From “Christ on the cross” by Lucas Cranach the Elder, after 1529. Wikipedia.
Jacob Wisse teaches the full range of Western art history at Yeshiva University to a committed Jewish audience, so it is only natural that he notes—for them and with them—how much the Hebrew Bible has played a role in European artworks. And stories from the Hebrew Bible have endured for a very good reason. They show a full range of characters with traits both virtuous and venal; their actions run the gamut from heroism to disgrace. Consider, for example, the contrasts across the life of David: first a youthful, unexpected triumph, then all aspects of kingship tainted by adultery and arranged homicide—and finally the grief of a lost, if rebellious son. Or the life of Jacob, who gains his sacred birthright over his older twin through outright deceit of his father, yet who personally wrestles with the divine, consequently giving his adopted name to the people Israel. For Jews, stories of the patriarchs, beginning with Abraham, make claims of a founding dynasty to a covenant with the divine, a dynasty, to be more specific, that participates in the divine’s mysterious plan. Wisse notes the specificity and power of those characters and stories for art. But he now turns his attention to something more: the question of how Christian artists responded to the same shared text of the Hebrew Bible, which they renamed the Old Testament.
Instead of on a peoplehood with a covenant, Christians focus on the fall of humanity and the Original Sin of Adam and Eve as the fundamental aspect of their take on the same story, an aspect requiring redemption through the ultimate sacrifice—presumably part of a similar divine plan—of Jesus on the cross. Thus, when Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican (1508–12) begins with the days of Creation, it moves directly into the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from paradise for defying God’s commands. And Michelangelo ends his Sistine Chapel work with a vision of the end of time: a stern image of the Last Judgment (1536–41) by a Christ figure, implacably dooming damned souls in the presence of saints. Wisse takes up the question of why any Old Testament subjects would hold meaning in the face of this overwhelming Gospel emphasis on salvation through Jesus as the son of God.
It turns out that Christians regard the Hebrew Bible as prophecy and prologue for their “New” Testament. Theologically, they select Old Testament actions and passages that seem to anticipate this final Gospel realization, as if their younger religion was the promised fulfillment of the covenant with humanity in general. Think Handel’s Messiah in music—its libretto encapsulates various major biblical lines of text deemed to hold predictive value in retrospect, such as Isaiah 7:14, translated as “behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” This doctrine, often encapsulated in the term “supersession,” asserts that Christianity is the rightful successor to Judaism for God’s special protection, and they choose stories the suggestively anticipate that culmination. As Wisse asserts, this allows Christians to fashion “an artistic tradition that is unimaginable without the Hebrew Bible and that can reveal deep truths about Hebrew Scripture and Jewish ideas.” But of course these truths come with a twist.
In the visual arts as well as textual commentaries, Christians often employ a notion called typology, or prefiguration, where events from the Hebrew Bible eventually find rhymes within the later life of Jesus as laid out in the New Testament. Perhaps the most basic of these is the Akeidah, the binding of Isaac by Abraham at the tense moment when God commands him to sacrifice his beloved son. For Jews, this moment is the basic liturgical text of Rosh Hashanah, a terrible test of faith that appropriately initiates the Days of Awe. But for Christian artists the binding of Isaac and his miraculous delivery by an angel sounds entirely like the story of Jesus, who risks his own body as an only son, prepared for the ultimate sacrifice according to the decree of his own divine Father. After all, like Isaac at Mount Moriah, Jesus carries the wood for his own demise, dragging a heavy cross up the hill of Golgotha outside Jerusalem. Isaac evades sacrifice, however, and Abraham receives a divine blessing and a reaffirmation of the covenant, including blessing “all the nations of the earth,” which Christian missionaries took up as their religious charge. Consequently, Christian artists took up the theme of vulnerable Isaac as a prefiguration of their own claims—through Jesus—to inherit that same promised covenant through Jesus’s fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.
Two vivid examples from the 17th century show both the drama of this scene as well as its fraught position for Abraham as father. Caravaggio, in a 1603 painting, underscores the drama of the climactic scene in a literal deus ex machina, where an angel enters from the viewer’s left to stay the hand of an older, balding Abraham, interrupting him at the climactic moment when he is taking a knife to the throat of a terrified, screaming Isaac.
