Art, the Bible, and the Big Apple to Shut Down upon Museum’s Closure

The Museum of Biblical Art closed to the public on Sunday, June 14, 2015, following the end of the run of Sculpture in the Age of Donatello, and will cease operations on June 30, 2015.  MOBIA will not reopen in a new location.

MOBIA had its origins as an art gallery founded in 1997 by the American Bible Society (ABS); the gallery opened in 1998 in the ABS building at 1865 Broadway, New York. In 2004, MOBIA became an independent art museum. MOBIA opened to the public in 2005, remaining on the second floor of ABS’s New York headquarters and continuing to receive significant in-kind and financial support from ABS. ABS sold its New York building in February of this year and will relocate to Philadelphia. With the building sale, MOBIA was required to find a new home. The Museum explored multiple options for a new site and potential partners with whom to collaborate. It was ultimately impossible in such a short timeframe to raise the funds needed for the increased operating budget necessitated by leasing and renovating a new site.

“I believe that MOBIA contributes a unique element to the cultural landscape of New York and the entire country, and it is with tremendous sorrow that we close our doors,” said Co-Chair of the MOBIA Board of Trustees John Fossum. “I want to extend the appreciation of the entire Board to the dedicated, creative, and tireless staff of the Museum, and especially to Director Richard Townsend. I also want to express our gratitude, as well as my personal appreciation, to American Bible Society. It was American Bible Society’s vision of creating a museum focused on the rich heritage of the Bible that gave birth to MOBIA. ABS has been MOBIA’s most generous supporter from the beginning.”

“Under Richard’s leadership, MOBIA has presented extraordinary exhibitions and programs and has elevated its standing to become a true peer of the great art museums of this city,” said Co-Chair of the MOBIA Board of Trustees Elaine Hirschl Ellis. “With Richard as director, I have no doubt that MOBIA would have continued to flourish had there been more time to raise funds to sustain the institution. It is painfully ironic that we must cease existence at the moment the Museum has achieved such prominence.”

“I am deeply proud of what we have accomplished at MOBIA, and deeply sorry that we will not be able to present the many exciting exhibitions and projects we had planned for the coming years,” said MOBIA Director Richard P. Townsend. “Parting with our incomparable staff is extremely difficult and I want to express my profound gratitude to them and our Board for their commitment to the Museum and their exceptional achievements and service. I also want to thank our partners, advocates, members, and all our many visitors for their support and their enthusiastic embrace of our programs. They have made my tenure as director of the Museum both an honor and a pleasure.”

MOBIA, in association with Art Services International, Alexandria, Virginia, has co-organized the exhibitionPower and Piety: Spanish Colonial Art from the Patricia Cisneros Collection, and had intended to launch the exhibition’s national tour in New York City later this year. Due to MOBIA’s pending closure, the exhibition—drawn from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros—will premiere at the Society of Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida, in March of 2016 and then tour nationally through 2018. For more information on Power and Piety, please go towww.asiexhibitions.org .

ABOUT MOBIA

The Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA), an independent non-profit arts institution, has as its mission examining the Bible’s influence on the Western visual tradition, and on artists from the historical past to the present day. The Museum has taken a secular perspective on the Bible’s pivotal role in art history, looking at how this text impacts artistic practice in both familiar and surprising ways. MOBIA has been committed to being inclusive and non-sectarian, inviting visitors of all beliefs and viewpoints to participate in its programs and engage with ideas at the intersection of a range of disciplines—from aesthetics to cultural history to religious studies.

The Museum’s exhibitions have included: Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral, which brought major works by Donatello and other early Renaissance masters to the United States for the first time; Back to Eden: Contemporary Artists Explore the Garden, an exhibition of painting, sculpture, installations, and multi-media pieces created in the last fifteen years, for which MOBIA commissioned six new works; The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi which re-united the three known surviving panels of di Fredi’s masterpiece; and Louis C. Tiffany and the Art of Devotion, which featured an array of church decorations and memorials that Tiffany produced beginning in the early 1880s.

