The work of history’s greatest artists—from Michelangelo to Rembrandt—is filled with depictions of the Exodus, of Mordechai and Esther, of creation itself. But what did these Old Masters make of the Hebrew Bible; how did it influence them? Did these artworks honor or depart from Jewish interpretive tradition? Did the art inspired by the Hebrew Bible fundamentally differ from that inspired by the New Testament and other foundational Christian texts? Why did Tanakh yield so many masterpieces?
These are among the questions I set out to address in this column, which takes its name from a line in the talmudic tractate Pirkei Avot: “Know what is above you: a seeing eye, a hearing ear, and all your deeds written in a book.” Broadly understood as a recognition of Divine omnipresence and a caution against transgression, the phrase can be applied to the double-edged task of artists, who work in a visual medium but aim to transmit meaning beyond the physical world. Raphael: Sublime Poetry, a fascinating special exhibition on the Italian Renaissance master (on view through June 28 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), offers a good place to start. One particular work provides, I think, an intriguing clue about a characteristic of the Hebrew Bible that inspired the artist’s creative genius.
The show features a large processional banner produced in the central Italian city of Città di Castello within the last few years of the 15th century, when Raphael would have been no older than seventeen. The exhibition’s curator, the art historian Carmen Bambach, contends that the remarkable pair of paintings might have been his very first independently commissioned work, earning him the professional designation of “master.” At the very least, it paved the way for other major commissions. It served, in other words, as a kind of artistic calling card, a public announcement of his talent.
The work of history’s greatest artists—from Michelangelo to Rembrandt—is filled with depictions of the Exodus, of Mordechai and Esther, of creation itself. But what did these Old Masters make of the Hebrew Bible; how did it influence them? Did these artworks honor or depart from Jewish interpretive tradition? Did the art inspired by the Hebrew Bible fundamentally differ from that inspired by the New Testament and other foundational Christian texts? Why did Tanakh yield so many masterpieces?
These are among the questions I set out to address in this column, which takes its name from a line in the talmudic tractate Pirkei Avot: “Know what is above you: a seeing eye, a hearing ear, and all your deeds written in a book.” Broadly understood as a recognition of Divine omnipresence and a caution against transgression, the phrase can be applied to the double-edged task of artists, who work in a visual medium but aim to transmit meaning beyond the physical world. Raphael: Sublime Poetry, a fascinating special exhibition on the Italian Renaissance master (on view through June 28 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), offers a good place to start. One particular work provides, I think, an intriguing clue about a characteristic of the Hebrew Bible that inspired the artist’s creative genius.
The show features a large processional banner produced in the central Italian city of Città di Castello within the last few years of the 15th century, when Raphael would have been no older than seventeen. The exhibition’s curator, the art historian Carmen Bambach, contends that the remarkable pair of paintings might have been his very first independently commissioned work, earning him the professional designation of “master.” At the very least, it paved the way for other major commissions. It served, in other words, as a kind of artistic calling card, a public announcement of his talent.
Raphael, The Holy Trinity with Saints Sebastian and Roch (obverse); The Creation of Eve (reverse), ca.1497-99, Pinacoteca Comunale, Città di Castello, Italy
What is the subject of this early independent commission? The banner was painted on both sides. On one side is a depiction of the Holy Trinity with Saints Sebastian and Roch and on the other the Creation of Eve. One image represents a foundational Christian doctrine, the other an episode from the Hebrew Bible.
Today, one would be excused for passing it by, especially in the context of an exhibition teeming with considerably more famous works by Raphael—most of which are much better preserved. Simply put, the painting is a wreck, having suffered the punishing effects of its original function as a banner that was carried year after year in outdoor processions, exposed to the elements. Furthermore, the banner was disassembled at least 400 years ago so that the two paintings are now viewed side-by-side instead of back-to-back, which is how they were originally oriented and displayed.
Yet its modern re-assemblage has an advantageous, if unintended effect. It allows us to see the two works simultaneously, turning them into a quintessential side-by-side art-historical comparison. It highlights the dramatically different nature of the Christological and Hebrew-biblical scenes.
The scene with the Trinity shows two saints kneeling in devotion on either side of the crucified Jesus, with the dove of the Holy Spirit and the heavenly Father above. The Father is encircled in an almond-shaped aura of light (called a mandorla, after the Italian word for almond), indicating his divine status. The composition is characterized by absolute stillness and symmetry, stylistic indicators of the immutable perfection of the Trinity.
Detail of Raphael’s The Creation of Eve, ca.1497-99, Pinacoteca Comunale, Città di Castello, Italy
In the Creation of Eve, God is represented without a mandorla. Bearing a strikingly earthly appearance, He supports himself on one knee while actively reaching toward Adam’s side to extract one of his ribs, poised to bring forth Eve. The composition is characterized by movement and contrast, suggestive of the new life about to come into being.
