In response to the growing debate over the role and implications of using artificial intelligence to create art, the headline of a story from the Harvard Crimson posed the question, “If it wasn’t created by a human artist, is it still art?” To this question, the response from the perspective of an important tradition in Christian art would be a resounding “yes!” Perhaps the greatest ideal ascribed to a vast body of Christian icons is that they would be considered to have been made not by human hands, but generated miraculously, as if by divine will and design. It is this very quality that gave them their power, that determined their truth, that made them worthy of being worshiped and copied. While the author of the article and the discussion over the emergence of AI-image generators do not draw on this Christian tradition, the lead question is very old, almost 2,000 years old. It is a question I was reminded of by Edward Rothstein’s and Larry Silver’s thoughtful responses to my essay.

Rothstein explores ways Jewish artists, especially within the context of manuscript illumination, diverged from the doctrinal interpretations that Christian artists imposed on imagery from the Hebrew Bible. Silver expands on the elaborate means through which Christian art manipulated Hebrew-biblical stories, transforming them into items on a typological menu. I’d like to reflect here on another aspect of the way in which the Western (i.e., Christian) artistic tradition was inspired by the model offered up by the Hebrew Bible, but ultimately veered dramatically from its predecessor’s values and ideas—namely, the role or character of the artist.

In my essay I touched on how the Hebrew Bible characterizes the work produced by Bezalel, the artist chosen by God to produce the Tabernacle and all its implements for the Israelites in the wilderness. The text makes clear that Bezalel and his God-appointed deputy Oholiab, son of Ahisamach, are not only technically talented but divinely inspired. The artists are characterized in such elevated terms because the Hebrew Bible considers art an echo of God’s holiness. The work carried out by Bezalel and Oholiab is described multiple times as “holy work”; not only are they called on to take on tasks that God charges Moses and the Israelites to do, but the object of the master craftsmen’s work serves as the dwelling place for God in the wilderness. There is, therefore, a connection established between the level of their skill and the importance of what they create: the makers of art must demonstrate the highest imaginable levels of human skill and creativity because the object of their creation must be worthy of accommodating the divine presence.

Indeed, the guidelines for the construction and design of the Tabernacle are provided by God, who speaks the instructions directly to Moses in order that he will convey them to the Israelites. These directions, which appear in chapters 25–31 of Exodus, are repeated practically verbatim later in the text in chapters 35–39, when Moses charges the Israelites and the master craftsmen with carrying out the specific tasks and work outlined by God. Except for minor variations between the form of the verbs in the instruction passages and the implementation passages, the words are the same. It is clear that the work done by Bezalel and Oholiab, despite their previously asserted wisdom and inspiration, follows God’s directions with scrupulous fidelity in every detail.

That art created by human hands can and does fulfill God’s will is again reflected in the final verses of the book of Exodus. Once the Tabernacle, the altar, all their furnishings, and the court surrounding them have been completed, the text describes how the structure serves to house God’s glory: “And the cloud covered the Tent of the Meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. And Moses could not come into the Tent of Meeting, for the cloud abode upon it and the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. . . . For the Lord’s cloud was over the Tabernacle by day, and fire by night was in it before the eyes of all the house of Israel in all their journeyings.” Though later commentators and theologians often attach abstract and metaphysical attributes to the “glory of the Lord” that fills the Tabernacle and hovers over the Tent of the Meeting, it seems to invoke, as Robert Alter suggests, “a palpably concrete manifestation of the deity.”

Whether one characterizes the manifestation as an emanation of light or a cloud-like formation that envelops God or as some other thing, its physical presence and visibility is clear and suggests a daunting or overwhelming effect. Moses himself cannot enter the Tent while the cloud or glory are present there. No other passage conveys as vividly the degree to which the Hebrew Bible recognizes in art—i.e., something created in physical form at the highest level of human creative achievement—the potential to embody or reflect the character and supremacy of the divine.

