erudite coauthor, Charles Pearson DeLorme, lead us through a virtual gallery of great paintings by masters of Western art: from Rubens and Brueghels Garden of Eden to Signorellis Testament and Death of Moses. They tell two stories: that of the great story of Gods redemption and that of the lives and times of the masters who labored to portray Gods story, which is, at the same time, our own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512729184

Eleanor DeLorme

Eleanor Pearson DeLorme graduated with honors in art history from Wellesley College, where she taught for 25 years. She received her MA in art history from Harvard. She is the author of Garden Pavilions and the 18th Century French Court (1996) and Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress (2002) which was awarded first prize by the International Napoleonic Society of which she is a Fellow. She conceived, edited, and contributed to Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire (2005). She lives in Needham, Massachusetts. Charles Pearson DeLorme, Eleanor’s son, is a graduate of Harvard with a major in Romance languages. He collaborated with Eleanor in researching and writing Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress. He was an editor of this book, and the developmental editor for Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire. He lives in Quincy, Massachusetts. He and Eleanor are members of historic Park Street Church in Boston.

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Copyright © 2016 Eleanor Pearson DeLorme and Charles Pearson Delorme.

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Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Used by permission. NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® and NIV® are registered trademarks of Biblica, Inc. Use of either trademark for the offering of goods or services requires the prior written consent of Biblica US, Inc.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

GENESIS

1   The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder

2   Cain and Abel by Pietro Novelli

3   The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark by Jan Brueghel the Elder

4   Winter or The Flood by Nicolas Poussin

5   Assuaging of the Waters by John Martin

6   Noah’s Sacrifice by Jacopo Bassano, known as Jacopo dal Ponte

7   Tower of Babel by Peter Breugel the Elder

8   Departure of Abraham for Canaan by Jacopo Bassano and Francesco Bassano the Younger

9   The Meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek by Peter Paul Rubens

10   Lot and His Daughters by Lucas van Leyden

11   Lot and His Daughters Leaving Sodom by Guido Reni

12   Abraham Banishes Hagar by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino

13   Hagar in the Desert by Giovanni Lanfranco

14   The Sacrifice of Isaac by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

15   Eliezer and Rebecca at the Well by Nicolas Poussin

16   Rebecca at the Well by Giovanni Domenico (Giandomenico) Tiepolo

17   Meeting of Isaac and Rebecca by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione

18   Esau Selling His Birthright by Hendrick ter Brugghen

19   Isaac Blessing Jacob by Govert Flinck

20   Landscape with Jacob’s Dream by Michael Lukas Leopold Willmann

21   The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel by William Dyce

22   Jacob Reproaching Laban for Giving Him Leah in place of Rachel by Hendrick ter Brugghen

23   Jacob with the Flock of Laban by Jusepe de Ribera

24   Jacob with the Daughters of Laban by Louis Gauffier

25   Laban Searching for the Idols by Laurent de la Hyre

26   Jacob Wrestling with the Angel by Eugène Delacroix

27   Jacob Meets His Brother Esau by Jan van den Hoecke

28   Joseph Reveals His Dreams to His Brothers by Raphael and Guilio Romano

29   Joseph Sold by His Brethren by Johann Friedrich Overbeck

30   Joseph’s Coat by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez

31   Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife by Guido Reni

32   Joseph Interpreting the Pharaoh’s Dream by Peter von Cornelius

33   Joseph Distributing Corn in Egypt by Bartholomeus Breenbergh

34   Egypt Saved by Joseph by Alexandre-Denis de Pujol

35   Joseph’s Brothers Find the Silver Cup in Benjamin’s Sack by Alexandr Andreyevich Ivanov

36   Joseph Recognized by His Brothers by Peter von Cornelius

37   Jacob and His Family Entering Egypt by Willem Reuter

38   Joseph and His Brethren Welcomed by Pharaoh by James Jacques Joseph Tissot

39   Jacob Blesses Ephraim and Manasseh by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

40   Jacob’s Body is Taken to Canaan by James Jacques Joseph Tissot

EXODUS

41   Israel in Egypt by Edward John Poynter

42   The Mother of Moses by Simeon Solomon

43   The Finding of Moses by Pharaoh’s Daughter by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

44   Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro by Sébastien Bourdon