The artists featured in MOBIA’s exhibitions include Donatello, William Kentridge, Jacopo Tintoretto, Pipilotti Rist, Marc Chagall, Paolo Veronese, Mark Dion, Albrecht Dürer, Fred Tomaselli, Romare Bearden, Andy Warhol, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Enrique Martinez Celaya. MOBIA is a non-collecting institution so there is no collection to be dispersed with the closing of the Museum.

This blog, run by the staff of MOBIA, will be shut down on June 30, 2015.  We wish to thank all of our readers for their interest and support.

Abraham and Isaac

Photo by Lucas Chilczuk

Donatello sculpted a host of early biblical figures – David, Judith and Holofernes, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah among others. Abraham and Isaac (the Sacrifice of Isaac) (1421) came first, except for the marble David that Donatello created three decades before the famous bronze version. Abraham and Isaac, which he created with Nanni di Bartolo, known as Rosso, was an early test of his skill depicting narratives from the Hebrew Bible.

Maybe appropriately, the sacrifice of Isaac is also a test.

In Genesis 22: 1-13, G-d announces that He will test Abraham and orders him to bring his “son, [his] only son” to a mountain in the land of Moriah for a sacrifice. Abraham does as commanded, deceiving Isaac about the purpose of their journey. In the nick of time, an angel called to Abraham and said that he had proved his devotion; he could sacrifice a ram caught in a nearby thicket in lieu of his son.

Donatello’s Abraham looks gangly. His thick arms and broad hands hang down, suddenly relaxed, letting the knife fall away from Isaac’s exposed carotid artery. The wide-eyed, skinny boy stares down away from his father, knowing that he would not die that day, after all.

Image Courtesy Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Antonio Quattrone

Abraham and Isaac (the Sacrifice of Isaac) (1421) keeps the angel, the ram, and the thicket outside of the frame. The rendering is uniquely simple. Some of that simplicity reflects the narrow frame of the cathedral it was made to adorn.   Donatello also made optical corrections for the sculpture’s placement high in a niche on the cathedral façade. Viewed from below, the hands and arms of the sculpture would appear smaller in proportion to the rest of the body.

But the figures remain unusual: too intimate and casual for the grand narrative that they embody. No other artist, before or after Donatello, made an image of the sacrifice of Isaac quite like this one.

Some of the earliest Christian depictions of Abraham and Isaac come from the Roman catacombs. These 60-some crypts, built into soft volcanic rock on the outskirts of Rome between the 2^nd and 7^th centuries CE, contained the bodies of martyrs, the relics of saints, and a wealth of art depicting Christian liturgy and practice. According to the early 20th-century scholar Alison Moore Smith, catacomb frescoes depicting the sacrifice of Isaac typically show one of three moments from the biblical narrative: father and son approaching the altar, father on a pedestal and son standing at the altar with the ram, and father standing over kneeling son. Some versions – especially ones that show the father standing over kneeling son – add a ram and the icon Christian icon of the “right hand of God.”

One fresco from the Catacomb of Marcellinus and Peter, depicting the third scenario, shows Isaac nude and Abraham in a short Roman tunic with a boxy altar going up in flames with a prancing lamb present. Abraham grabs Isaac’s shoulder, but there is no malice in his stance. The curved dagger hangs too low and swings too widely to deal a death blow. Perhaps the angel has intervened or, perhaps for this image, Abraham’s heart was not in it.

Over time, more symbols and figures crowded scenes of the sacrifice of Isaac. On sarcophagi from the Mediterranean rim in the early Common Era, Abraham and Isaac typically appear with the hand of God, reflecting a transition from Jewish iconoclasm to Christian iconography of the Father and the Son. Farther into the Middle East, early Christian artists showed Isaac on the altar more often than kneeling on the ground and added Sarah (Abraham’s wife and Isaac’s mother), the character of a servant (who does not appear in Genesis), a donkey or a horse, and extra foliage.