Rembrandt (1606–69) also took up the Sacrifice of Isaac on several occasions in both paintings and etchings. Eventually, in a 1655 etching, he reduced the external drama of the scene to a more internal form. In this interpretation, the artist shows Abraham, still bearded, as an aged man with darkened eyes, which suggest an external blindness of his own. He shows surprise at the sudden presence of the angel, who grasps him from behind as he presides above a kneeling Isaac, who, unlike Caravaggio’s panicked youth, appears passive and reconciled to his fate. The angel still blocks Abraham’s arm while shielding the eyes of Isaac. Rembrandt also suggests the divine supervision of this outcome through descending lines from heaven above the three principals.
Some scenes are almost too obvious as precedents for New Testament typology. When Moses was ordered by God in the book of Numbers to punish the Israelites for their restlessness and lack of faith in the wilderness, he was instructed to build a pole with a fiery brass serpent on it, so that all who behold it would survive, but that those who did not turn to it would perish of snakebite. That scene was taken up, especially by Lutheran interpreters in the 16th century, as a rather explicit anticipation of the Christian cross and the need for both obedience and faith. A painting after 1529 by Lucas Cranach (Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum) juxtaposes the Brazen Serpent with Christ on the Cross. Or the event of Jonah emerging from the belly of the great fish after three days and three nights after prayer and contrition by that prophet foretold the Christian doctrine of Christ’s victory over death in his Resurrection, though that subject was not frequently represented in visual art.
In similar fashion, the less familiar scene of another biblical parental blessing, this one by an elderly Jacob for the two sons of Joseph, was readily adopted by Christian thinkers as an example of how the second son took the favored position over the first. According to Genesis 48, a nearly blind Israel (i.e., Jacob) deliberately reversed the placement of his blessing hands to favor the younger Ephraim over Menasseh, preferring his descendants as a “multitude among nations” (an echo of the earlier covenant between Abraham and God). Christians seized upon this image to proclaim that they were like Ephraim, favored over the older Jewish religion and the true inheritors of the foundational covenant. Rembrandt movingly depicted this subject in a large 1656 canvas.
In the late Middle Ages, typological manuscripts and printed books codified these relationships in illustrated and distributed form. Their titles proclaim their theological ambitions: Biblia pauperum (Bible of the Poor), for instance, or Speculum humanae salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation). A good example of how this organized juxtaposition reinforced New Testament messages through Old Testament prefigurations appears in a massive multi-part Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament (1464-68) by the fifteenth-century painter Dieric Bouts. This is ably mentioned by Wisse in connection with the Gathering of Manna image, but in my view there is still more to see in it, more it reveals about Christian typology.
In the center, at a size equal to the four side panels of the piece, is Jesus presiding over the Last Supper as he establishes the Eucharist, whose daily enactment in the church the altarpiece was installed in transpired underneath its vivid visual representation. The sides display four episodes from the Hebrew Bible, some of them fairly obscure but all considered strong typological prefigurations of the Sacrament itself. At the upper right is the Gathering of Manna, a meal of divine grace. Its typology echoes in John in the New Testament: “Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”
Opposite that scene in the Bouts altarpiece, in the upper left, an armored, young Abraham encounters a priest-king of Salem, Melchizedek, who brings out bread and wine in greeting as he blesses the future patriarch. At a lower point in the altarpiece, meanwhile, the Israelites are shown roasting their Paschal lamb, a scene anticipating John the Baptist’s famous declaration, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” (It also has an echo in Paul’s scripture in I Corinthians, “For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.”) That scene is complemented in the upper right by the manna offered through divine grace, conveyed by an observing God in heaven above the people gathering their sustenance. Finally, at lower right, a sleeping Elijah in the wilderness rests, ready to die, but then awakened by an angel and bidden to eat.
All these Hebrew Bible scenes foretold Christian doctrine, the Holy Sacrament as a divine gift and a sustaining element of faith. Of course, Christian artists readily represented their own foundational scenes from the New Testament: the Infancy of Jesus; his suffering and Passion, culminating in the Crucifixion and Resurrection; and, to a lesser extent, his adult miracles and preaching. But they frequently turned to the Hebrew Bible for its own leading figures, from the patriarchs (Abraham and Jacob especially) to later leaders, such as Moses and David, or others, including the suffering Job or a worthy woman, Esther. Whenever they did use such figures, it was always with an eye toward the Christian doctrine as the true successor to the Jewish covenant, actively making past into prologue.