45   Moses before the Burning Bush by Domenico Fetti

46   Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh: An Allegory of the Dinteville Family (Anonymous)

47   He Turned Their Waters into Blood by Erastus Salisbury Field

48   The Fifth Plague of Egypt by Joseph Mallord William Turner

49   Seventh Plague of Egypt by John Martin

50   The Death of the Pharaoh’s Firstborn Son by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

51   Pharaoh’s Army Marching by Erastus Salisbury Field

52   The Crossing of the Red Sea by Cosimo Rosselli and Biagio d’Antonio dei Tucci

53   The Miraculous Fall of Manna by Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto

54   Victory O Lord by John Everett Millais

55   Moses and Jethro by Ferdinand Bol

56   Moses in the Sinai Desert (with the Tablets of the Law) by Jacques de Létin

57   The Adoration of the Golden Calf by Nicolas Poussin

58   The Tablets of the Law and the Golden Calf by Cosimo Rosselli

59   Moses Presenting the Tablets of the Law by Philippe de Champaigne

60   The Tabernacle by Letizia Morley

61   The Ark of the Covenant by Letizia Morley

LEVITICUS

62   Common Ground Dove by John James Audubon and George Lehman

63   Wheatfield with Crows by Vincent van Gogh

64   Sheep under Trees by Charles-Émile Jacque

65   The Bull by Paulus Potter

66   Agnus Dei by Francisco de Zurbarán

67   The Dead Bodies Carried Away by James Jacques Joseph Tissot

NUMBERS

68   Moses and the Messengers from Canaan by Giovanni Lanfranco

69   The Punishment of Korah, Dathan and Abiram by Sandro Botticelli

70   Moses Striking the Rock by Jan Victors

71   Moses Raising the Brazen Serpent by Anthony van Dyck

72   Balaam and His Ass by Bartholomeus Breenbergh

DEUTERONOMY

73   Testament and Death of Moses by Luca Signorelli

Endnotes

References

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W ith immense appreciation and admiration, the authors dedicate The Word Painted to their son and brother, Dr. Stuart DeLorme, former Minister to Internationals, Park Street Church in Boston, Massachusetts. He set aside the publication of his dissertation to make this book possible.

Stuart saved the day with carefully chosen commentaries he’s lent to us and with his theological insights. He spent many hours in editing the manuscript, checking references, procuring image rights, and submitting the final version to the publisher.

It was through Stuart’s friends that Eleanor met the late art historian Hans Rookmaaker in 1976, and they became friends when he was lecturing on art and culture at Westminster Theological Seminary. When he came in March 1977, Hans stayed at our house in Milton, Massachusetts. After returning to Holland, he died suddenly on March 13. Hans Rookmaker’s work and his friendship have been a perpetual inspiration.

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Our deep gratitude goes to Jenn Seiler, LaMont Fells, Edward Foggs, Jane Lusaka, Rebecca Freeman, Adam Tinsley and the team at WestBow Press in Indianapolis for their encouragement, their patience, and the way they carefully steered us home to production.

It was Charles who gave the book its title, and for permission to use it, we must thank Betsy Pitts, Eleanor’s excellent former student at the Cooper Hewitt. Betsy asked her friend Tom Wolfe if we might invert the title of his book, The Painted Word, for our own purposes.

We extend our thanks to the following for images of the highest caliber: Wendy Zieger, Bridgeman Art Library; Robbie Siegel, Art Resource; Lydelle Abbott, Milwaukee Art Museum; Raven Amiro, National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; Peter Huestis, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Marina Vasilievna Ivanova, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; and Angelika Neumann, Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Potsdam.