Among the striking contrasts between these two subjects, the most obvious is the theological gulf between the Trinity, with its mysterious expression of God as existing simultaneously in three coeternal and coequal persons, and the Hebrew Bible’s view of humanity as a reflection of, yet separate from, an indivisible and transcendent God. But the distinguishing characteristic of the Creation of Eve that I’d like to highlight is one that artists recognized perhaps more than any other in scenes from the Hebrew Bible: their manifestation of change. While the absolutely symmetrical Trinity reflects a pre-determined state of eternal harmony, Eve’s creation is characterized by creativity and momentous transformation. In one, the viewer encounters perfect equilibrium, in the other, dramatic flux.
The stark thematic and stylistic contrast between the two sides of Raphael’s banner leads us to ask: did the Hebrew Bible prompt artists toward a new visual language? Is there something in its character that encouraged dynamic compositions? Were narrative episodes from the Hebrew Bible inherently conducive to artistic creativity, in ways different from Chistian texts?
There is only one other painting with an Old Testament subject in the Raphael exhibition by which to test this idea: The Vision of Ezekiel, a small work from late in the artist’s career, when he was based in Rome, working mainly for the pope and patrons in the papal court. The painting is based on the vision from the opening chapter of Ezekiel where, within a great, radiant storm cloud, the prophet sees four living creatures with the faces of a human, a lion, a bull, and an eagle. These creatures were later interpreted by Christians as representing the four evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
The viewer of this very well-preserved, jewel-like painting may at first be drawn to the figure of God, whose muscular form and outstretched arms are silhouetted against a burst of yellow light. But the orientation of the figure’s face and gaze leads us down to the lowermost left corner of this bold, dynamic composition. It is here where you can just make out the tiny form of Ezekiel standing in a richly verdant landscape, bathed in divine light. It is from his perspective, the viewer is made to understand, that the vision above is being experienced.
Detail of Raphael’s The Vision of Ezekial, ca.1515-16, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina, Florence
The landscape in Raphael’s Vision of Ezekiel takes up a relatively small footprint of the overall panel—in absolute dimensions it is probably a little over 3 inches high by 11 inches wide. But its beauty, grandeur, and sophistication are legendary. The famous Renaissance painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari remarked, “the little landscape depicted below on earth is no less striking and beautiful in its smallness than are other monumental things by him.” It’s a tiny expanse of paint that astonishes.
There is something, then, in both these Hebraic subjects that lent themselves to particularly animated, vitally conceived compositions. Moreover, when one compares the Creation of the Eve and the Vision of Ezekiel to the many harmonious and balanced Virgin and Child paintings that populate the show—among depictions of other Christian subjects—the sense of dynamism in the Hebraic paintings is even more striking.
One would need to travel to Rome to appreciate fully the impact of the Hebrew Bible on Raphael. Around 1518, not long before his death in 1520 at the age of thirty-seven, the artist received a commission from Pope Leo X to paint a covered gallery in the Vatican Palace. Raphael designed 52 fresco paintings, almost all of them illustrating scenes from the Hebrew Bible. Though much of the actual painting was done by his workshop assistants, the celebrated series has come to be known as Raphael’s Bible.
Indeed, artists often used the Hebrew Bible to explore dynamic confrontation and radical transformation, internal and external. Two of the most famous sculptures of the Italian Renaissance, by Raphael’s slightly older colleague Michelangelo Buonarotti, serve to demonstrate this point. Michelangelo’s monumental sculpture of David was produced for the city of Florence at the very beginning of the 16th century, within a few years of Raphael’s early banner. The sculpture of Moses was conceived as part of an ambitious multitiered tomb monument for Pope Julius II, a project Michelangelo was summoned to Rome to execute but ultimately left unfinished.
It’s beyond the scope of this essay to discuss Michelangelo’s remarkable sculptures in detail – I will return to them in future columns. But it’s worth noting here that one of the most striking aspects of Michelangelo’s David and Moses is how he chose to represent their subjects at dramatic inflection points in their lives.
Detail of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s David, 1501-1504, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (Photo by Jörg Bittner Unna, 2021)
Both David and Moses are represented on the precipice or just over the precipice of vital transitions: David about to sling the stone in his battle with Goliath, Moses about to smash the Ten Commandments upon seeing the Israelites dancing around the golden calf. The artist brilliantly communicates energy and movement through the narrative context of these figures, each of whom possesses ideal, classical forms and proportions.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Moses, ca. 1513–1515, Basilica of Saint Peter in Chains, Rome
Taking a further step back, this attribute of looming transformation can be used to describe much of the art based on the Hebrew Bible, which possesses no shortage of sensational action, rich character development, and complex, evolving family dynamics. That much of the greatest Hebrew-biblical art highlights moments of drastic change or great risk could be explained both by the inherent character of the source material, and by what naturally appeals to artists when they interpret text in visual form.