The sacrifice of Isaac caught on during the Byzantine period, once artists and theologians understood it as a parallel to God the Father offering his son Jesus to atone for humanity’s sins. The central figures began to appear with halos, flowing robes, and more elaborate decoration, in contrast to the simplicity of the early Christian imagery.  In the West, this part of Genesis had less of a following among artists and when it appeared, it did so with a strongly didactic cast.

But in the sculpted interior of Norwich Cathedral in Norfolk, England, the story appears twice. The Late-Gothic-style cathedral nave features a series of bosses – architectural protrusions – depicting scenes from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.  One boss shows Abraham and Isaac with the simplicity, fatherly emotion, and lack of overt symbolism that characterize very early Christian art. The other, more prominent in the structure of the nave, shows a prayerful Isaac, sitting on an altar covered in fringed fabric, and Abraham standing tall and seemingly free of doubts about the act that he is soon to commit.

Helen Sherman identifies the latter boss as the quintessential medieval depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac. The nave dates to the 1640s, well after the Italian Renaissance. England took longer than continental Europe did to emerge from Gothic conventions of art and architecture. But Sherman connects the simply styled boss to quatrefoils that Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi produced for the doors of the Florence Baptistery.  These two master sculptors competed for the commission of the grand doors by producing relief sculptures of the sacrifice of Isaac, which had to include the father/son pair, two servants, the angel, and a sheep. Sherman identifies Ghiberti’s winning submission, with its idealized human forms and asymmetric, uncluttered composition, as the aesthetic that would define the High Renaissance.

Ghiberti and Brunelleschi may have influenced medieval style in depictions of Abraham and Isaac as much as it influenced them. And they probably influenced Donatello, their  contemporary and fellow Florentine. But where does Donatello himself fit on the historical arc of artistic style?

19 years after Ghiberti and Brunelleschi made their Abraham and Isaac sculptures, Donatello began his. Ghiberti had shown Abraham and Isaac just before the divine intervention and Brunelleschi had shown them in the midst of it. Donatello chose to depict a more internal drama: Abraham’s solace and gratitude after G-d tells him that he would not have to sacrifice his son.  In some sense, this Abraham takes after Abraham of the Catacomb of Marcellinus and Peter: less symbolic than fatherly.

However, Timothy Verdon, co-curator of Sculpture in the Age of Donatello, identifies qualities that make this image of Abraham and Isaac absolutely new.  With this sculpture, Donatello invented the figura serpentinata e moltiplicata, the coiled, multiple-figure grouping. Donatello himself would use this structure again in Judith and Holofernes (1460). High Renaissance artists like Michelangelo would later make it more elaborate.

Image Courtesy Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Antonio Quattrone

Moreover, Donatello’s Isaac was the first male nude of the Renaissance. This, too, foreshadowed the artist’s later work. The bronze David, from the 1440s, was the Renaissance’s first freestanding male nude.

But where David, another figure from the Hebrew Bible, may be erotic in Donatello’s depiction, Isaac is naïve. Genesis does not actually specify Isaac’s age at the time of the near-sacrifice. At one point, the Talmud – a massive code of Jewish law and a sort of commentary on the Hebrew Bible – says that he was 37 years old. Artists in both Christian and Jewish traditions, however, have tended to depict him as a child.

Donatello made Isaac exactly that, a child with a middle-aged father.

History did not take this simplicity with it. In the Baroque period, painters rather than sculptors picked up the topic. Domenichino, Caravaggio, Pedro Orrente, and Rembrandt van Rijn produced Abraham and Isaac scenes with intense emotional content, symbolism, and coloration. Chiaroscuro, rounded lines, cherubic angels, background landscapes, and glowing faces replaced Donatello’s angled planes, simple garments, and familiar interaction.  A rare Baroque sculpture of Abraham and Isaac, by the Spanish artist Alonso Berruguete, shows both men wailing grotesquely. Gold drapery encases their twisted bodies.