Our search for accurate and esthetically appealing representations of the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant was futile. Instead, we commissioned them from Letizia Morley, an artist at Stony Brook School, Long Island, New York. Her painstaking research and exquisite draftsmanship greatly enhance our text.

Thomas L. DeLorme III—also a gifted linguist— translated the poem by Alfred de Musset in Chapter 14.

Dr. Thomas Howard, having magnanimously read the entire text, nevertheless agreed to write the Foreword. For his time and his scholarly annotation, we are eternally grateful.

At historic Park Street Church in Boston, Senior Minister Dr. Gordon Hugenberger and Associate Minister Dr. Walter Kim, both Old Testament scholars, provided invaluable exegesis of certain passages. Assistant Minister Dr. Chris Sherwood, who oversees Park Street Arts and is an indefatigable museum visitor, offered perpetual encouragement.

At Wellesley College, our colleagues in the art history department who deserve special thanks are Professors Margaret Carroll, Lilian Armstrong, Peter Fergusson, Heping Liu, Rebecca Bedell, Lara Tohme, Miranda Marvin, and Visiting Scholar Dr. Antien Knaap. In Computer Services, Douglas Chudik was always available to solve technical problems.

In the Wellesley College Art Library, Brooke Henderson and Jeanne Hablanian searched and supplied reference material as did Megan Brooks in Clapp Library. In visual resources, Maggie DeVries has been indispensable.

At Harvard, we are indebted to Professors Seymour Slive, Sidney Freedberg, and Konrad Oberhuber in the Department of History of Art and Architecture.

In New York, our friends at the Metropolitan Museum have been essential: Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, Associate Curator, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts; Peter M. Kenny, Ruth Bigelow Wriston Curator of American Decorative Arts and Administrator of the American Wing; and Julie Zeffel in Digital Media.

At the Frick Collection, Director Ian Wardropper deserves special mention as does Curator of Sculpture Denise Allen, Eleanor’s former colleague on the Wellesley College faculty.

As for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), former Director Agnes Gund, Eleanor’s classmate in grad school at Harvard and long-time friend, fortifies us with numerous lunches, and she has bestowed upon us a virtual library of catalogues and art books. Her wonderful office staff has gone out of their way to assist us for many years.

At MoMA’s front desk, Maria Martin greets us with her infectious smile and a hug, and we do appreciate the curators who have given us special tours of current exhibitions.

At Wildenstein & Company, Odile Poncet and Joseph Baillio have always extended to us authentic French hospitality.

At the New York Historical Society, Jillian Pazereckas, Museum Database Administrator, provided those invaluable images of Audubon paintings.

At the Jewish Museum in New York, Curator Elizabeth Manzi graciously showed us their Tissot collection in the vaults, enabling us to choose the appropriate images.

At the Harvard Club of New York, the devoted personnel have greatly enriched our many sojourns in this home away from home.

We also appreciate the encouragement of Dr. John Mason and Dr. Clifford Schwartz of Christ Church in New York. And at the gallery Schiller & Bodo, special thanks go to Michelle Montgomery, Jaclyn Drummond, and Susan Bodo.

For their expert technical assistance, we are grateful to A. J. Avakian and Aaron Johnson in information technology at North Hill, and to Amy Carr for obtaining the copyright.

Finally, to Mitzi Cotter and Brooks Lobkowicz for always being there.

FOREWORD

S tory seems somehow to lie at the root of things. Archaeology has been unable to find the leavings of any tribe or culture that do not somehow—in sculpture, frieze, fresco, painting, or document register the effort of mortals to immortalize Men and their doings. Time out of mind, we have whittled, chiseled, painted, sketched, sung, recited, and written our story.

The myths, of course, brought to a peculiar nobility, force, and clarity—our keen awareness that Something pulsates in events and calls out to be given shape. But that Something—what is it? Or is it they? Or at the final depth and height, is it He?

At the root of the myths, there lies a proto-historic narrative that has been understood by Jews and Christians to be The Story: In the beginning God … Who among us is not haunted by that remote dawn?