Artists are naturally drawn to dynamic subjects—in part because they help animate and elevate the inert character of their medium. Listeners and readers absorb music or literature over time. Works of visual art remain constant, fixed in place. The impression conveyed by a work of art must be immediate, even if its details and subtleties reveal themselves over time and through extended, close observation. It falls upon the artist to generate a moving or powerful experience for the viewer within this context. And so it is no coincidence that artists—especially since the early-modern period, when art was expected to prompt an inner response in viewers—tend to gravitate toward subjects involving dramatic and transformative experience.
To cite but three of the many episodes from Tanakh that have produced important artistic legacies, there is the test of Abraham at the Akeidah, which sparked a remarkable body of work in the Renaissance and Baroque eras, in particular; the confrontation between Jacob and the angel, which continued to inspire artists into the 19th and 20th centuries; and Queen Esther’s unbidden appearance before King Ahasuerus, which yielded a rich artistic output in both Chistian and Jewish contexts through independent paintings and decorated Esther scrolls. Artists invented creative means to express Abraham and Isaac’s psychological turmoil, Jacob’s existential challenge, and Esther’s heroic intercession on behalf of her people.
For great artists, these scenes can reveal fundamental truths about the covenant between God and man; about the challenges we face as divinely created beings in a fraught, human world; about the means through which we try to institute God’s vision in society.
To return to the Raphael painting with which we began, we should not ignore the social and religious context in which the work was made—a context far removed from the one in which the Hebrew Bible was conceived and from the various communal contexts in which Jews have continued to read, interpret, and live by their core text. The fully anthropomorphic depictions of God in the Creation of Eve and the Vision of Ezekiel demonstrate unequivocally that they were not conceived within a Jewish context.
Raphael’s banner was commissioned by a confraternity (a lay religious organization common in the Renaissance) dedicated to promoting the Trinity. Its specific purpose was to be carried in a procession dedicated to combatting the effects of the bubonic plague, which had brutally hit Città di Castello and other cities in central Italy around this time. Sebastian and Roch, the saints depicted in the presence of the Trinity, were commonly invoked as protector saints against pestilence, and frequently represented on plague banners. (One may wonder whether the placement of the Creation of Eve within the context of a work meant to have a medical function reflected the inherently therapeutic character of Genesis’s account of the subject, an association my fellow columnist Devorah Goldman explored here.)
Though the Creation of Eve is considered an unusual choice for a processional banner, and its specific meaning in this work has been variously interpreted, it must at least in part be understood within the context of Christianity’s typological use of the Hebrew Bible. Within this ideological framework, Eve, according to Bambach writing in the exhibition catalogue, “was seen as a symbolic parallel for the Church, which was born from the side of Christ just as Eve had been coaxed to life from Adam’s rib.” Such parallelism was often complemented by more fervently negative supercessionist ideas, according to which Adam and Eve—as Bambach, drawing on early Church writings, explains—“represented humanity’s suffering through their original sin” while Mary symbolized the repudiation of sin and the granting of redemption.
Yet I would strongly caution—and here I am speaking mainly to fellow Jews—against dismissing Raphael’s Creation of Eve on account of its Christian context or messaging. Great artists are not mouthpieces of ideological programs. Their work reflects ideas in complex and multifaceted ways. The masterpieces based on Hebrew biblical subjects are masterpieces not in spite of how they interpret the source material; they achieve greatness, in part at least, because they retain and convey an essence of what is in the source material.
And at the core of this representation of human creation is a recognition that change is at the heart of the story of creation itself and, more broadly, of the Hebrew Bible as a whole. The book that begins with a state of Tohu va-vohu (translated by Robert Alter as “welter and waste”) never sees chaos completely vanquished, only held in check. Great artists like Raphael, Michelangelo, and many others were inspired by this distinctly Hebrew-biblical piece of wisdom.
Jacob Wisse is Associate Professor of Art History at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University. He is the former director of Yeshiva University Museum, where he guided its exhibitions and collections and its educational and public programs. He received his B.A. in Art History from McGill University; an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University; and a Curatorial Studies Degree, jointly from NYU and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He specializes in Jewish art and visual culture, as well as in northern European art of the Renaissance and early modern era. His book on City Painters in the Burgundian Netherlands is to be published by Brepols Press. He lives in Yonkers, NY, with his wife and two daughters.