Donatello stepped outside the historical framework. Early Christian and Classical all at once, the 1421 Abraham and Isaac is a category unto itself, and it’s on view at MOBIA through June 14.

– ABK for MOBIA

The Art of Suffering

Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last. – Luke 23:46

The death of Jesus is treated with sparing detail in the New Testament.  Only 42 verses in the entire Bible explicitly describe his crucifixion, a gruesome but unfortunately common form of execution used by Romans for criminals convicted of treason against the Empire.  While ancient sources like Josephus and Cicero unanimously agreed that it was a horrible death, the Gospel writers did not focus on the gory details that may have included, according to modern archeological evidence, nails being driven through the sides of the heels of the condemned and into the crossbeam.  Instead, the Evangelists emphasize the words Jesus uttered to those in his proximity and his agonized cries to God, as well as the foreboding surrounding elements that signified the tremendous importance of his death.  But if the actual description of Jesus’s suffering leaves a reader wanting, artists over the past two millennia have expounded on the terse words provided in the Bible.

The Crucifixion has been widely depicted since the fourth century C.E.  Unsurprisingly, this key moment in the Christian narrative has also been recreated on film many times since the birth of the medium.  The treatment of Jesus’s violent death on screen has ranged just as widely as pre-cinema visual representations, from the subdued to the highly graphic.

Many films centered on the Passion may be featured on television this weekend, but if you are especially interested in traditional Christian art, you might want to check out the movie adaptation of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1973).  In a highly emotional scene in which Jesus, knowing that he is going to die in a matter of hours, makes a final plea to God for his life before relenting and agreeing to his crucifixion, he cries out, “Just watch me die!  See how I die!”  The charged exclamation is followed by a rapid succession of details of paintings of his death.  Can you name any of the artwork? (Starts at 3:25).

Bonus: In the preceding scene, when Jesus is gathered with his disciples for the Passover Seder the night before his arrest, they strike a familiar pose. Do you recognize this?

Still from Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), dir. Norman Jewison.

– TC for MOBIA

The Quattrocento – An Overview

The Quattrocentro was a place almost as much as a time.

The Battistero di San Giovanni, the Florence Baptistery, sits on the Piazza Duomo, northwest of the Arno River in the center of Florence. This famously octagonal basilica includes bronze doors sculpted by Lorenzo Ghiberti.  In 1401, Ghiberti had bested Filippo Brunelleschi to create the doors, intended to depict scenes from the Bible. And with that, the Quattrocentro, from the Italian millequattrocentro for 1400, had officially begun.

Master of Castel di Sangro
Flagellation
First half of the 15th century
Maiella stone
Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence (deposit of Gallerie Fiorentine, inv. Bargello sculture 487)
Image Courtesy Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Antonio Quattrone

The stylistic and iconographic content of the images on those doors – a focus on the New Testament, a sense of depth created by architecture, and elongated figures – spread fast. By the middle of the 15th century, they had come to the Abruzzo region of Italy. There, the anonymous Master of Castel di Sangro created limestone relief panels that closely mimicked Ghiberti’s doors. Now on view at MOBIA, the panels suggest how works from one square in Florence came to define 15th-century European art.

After Pisanello
Portrait of Pope Martinus V

Other, religio-political developments accompanied the shifts in Quattrocentro art and architecture. From 1414 to 1418, several hundred bishops, abbots, and governors met in Constance, Germany to resolve a problem that had pressed on Western Catholicism since a schismin 1378: the existence of not one, not even two, but three popes. Finally in November 1417, Oddone Colona, a cardinal from Rome, became Pope Martin V of a unified Europe.