But the dawn did what all dawns do: it brought the day, and with the day, history. Is there a theme in history? Or is it a muddle—a mere fortuitous sequence of occurrences, lurching along hugger-mugger towards the abyss? Men have wondered about this question.

There is a point of view that says no to that supposititious muddle. There is a theme. There is a denouement. And, oh joy deeper than havoc or tragedy, there is One. He. The Author and Maker and End of all mortal yearnings.

In the book of Genesis, we find the first hours of The Story recorded. Scene follows scene, more often than not in an apparently turbulent and chance manner—if, that is, we are reading lazily. If, on the other hand, we gird our loins and attend to the record, we find that, as with an epic of Homer, or a terza rima by Dante, or a polychrome square by Fra Angelico, the record bespeaks l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle (the love that moves the sun and the other stars).¹

Adam—Abel—Noah—Abraham—Isaac—Jacob—Joseph—Moses. These are names to which a titanic nobility attaches in a way, if possible, more fundamental than the names of Menelaus, Agamemnon, Hector, or Aeneas. Not one of them was a warrior or conqueror (except for Abraham’s brief skirmish to save Lot). Their stature owes its measure to something that dwarfs mere conquest.

That something, of course, is Man addressed by God. Oh, to be sure, Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and Artemis were forever arriving on stage to help or hinder, in their untrustworthy way, the mythic heroes. But The One who spoke to the patriarchs in Genesis has nothing in common with the venal, capricious, lecherous, and quarrelsome deities of the Greek East, beautiful as they were, much less with the bloody and omnivorous gods of the Fertile Crescent.

In the book that follows here, readers will find not a mere juxtaposition of the two mighty realms of Sacred Scripture and Art, but, rather, a seamless fabric. The authority and mystery at work in this ancient record leap into visibility (one could almost say incarnacy) at the hands of the painters. But this leaping into visibility comes about for us semi-comatose and untutored viewers at the hands of skillful and astute teachers. They tell us, without patronizing, what we are reading and seeing. Left to our own lights, we would no doubt drift along, murmuring obliging assent to the stories and pictures, and forthwith return to the usual distractions of the day.

One of the notable achievements here is just that seamlessness. We are never given the idle luxury of setting the Bible aside and then turning to the painters’ work. The two elements form an entirely harmonious and antiphonal whole. On the other hand, the summaries of these narratives we find here are precise and thrifty. No word is merely gratuitous, but nothing is ignored. Readers are taken skillfully into the heart of each anecdote, big as each one is with human and divine significance. The attentive reader will slowly become aware that what we have here is not a mere assembling of tales, but rather the organic components of one story—The Story—of God’s providence, grace, and wisdom—nay, of His love—shepherding us along the start of the road that became our history.

Then we come, in each case, to the artist who himself was arrested by the anecdote. The biographical sketches of each man’s life, set in the context of Italian or Dutch Renaissance history for the most part, furnish some of the most interesting, and often diverting, elements of this work. We are in the hands of very good teachers here, who know how to distil the essential from the merely interesting ingredients of the material—in this case the artists’ lives and their world.

To my mind, the crowning achievement of the following work, however, is found in the scrutiny brought to the paintings themselves. Here we have no mere art appreciation class. To be sure, all that belongs to such appreciation is here, but every detail throws light on the anecdote in question. No scarf, no gnarled tree root, no forearm, no vessel or bundle, no lamb or sandal is brought to our attention for solely aesthetic purposes. The authors marshal their encyclopedic knowledge of art in the service of the paintings’ homage to The Story. Light, line, space, mass, color, composition—no aspect of a painter’s work is left in the classroom or museum. In every case, we are drawn deeper into the ancient records themselves. It is ars veritatis (art for truth’s sake) rather than ars artis (art for art’s sake). And it is all done with graceful and economical perspicacity.

