> Jim, if that's your thing, why not do us a favour and give us a brief
> history thereof? I'm sure it will be greatly appreciated. It would be
> beyond my competence.
>
> Bill.
Dear Bill,
This is certainly a subject of interest to me, but I can't quite
claim it is my "thing". There are issues of narrativity, among
others, that I am not fully competent in, but from your own bold
approach, which has provoked such stimulating response from the list,
I will endeavour at least to frame the subject. One of the
surprising things about early illustrated Bibles, or parts of Bibles,
such as the Cotton Genesis and the Quedlinburg Itala, is the profuse
extent to which they were illustrated. Several hundred
illustrations, in both cases, have been estimated to accompany their
biblical text. But it does not matter, really, how extensively a
text is illustrated. The choice of what is illustrated involves not
just a particular editing of the text, but an interpretation of it,
as well. In other words, value judgements and cultural values enter
the picture, as in some respect, I am sure, they must in purely
textual traditions. How, essentially, does one chop a text up into
discrete, illustratable segments? Whatever the process or the
reasons, the story of Christ's life, to take a prominent example,
becomes interpreted in a certain way. Some events become
illustrated, while much text is ignored. A standard canon of
"events" became visualized, and although in some instances a clear
historical rationale can be ascertained, I at least suspect that
more "arbitrary" aspects of the historical process also play a
central role. It is pointless, for example, to look for images of
Christ's Crucifixion before the 5th century; it was not represented
before this. The reasons why it wasn't illustrated earlier probably
involve the humiliating and marginalizing manner of execution that
crucifixion represented in the Roman world. The reasons why it began
to be represented, however, are equally interesting: the 5th century
also saw a crystalization of debates on Christ's nature (Council of
Ephesus, 431) that formulated an orthodox view that He had two,
divine and human, as against, for instance, the Monophysite view that
he had only one, divine: what better way to emphasize Christ's two
natures than by showing Him both dying, in the Crucifixion, and being
resurrected, as a proof of His divine natur?. These were issues that
only arose in the 5th century, so it is not surprising that their
illustration did not precede this period of theological enquiry. The
Old Testament narrative sequence in the mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore,
however, devised in the papacy of Sixtus III (432-40), exemplify a
completely different cultural mode of selection. Here, the glorious
and heroic story of the early books of the Bible are illustrated in a
way that recall previous and non-Christian artistic traditions of
imperial triumphs: the events of the Old Testament are interpreted in
a manner that emulate the imperial victories depicted on Triumphal
Columns, for example. Here, we are dealing not with strictly
Christian issues but wider cultural ones, that affect the reception
of the Text. Is this an issue that only applies to image traditions,
or do the same factors also impact on the biblical text itself? The
way that people envisioned the Bible is an issue, however
inconvenient to textual scholars, that centrally affected its
reception and interpretation. Pope Gregory the Great's formulation
of images as the "Bible of the illiterate" has undoubtedly been
overplayed, but nevertheless, the way that the text of the Bible has
been visually represented cannot simply be written off in any
consideration of the way that the Bible has been edited or
interpreted.
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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