A Florentine, Cosimo de’Medici, had accompanied Antipope John XXIII to the Council of Constance and upon return to Italy, he consolidated power. He and his descendants effectively ruled Florence from 1434 to 1737, sponsoring art, quashing opponents, and raking in gold.

Florence was a prize for whomever could control it. With the other Italian city-states, it flourished throughout the Quattrocentro.  Mediterranean trade routes sent untold numbers of goods and gold through the city’s markets and into the European interior. Three men growing up in 14th-century Florence – Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante – had gained the sobriquet “The Three Fountains” for the ink that flowed from their pens to form some of the West’s iconic literary works. The mellifluous Italian of Dante and Petrarch would become standard for all of Italy, into the modern era.

Otto Henry Bacher
Mercato Vecchio, Florence, 1881
Etching

Artists such as Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, better known as “Donatello,” Nanni di Banco, and Luca dell Robbia (whose works are also on view at MOBIA) took this world by storm. For the first quarter of the 15th century, Northern Europe favored the International Gothic style, which promoted elegance, animated lines, naturalism in lieu of symbolic stateliness (especially for human forms), and use of negative space. Ghiberti applied some of these tropes, yet he and his colleagues on the Piazza Duomo projects ran ahead of the times. They revived Classicism: stasis, idealized forms, symmetry, and balance. The objective of these formal choices was beauty inspired by nature rather than naturalism per se. Leon Battista Alberti, an artist and author of the Quattrocentro, codified the model set by Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Donatello in Della pittura and De statua, treatises cum instruction manuals for the High Renaissance artist. The new paradigm venerated the artist via substantial commissions and high expectations for works just as lovely as they were didactic.

15th-century map of Constantinople

In 1453, just after Della pittura and before De statua, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire, frightening Christian principalities and upending Mediterranean Sea routes. Merchants and missionaries needed new passages to Asia and some attempted to go westward, happening upon the Americas in 1492. Rumblings against the Church of Rome gained force, meanwhile, in both humanist and Protestant circles.

The new money and growing pains that gripped Florence would spread northward. The 15th century meant change and conflict. But inside the studio of the Quattrocentro artist, all was order and light.

-ABK for MOBIA

Coming Soon to MOBIA…

Attributed to Giovanni d’Ambrogio
Virgin Mary of the Annunciation (det.), late 14th century
© Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Antonio Quattrone

Are you stateside but longing to see some of the beautiful Renaissance art Florence has to offer?  Well Florence is coming to you next Friday, February 20, when MOBIA debuts Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral.

23 masterpieces of early Florentine Renaissance sculpture—most never seen outside Italy—will be exhibited at MOBIA as the centerpiece of the Museum’s tenth anniversary season. MOBIA will be the sole worldwide venue for this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition. These works—by Donatello, Brunelleschi, Nanni di Banco, Luca della Robbia, and others—were made in the first decades of the 15th century for Florence Cathedral (“Il Duomo”), which was then in the last phase of its construction, and are figural complements to Brunelleschi’s soaring dome, conveying an analogous sense of courage and human potential. Like the dome, these statues of prophets and saints express the spiritual tension of a faith-driven humanism destined to transform Western culture.

This tightly focused exhibition features works all created as components of larger programs for the exterior and interior of the Cathedral from around 1400 until 1450. They include statues and reliefs by Nanni di Banco and Donatello from the lateral entry known as the “Porta della Mandorla”; two larger-than-life seated evangelist figures made to flank the church’s main western portal, again by Nanni and Donatello; two of Donatello’s life-size figures of Old Testament personages from the bell tower; and three of the hexagonal reliefs carved by Luca della Robbia, also from the bell tower. In addition, the exhibition includes the two bronze heads with which Donatello adorned his cantoria, or singing gallery, inside the Cathedral in 1439. Also on view will be two Brunelleschi wood models of the dome—one relating to the overall structure and the other to the titanic lantern—and three early 15th-century stone reliefs derived from scenes on Ghiberti’s first bronze doors for the Baptistery facing the Cathedral.