One last note: we all know that the quality above all other qualities which makes for good teachers is their sheer love for the subject. This comes through in every entry in the book (and also, to my mind, in the intermittent droll asides that spice the text). Our authors are clearly reveling in the whole thing: the very prose is baroque! Again, it is not merely the field of painting, sublime though it is. Rather, their subject is The Story of God and Man as written in the Pentateuch and as it finds depth, visibility, splendor, and vibrancy in the work of the great painters.

Thomas Howard

PREFACE

We have given you only what comes from your hand.

(1 Chronicles 29:14)

I f ever there was a labor of love, this is it; if ever a family project, this is it. The co-authors, Eleanor DeLorme and her son Charles, were joined by his brothers, Thomas and Stuart, and Stuart’s artist daughter Letizia Morley.

At the heart of this endeavor stands the incomparable Word of God inscripturated through Moses, the quintessential prophet and founder of the nation Israel, and incarnated in Jesus Christ, the Light of the World.

Illuminating the text are significant paintings that span several centuries of Western art, from Cosimo Rosselli’s The Crossing of the Red Sea for the Sistine Chapel (1481) to Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Finding of Moses by Pharaoh’s Daughter (1902). Then, as works untimely born, The Tabernacle and The Ark of the Covenant by Letizia Morley, represent our 21st century.

This book came into being as a response to requests from some of Eleanor’s students in Art History at Wellesley College, and from auditors of her illustrated lectures in a church, at the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Co-author Charles DeLorme is a graduate of Dexter School, Milton Academy, and Harvard, majoring in Romance languages. He was an editor and virtual co-author of Eleanor’s Josephine, Napoleon’s Incomparable Empress (Abrams, 2002). It was awarded the First Prize from the International Napoleonic Society, to which she was elected a Fellow. For Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), the Getty appointed Charles as Developmental Editor.

As co-author of The Word Painted, he extensively researched the artists and their works. Furthermore, he always provided the mot juste in his own inimitable style, and much of the humor enlivening the text springs from Charles’s fertile imagination and linguistic agility.

Stuart DeLorme came late to the process as the singularly erudite editor and manager. The subject of Stuart’s doctoral dissertation concerned language issues in post-Soviet Central Asian government and education—a far cry from 17th century Europe’s courts of patronage and schools of art! He has learned seven languages, and fortunately for us, even English and French.

Stuart loved art as a student at Dexter and Brown and Nichols, where he first studied Russian. Along with his brothers Tom and Charles, Stuart spent many hours in Boston’s art museums, and is acquainted with museums in such far-flung places as Philadelphia, Paris, Munich, Aachen, St. Petersburg, Almaty, Taipei, Tokyo, and Jakarta.

Stuart sometimes accompanied Eleanor and Charles to New York to visit their friends in the art world. They are curators at the Metropolitan Museum, directors of the Frick, Morgan Library, and Museum of Modern Art, and some have notable private collections.

Year after year, Eleanor and Charles would bring freshly baked chapters for the family to assess after the Thanksgiving feast. However, Stuart’s demanding duties as Minister to international students and scholars at Park Street Church precluded his being able to focus on this project.

What finally caught his attention was the authors’ inability to find an appropriate publisher. Those who were attracted to the theological aspect didn’t appreciate the art, and the arbiters of art were not interested in, or wanted to modify the theology.

Another reason for Stuart’s involvement was that two of his colleagues at Park Street Church in Boston were consultants in matters of history, geography, and exegesis. They are Dr. Gordon Hugenberger, Senior Minister, and Dr. Walter Kim, Associate Minister, both of whom are Old Testament scholars.

Thomas L. DeLorme III, Eleanor’s eldest son, was educated during his college junior year at l’Université d’Aix-en-Provence in France; the Berlitz School in Bonn, Germany; and in Salamanca, Spain, majoring in Romance Languages. He translated the excerpt from Alfred de Musset’s poem, La Nuit d’Octobre, in Chapter 14.

Letizia Morley majored in Pre-Vet at Cornell, but she has now turned her attention to art. She and her family live at The Stony Brook School, Long Island, New York, where her husband teaches English literature.