Of course, the significance of the role of master craftsmen Bezalel and Oholiab is determined not by the inherent beauty or brilliance of what they create but by the importance of the object or entity that they are honoring through their work. The art and architecture of the Tabernacle and the Tent of the Meeting are admirable because of the functions they serve: housing the Ark of the Covenant, marking a place of divine worship, and symbolizing the presence of God among the people of Israel while they wander through the desert on their way to the Promised Land, among others.

The Hebrew Bible, in other words, ultimately measures art’s value and importance according to how rigorously it serves God’s plan and will. Art in itself is not holy. The clearest demonstration of this idea within Jewish tradition is that the text of the Five Books of Moses—preserved as a Torah scroll—is unadorned, un-embellished by art or complementary decoration. The Torah is a text understood to have been given by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai; its holiness cannot be increased, altered or affected in any way, including by artistic decoration, which is by nature a malleable, individualistic, and changeable form. The strict rules governing the writing of a Torah scroll—including in the form of its text, the nature and preparation of the parchment surface on which its written, and the identity and mindset of the scribe—reflect its constant nature and help convey the authenticity and completeness of the text. Theologically, one might say that art in general is not only considered superfluous to the text of the Five Books of Moses, but that the inherently individual character and unique appearance of all works of non-religious art are incompatible with the necessary consistency of the Torah scroll. Its rigorously maintained form links the text directly back to its origin story at Sinai. And this brings us back to and serves to highlight one of the key characteristics of art according to how it is understood in the Hebrew Bible: it is vitally and essentially a human endeavor.

Christianity and historians of Christian art were influenced by the Hebrew-biblical idea that great artists are endowed with divine inspiration. As I discussed in my essay, the great Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari echoes this in his accounts of the lives of, among others, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, which helped establish the basis for the conception of artistic genius. But in what was in part an attempt to supersede the Hebrew Bible’s account of Bezalel and Oholiab, medieval Christian writers and theologians conceived of St. Luke the Evangelist as the first icon painter and, thus, the first Christian and first true artist. How did this come to be? The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles (also attributed to Luke) occupy a prominent place within the New Testament, distinguished by what are considered to be their meticulous and accurate descriptions. Luke thus came to be considered a reliable historical source, as someone who himself must have had firsthand access to biblical events and personages. Because Luke’s Gospel contains material related to Mary not found in any of the other gospels, a tradition in Christian thinking developed that Mary had been an eyewitness to events about which she communicated directly with Luke and that she was the person he claimed in his prologue to have consulted.

By the early to middle part of the medieval era, Luke came to be characterized as an artist who had envisioned and captured in paint the true image of the Virgin Mary and her son Jesus as they had appeared to him. By the late medieval period, a number of depictions on panel of Mary and Jesus were widely considered to be autograph works by Luke. “The Black Madonna of Częstochowa,” housed in a monastery in Częstochowa, Poland, “Our Lady of Vladimir,” a 12th-century Byzantine icon, and the “Madonna del Rosario,” an icon from the 6th century if not earlier, are among icons revered as having been produced by Luke’s hand. A panel by an anonymous 16th-century Russian icon painter represents what proports to be the genesis of the “Our Lady of Vladimir” icon. Like many depictions of the artist-saint, it represents an angel guiding Luke’s hand as he captures an image of Mary standing with the infant Jesus in her arms, suggesting, like traditional understandings of the gospels themselves, that the image created by Luke was truthfully recorded and divinely conceived.

The subject of St. Luke drawing the Virgin became a favorite among German and Netherlandish artists in the 15th and 16th centuries, by which time Luke was widely recognized as the patron saint of artists and the eponymous name given to the artist guilds that were responsible for protecting the working rights of artists, including access to local markets, and for guaranteeing artistic quality and proper standards. A charming painting by the 15th-century south Netherlandish artist Rogier van der Weyden may indeed have been commissioned for the chapel of the painters’ guild in Brussels, where Rogier served as official city painter. Holding a thin metal stylus, St. Luke records a likeness of Mary in silverpoint, a drawing technique widely used by artists during the period.