The significance of the exhibition derives in part from its single-site specificity. Sculpture in the Age of Donatello brings together objects made for the same location by artists who knew each other personally, offering a moving, close-up look at the project which more than any other shaped the early Florentine Renaissance: the completion of “Il Duomo”.

To purchase tickets for Sculpture in the Age of Donatello, please click here

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Throughout the exhibition’s four-month run (it closes on June 14) Art, the Bible & the Big Apple will be featuring blog posts that delve further into the historical and artistic contexts of Sculpture in the Age of Donatello.

The History of Nativities

García del Barco, Triptych of the Nativity (1475-1500)

On a cold, wintry night, in a rocky outcropping overlooking a valley, animals stood on a bed of hay surrounding a simple manger.  People gathered to worship, one of them looking towards the manger and sighing over the sight of a newborn boy nestled within.  The year was… 1223.

The account of the birth of Jesus is recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.  Between the two, the dramatic story is filled with details of a woman delivering her child in a stable, shepherds leaving their flocks at the insistence of angels, visiting wise men, a significant star, a jealous and violent king, and a poor family’s escape to a foreign country.  While the words were first recorded in the first century C.E., the image of that holy birth is most firmly ingrained in our modern cultural mindset because of nativity scenes.  Whether acted out with living people and animals or reproduced as models in various sizes (called crèches), the image of Mary, Joseph, the infant Jesus, and the assorted other players is a recognizable and long-standing visual traditional integral to the Christmas season.

Josefa de Obidos, St.Francis and St. Claire of Assisi in Adoration of the Infant Christ (1647)

The first recorded instance of a Nativity scene comes from St. Bonaventure (d. 1274), a medieval theologian who wrote about the life of the founder of his religious order, St. Francis of Assisi.  Bonaventure describes Francis journeying to the Italian town of Grecio for Christmas in 1223 and, having moved Midnight Mass to an outdoor space to accommodate the large congregation, being inspired to recreate the scene of Jesus’s birth with a live ox and ass.  An onlooking soldier called Master John of Grecio is recorded as having a vision of the newborn king – whom Francis loving called the Babe of Bethlehem – sleeping in the empty manger.

The practice of reenacting the Nativity story became popular in an atmosphere where the written stories of the Gospels were brought to life – literally – through mystery plays.  Much like church art was used to communicate religious messages to laypeople, these tableaus, aside from entertaining, educated the Catholic masses and subsequently formed pictorial associations in people’s minds beyond having the Gospels read to them in Latin during Mass.

Danish Nativity. Courtesy of Glencairn Museum.

Nativities have developed over time less as accurate visual interpretations of Scripture and more as all-inclusive representations of the traditional elements of the Nativity story as a whole.  For example, no specific animals were mentioned in the Gospel accounts as having been present at the event, yet donkeys, sheep, and other animals have been represented in the stable since the first documented nativity scene.  The number of Wise Men who came to laud the babe are not numbered in Scripture, but nativities typically include three, one bearing each documented gift: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  And the Wise Men commingle with the adoring shepherds, though the former are mentioned only in Matthew’s Gospel and the latter solely in Luke’s.  The stable in which the Holy Family is housed, meanwhile, is often topped by an angel, though the New Testament telling has a “multitude of the heavenly host” filling the sky above the fields in the region, not one lone messenger hovering above the baby.

Living nativities and large-scale crèches occupy church grounds and interiors around the world.  New York City has its fair share, sometimes in secular settings.  The famous Radio City Christmas Spectacular, performed throughout the holiday season at Radio City Music Hall, features a living nativity in its program.