A word in closing about the patriarch, Thomas L. DeLorme, M.D., who left us for glory in 2004. Dr. DeLorme was an orthopedic surgeon, a professor at Harvard Medical School, practiced at Massachusetts General Hospital, and was honored at symposia for his unique contributions to Physical Medicine.

He encouraged us on this and all our various enterprises.

INTRODUCTION

A glory gilds the sacred page,

Majestic like the sun;

It gives a light to every age;

It gives but borrows none.²

Y ou may be asking, "Why this title, The Word Painted ?" Perhaps you recall The Painted Word (1975), Tom Wolfe’s brilliant critique of modern art. For our purposes, though, the word is the Word of God.

The Bible has been and continues to be instrumental in shaping the history of the West, as are those other great edifices, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Furthermore, we see the Bible as God’s truth cast in the form of a literary monument relevant to all cultures and all times, the book that James George Frazer called the epic of the world.

This inexhaustible epic amazes, delights, inspires, surprises, and even shocks us. And it is unique in that its authors spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). But this does not mean that they simply wrote from dictation. They were historian-theologians who utilized archives, records, diaries, and even official decrees like that of King Cyrus, who ordered the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem (Ezra 6:1).

Some authors were sublime poets like Isaiah; others gave their accounts as gripping narratives, but all of them wrote from a divine perspective. According to John R. W. Stott, the Holy Spirit communicated through each [writer] a distinctive and appropriate emphasis.³

In The Word Painted, we deal with only the Pentateuch, the Torah—the first five books of the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible. A familiarity with the Pentateuch is indispensable to a proper understanding of the rest of Scripture, for the Old and New Testaments are one story. In fact, numerous prophesies in the Pentateuch are fulfilled in the New Testament. Surprisingly, one of the most significant comes from the mysterious seer Balaam:

A star will come out of Jacob;

a scepter will rise out of Israel. (Numbers 24:17)

For the sake of brevity, we shall follow the main story line, with paintings that bring the narrative to life. Franciscus Gratianus said that paintings are the Bible of the laity, which reminds us that during the medieval age when few people could read, sculptors carved the story of salvation in the tympana above the entrances of Gothic cathedrals—as sermons in stone.

But why painted? Reading is one thing; seeing is another. When art historians turn to Scripture, certain images inevitably leap to mind. We hope this will be our readers’ experience as well, and that you will agree that a judiciously chosen work of art confers another dimension to the printed page, sometimes granting a vison so powerful as to shape a person’s life vocation. Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf, for example, a founder of the Moravian missionary movement, attributes his call to serve to his encounter with Domenico Fetti’s Ecce Homo, based upon the New Testament’s account of Pilate’s presenting Jesus to the crowd before his crucifixion. We shall see one of Fetti’s works in this book, Moses before the Burning Bush.⁴ Prepare to take off your sandals!

Art carries the genes of a civilization, as the old maxim goes. It also appeals to our senses, stirs our emotions, and stimulates our intellects. According to the eminent French art historian René Huyghe, Art is an essential function of man, indispensable to individuals and communities alike … a sort of spiritual respiration … The individual or civilization that exists without art runs the risk of an asphyxia of the soul and a real moral breakdown.⁵

It has been said that art is the consequence of history, but it can be the other way around, because the artist is a prophet, the one who says it first. According to the English historian Lord Kenneth Clark, "It is generally true that all changes or expansions of popular taste have their origins in the vision of some great artist or group of artists, which sometimes rapidly, sometimes gradually, and always unconsciously, is accepted by the uninterested man"⁶ (italics are ours). In 1967 Archibald McLeish expressed it even more urgently when he declared, There is, in truth, a terror in the world, and the arts have heard it, as they always do.⁷

Most of the paintings we have selected are by masters who augment the text with their technical expertise, soaring imaginations, and uncommon intellects. Some even changed the course of art history. In short, our aim is to offer a pictorial pantheon of the Pentateuch.