An ambitious rendition of the subject by the early 16th-century Netherlandish artist Jan Gossart locates the scene in a grander looking Italianate setting, adorned with pilasters and classical medallions copied from Roman coinage. While Luke kneels at a prie-dieu on which his drawing sheet rests, an angel guides his hand to generate the metalpoint image of the Virgin and Child, who are suspended within a cloud of light and encircled by angels at left. The figure of a horned Moses holding the Tablets of the Law, sculpted on a plinth that is oriented in the background directly behind Luke, evokes the Hebrew-biblical tradition upon which the origin of the inspired religious artist is based. Moses seems to point to one of the first commandments on the right arched tablet. Could this be an allusion to the Second Commandment that “You shall make you no carved likeness and no image of what is in the heavens above or what is on the earth below or what is in the waters beneath the earth”? Whether or not this prohibition is directly invoked, the strategic presence of the sculpted figure of Moses seems intended to signal that the laws he brought down at Sinai for the Israelites have been replaced with a new set, and that the restrictions against creating images of the divine are no longer necessary.

But the most dramatic repudiation of the Hebrew Bible’s understanding of artists occurs around the way miraculous images in Christianity are characterized. Envisioning the need for religious art that would convey divine, irrefutable truth, Christians conceived of works of art that are the direct product of the divine imagination—with no human intermediary. With this conceptual leap the role of the artist is imagined to be superfluous or non-existent. There’s even a name for this: acheiropoieton (pl. acheiropoieta). The word, from the Greek, means “made without hand,” and refers to Christian icons said to have come into existence by miraculous divine creation, not created by a human.

The vast majority of acheiropoieta are of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. The term is associated with images made within both the Eastern Orthodox tradition and the western Catholic Church. The Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth long believed to have been used to wrap Jesus’s body following his crucifixion and upon which Jesus’s bodily image was miraculously imprinted, is probably the most famous image of this type. As Gary Vikan, author of The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death, has demonstrated, the Church’s drive toward recognizing miraculous images was so powerful that even devotional objects that were innocuously created could be swept up into vast, international movements. So strong is the divine association with acheiropoieta that the term is also applied to icons regarded as normal human copies of a miraculously created original archetype.

A striking painting of this type in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by a late 14th-century Italian artist designated as the Master of the Orcagnesque Misericordia represents the Head of Christ in temper on wood with gold ground. Still in its original frame, a rarity among such works, the panel represents two angels holding a cloth on which Christ’s face was miraculously imprinted. According to Christian tradition, Saint Veronica was a Jerusalem widow who lived in the 1st century at the same time as Jesus. Upon seeing Jesus carrying the cross to Calvary, she was moved with sympathy and gave him her veil so that he could wipe his forehead. Jesus accepted the offer, and when he returned the veil the image of his face was miraculously captured on it. The resulting relic became known as the Veil of Veronica.

This is one such version and for centuries the portrait that resulted was understood as being the true likeness of Christ. The miraculous picture, not made by human hands, became a foundational image for European artists. It was venerated and possibly used within the context of the celebration of Mass. An inscription on Jesus’s collar from the Gospel of John, “My peace I give unto you,” prompted Millard Meiss and other art historians to theorize that the painting was employed during the celebration of Mass as a tablet used in passing the kiss of peace. Abrasion around the forehead area of Jesus’s face is consistent with this practice, it has been argued, supporting the idea that the panel served such a liturgical function. What made this work, along with other works used within the context of Christian ceremony, appropriate for its devotional function is the determination and recognition that it issued forth through pure, divine creation, that it was produced without human involvement. How markedly different this is from the adamantly human character of religious art in the Hebrew Bible.

This new Christian concept of a miraculous image effectively denies the role of the artist in the creation of an image. It also contravenes the Hebrew Bible’s image of an artist who is divinely inspired to create images and works of art bound up in holiness. The view of human beings captured by the Hebrew Bible holds that they are imbued with a divine spark and that, under the right circumstances and blessed by talent and inspiration, they can achieve holiness. Images and works of art created by their hands and guided by their inspiration are recognized as of this world, and yet capable of reflecting and evoking a holy spirit. The Christian ideal of the work untouched, unmolded, or unguided by human hands ascribes holiness to the divine realm. While absolute divine truth is revealed in this Christian vision of art, the artist is nowhere to be found.