Depictions of the Nativity vary as much as the traditions and cultures of believers worldwide.  If you would like to view a sampling of a variety of such crèches, visit the Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania.  Located less than 30 miles from Center City Philadelphia, this castle-like museum is currently exhibiting World Nativities (on view through January 11), a display that “reveals how artisans have adapted the Nativity scene to represent their own national, regional, and local cultures. Nativities are often crafted from whatever materials are locally available, such as clay, grass, cornhusks, bark, gourds, and even coconuts.”  Five continents are represented in the dozens of displays, ranging from a meticulously rendered traditional Flemish scene, to an English Minimalist Nativity formed out of colored blocks.

Minimalist Nativity. Courtesy of Glencairn Museum.

While there, check out the complementary exhibition, A Century of Santa: Images of Santa Claus in the 1800s, to learn about the development of depictions of Santa in America.  And be sure to take a “Christmas in the Castle” tour, where visitors learn how the family that built the 20^th-century castle celebrated the holidays in their medieval-minded space.

Happy Holidays from the MOBIA family to yours!

– T.C. for MOBIA

Beyond Broadway at 61st: Our Lady of Good Counsel

On East 90^th Street between 2^nd and 3^rd Avenue, just off Museum Mile, stands the Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel. The Roman Catholic parish church was established in 1886 and built according to the designs of its parishioner Thomas Henry Poole, a British-born architect known for his commissions for the archdiocese of New York.

Built in Gothic Revival style, the marble exterior of Our Lady of Good Counsel is decorated with turrets and crenellations like a medieval castle. This somewhat austere façade contrasts the church’s interior, which is very spacious and ornate. In the entrance, colorful stained-glass windows with images of saints let in quite a lot of light. Once within the nave of the church, don’t be surprised if you find yourself spending a bit of time looking up at the ceiling; it’s constructed by fan vaults that spread out into beautiful circular lattice patterns.

Despite the overall Gothic feeling of the church, the decoration program of Our Lady of Good Counsel definitely incorporates a Baroque style. Five large-scale paintings with scenes from the life of Christ adorn the walls behind the altar and at the end of both aisles. The dramatic compositions in combination with the monumental size make each work easily visible to viewers from anywhere inside the church. On a smaller scale, reliefs depicting the Passion are fixed at eye level along the walls throughout the church. These works evoke strong emotions and give parishioners and visitors a chance to contemplate the scenes more intimately.

– D.L. for MOBIA

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The Harrowing of Hell

The Harrowing of Hell, the Old English and Middle English term for the triumphal descent of Christ into the underworld, is the subject of an alabaster panel in MOBIA’s current exhibition, Object of Devotion: Medieval English Alabaster Sculpture from the Victoria and Albert Museum. The fifteenth-century relief depicts Christ holding the cross staff of the Resurrection and leading souls out of the mouth of Hell. He guides a figure representing Adam by the wrist as Eve, John the Baptist, and the patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament follow with their hands joined in reverence.

The Harrowing of Hell, c. 1440-70
Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum

What is the Harrowing of Hell?

The medieval English concept of the Harrowing of Hell was derived mainly from dramatic literature based on an account in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. Christ’s descent into the underworld is said to have occurred in the three days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Although there are no explicit references to the event in the New Testament, the brief mentions of it in 1 Peter 3:19-20 and in the Apostles’ Creed prayer indicate that despite some theological controversies concerning the details of the event, the subject was deemed acceptable in Western Christian art. In the Eastern Orthodox

Anastasis, Chora Church, Istanbul

Church, Adam and Eve are always depicted as part of the Resurrection icon, called the Anastasis. A famous example of this is the fourteenth-century apse fresco in the chapel of the Chora Church in Istanbul. While in the West, the Resurrection is usually represented by an image of Jesus rising from his own tomb, in Eastern icons Christ is shown standing at center trampling over a figure symbolizing death as he pulls Adam and Eve from their tombs.

The term “harrowing” is used in modern times to describe an extremely distressing or agonizing experience. Christ’s descent into Hell is certainly meant to be interpreted as a victorious occurrence, but images of Hell in medieval English art were often very graphic and designed to strike fear into the viewer.