Not only do the paintings illuminate the characters of the dramatis personae with their expressive force, but they also tell us things about ourselves of which we might have been unaware. Besides, since we are only a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes (James 4:14), we cannot afford to waste one moment with what Lord Clark calls the convenient second-rate.

As infinitely rewarding as it is to read—and to meditate upon—the biblical account, we still wonder what it might have looked like that early morning at Moriah when Abraham bound Isaac on the altar and prepared to cut his throat. The creative genius of baroque art, Caravaggio, imagined that appalling moment on the mountain, and he was well qualified to do so by virtue of his own experience, for he had been in such precarious situations himself.

Then there is the desperate Hagar, alone with her boy in the desert, both of them dying of thirst. Giovanni Lanfranco portrayed these two outcasts, and we rejoice with them at the sudden arrival of an angel, robed in the hopeful colors of dawn, pointing to a well.

And what of Jacob, the deceiver who was deceived when his father-in-law substituted Leah for the lovely Rachel on his wedding night? Ter Brugghen provided a view of that ghastly morning after, with poor unloved Leah standing there, still in her wedding finery.

Some paintings will be instantly familiar, others may come as surprises. For every painting, however, our aim is for you to see with fresh eyes both the work of art itself and the biblical incident it depicts.

Of course, none of the artists worked in a cultural vacuum; their work was colored by their artistic, scholarly, theological, and political presuppositions. They were of several nationalities and eras; received excellent training, like the expert instruction of the Carracci Academy in Bologna, or were largely autodidactic; endowed with varying talents and widely divergent personalities; and usually governed by the dominant style of the age. As we look at each painting, we shall briefly discuss the artist’s historical pedigree and style,⁸ those aspects of the cultural milieu that shaped his interpretation, and consider the ways in which he brings the story to life.

Of primary importance to an artist’s career was patronage—not always salutary but sometimes threatening, as we shall see. Many artists are Flemish, and in the Spanish Netherlands, as in Spain, sponsorship came largely from the Habsburgs. In Italy, commissions came principally from the papacy and the affluent families allied to the Holy See, including the Medici, Barberini, Farnese, Gonzaga, and Borghese, some of whom claimed a pope as a family member. In Holland, rich merchants were the art patrons, and in France, it was the crown, the nobility, and later the haute bourgeoisie (industrialists, financiers, and other individuals of wealth). Without them and others who supported artists, we would have been deprived of some of the greatest art in the Western world, although executing their commissions sometimes exacted a terrible toll.

Some labored under unbelievably difficult circumstances. A case in point is the disinclined Michelangelo, whose preferred medium was sculpture but who was compelled to paint well over 500 square meters of the Sistine Ceiling, working on platforms suspended more than thirteen meters above the pavement. And yet the result is an unparalleled masterpiece.

Many artists died young due to acute illness, congenital infirmities, and even mental or physical exhaustion brought on by the incessant demands of unscrupulous patrons. The great Bolognese master Annibale Carracci descended into such psychic despair that he had to stop painting and died at age forty-nine; his gifted younger brother Agostino passed away at age forty-four. Caravaggio was cruelly exploited by Cardinal Scipione Borghese and had to work in a frenzy of creative activity between flights from his enemies. Another major artist who had to bend to Scipione’s imperious demands was Guido Reni. Guercino had only one good eye, and in his last years he painted with a crippled arm and persistent chest pain.

As for the painters whose works are shown in this book, at the time of their deaths, Govert Flinck was forty-five; Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pietro Novelli, and Simeon Solomon, forty-four; Francesco Bassano and Anthony van Dyck, forty-two; Hendrick ter Brugghen was forty-one; Lucas van Leyden, Louis Gauffier, Jan van den Hoecke, and Caravaggio were thirty-nine; Raphael and van Gogh were thirty-seven; Domenico Fetti, thirty-four; and Paulus Potter, twenty-eight. Their fellow artists in the performing arts did not always have the life expectancy of Methuselah either: Schumann lived to forty-six; Mendelssohn, thirty-eight; Mozart, thirty-five; and Schubert, thirty-one.

Yet, in spite of severe debilities, adverse working conditions, and the surprising brevity of many of their lives, they bequeathed a legacy of inestimable value that still blesses us today. We must remember, though, that the pictures in this book are but pale reflections of the real thing. Even the best reproduction can never do justice to the palpably physical substance of a Piet Mondrian painted canvas, for example, or the opalescent skin of Caravaggio’s compellingly beautiful Musicians in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The artists you will meet in these pages represent the Western tradition that has come to be appreciated also in the East. For example, Japanese industrialist and art patron Kōjirō Matsukata (1865–1950) bequeathed his paintings and etchings to Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art (NMWA), which opened in the spring of 1959 in a new building by Le Corbusier in the magnificent and popular Ueono Park. Matsukata had attended Rutgers Preparatory School and Rutgers University in New Jersey and later became a friend of Claude Monet. His patronage was not without its sorrows: some of the works he had collected were destroyed during World War II, in the blitz of London and the bombings of Tokyo. One of the masterpieces in the NMWA is an early work by an artist we discuss, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Wooded Landscape with Abraham and Isaac (1599).

The Western tradition finds its canonical context in the biblical world and the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. It has been claimed that the cornerstones of Western civilization are Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible. The last two have most consistently inspired visual artists. Not only have pagan gods and goddesses and Homeric heroes and heroines enriched our art and literature, but these beings—stronger and more beautiful than ourselves— also persist in the Western collective memory. They provide indispensable symbols for the artists, who grandly capitalize upon their significance, and we can recognize them by their attributes. For instance, Hercules, usually a symbol of brute force, also stands for the human soul, and we identify him by his attributes—the Nemean lion’s skin and his club. Mercury, messenger of the gods, is equipped with winged feet, and wings are often attached to his helmet.

Often the gods and goddesses are unclothed—never naked but nude. The nude appeared during the Renaissance as an art form (like landscape or portraiture) rather than a subject. In the first painting we discuss, the nudity of Adam and Eve symbolizes their innocence when they were first created. And in Sacred and Profane Love (circa 1515) by Titian, the greatest of the Venetian painters, the nude symbolizes both love of the divine and truth. Venus, the paradigm of love and beauty, is often represented as a reclining nude, sometimes with her son, Cupid, beside her. In short, the characters in mythology provide us with a pictorial language, even though we know they are not real. According to Robert Graves, the heroic legends are so foreign to a student’s experience that he cannot believe them to be true. Hence the English adjective ‘mythical,’ meaning ‘incredible.’⁹

The gods’ adventures are heroic, amusing, ingenious, and—as Thomas Howard remarks in his foreword—untrustworthy. But we smile at their foibles, for they live in their own bright world, and biblical standards of morality seem strangely inapplicable to them. A drunken Silenus carouses with nymphs with impunity, and Venus consorts with Adonis. In that ancient Greco-Roman world, it seems as if ‘physical beauty and carnal desires, heroic pathos and playful amorousness had never entered into conflict with moral or theological conceptions.’¹⁰ And yet, their stories seem true in that they are quickened by the authentic breath of myth.¹¹

Walt Disney certainly understood this when he released the animated feature film Fantasia in 1940 at a time when the Allies were bombarded by one news report after another of Hitler’s victories in Europe. Listening to a soundtrack playing Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (1808) conducted by the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Leopold Stokowski, wartime movie-goers were transported by a magnificent vision of cavorting fauns, centaurs, and gods in carefree Olympia. Escapism? Yes! But in dark times when evil seemed to be in ascendancy, it reminded the beleaguered audience of a paradise lost—a mythic time of peace and prosperity— which was worth all the blood, toil, tears and sweat it cost to regain it.

Although the artists were interpreting historical events from the Hebrew Scriptures, their work was significantly enriched by their acquaintance with the myths and legends about the Greco-Roman gods. For example, in Lot and His Daughters, Guido Reni convincingly evokes real characters