Winchester Psalter

The Mouth of Hell

The Hell pictured by medieval dramatists, poets, and artists is very different from the underworld of the Hebrew Bible. Sheol, the abode of the dead, is a place cut off from God that all mortal people, both righteous and unrighteous, will ultimately inhabit. To Christians, Hell is a place of glowing fires and frightful punishments, where, as it is said several times in the New Testament, there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The alabaster panel of the Harrowing of Hell follows in the Anglo-Saxon artistic tradition of depicting the entrance of Hell as the mouth of a beast. Medieval theatre often used a hellmouth prop to attempt to scare the audience through a vivid dramatization of the horrors encountered by the damned. This portrayal of Hell spread through continental Europe and gained popularity during the Protestant Reformation.

Follower of Hieranymous Bosch
Christ in Limbo, c. 1575
Indianapolis Museum of Art

Object of Devotion closes this week! Be sure to catch the show The New York Times called “beautiful and fascinating” before it ends its run at MOBIA on June 8^th.

– D.L. for MOBIA

Fountains of the Deep: Visions of Noah and the Flood

Coinciding with the release of his new feature film, Noah, director Darren Aronofsky presents an exhibition of contemporary art inspired by the biblical story of Noah and the Flood. Fountains of the Deep includes work from 50 internationally recognized artists and is a collaborative effort between Aronofsky and independent curator Dominic Teja Sidhu. The filmmaker personally chose each work of art on display and commissioned many of the artists to create original work specifically for the exhibition: “While writing the script for Noah, I wondered how my favorite artists would interpret the iconic text. So I decided to ask a few of them to return to Genesis and create an image of their own.”

Identifying the story of Noah as humanity’s first apocalyptic tale seems to be the central premise of this exhibition. Genesis 6-9 depicts a world very different from the one we know, and yet its themes of survival, redemption, and new beginnings are entirely familiar. The Creator turns his back on his creation and vows to wipe mankind off the face of the Earth. Yet God has mercy on Noah and instructs him to build an ark that will house himself, his family, and two of every animal that lives on land. Noah does as God commands and though the Earth is flooded by rain for forty days and forty nights, God delivers him from this terrible fate. Noah and his sons are then blessed by God and ordered to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth” (Genesis 9:1).  It is a story that is grim and miraculous in the most extreme ways and one which remains exceedingly influential on the arts.

Doug and Mike Starn, Bbú Juju painting MV4

Fountains of the Deep encompasses a great range of genres and media, from painting, sculpture, and photography to commercial illustration and graffiti. In David Scher’s grayscale painting Noah Noah a boat sits stranded atop an island of debris. The image depicts a cloudy, melancholy world in which humanity is left to deal with the consequences of a natural disaster. The work by artists (and identical twin brothers) Doug and Mike Starn titled Bbú Juju painting MV4 gives off a sense of both tragedy and hope. On one hand, the Starn brothers have used bamboo and rope to construct a jumbled object that appears to be in a state of wreckage. Then again, the assembled bamboo resembles a makeshift raft, a symbol for human resourcefulness and survival.

James Jean, Noah

The lower-level gallery is filled with work that is perhaps more unexpected considering the Old Testament-derived theme of the show. Kagen Sound, a woodworker from Colorado known for his Japanese-style secret boxes, designed a box from 59,003 tiny wooden cubes measuring exactly one cubit, the unit of measurement designated by God to be used in the construction of the ark (Genesis 6:15). Commercial artist James Jean interprets the figure of Noah as a sort of allegory of human frailty; the exposed body bleeding into the ocean is painted in the bright, swirling colors for which the Taiwanese painter is known. A bold graphic style is also employed by graffiti duo FAILE in Never Before, Never Again, a collage of images and text referencing both the environmental and emotional impact of the Flood.

Thomas Thiemeyer, Building the Ark

Thomas Thiemeyer provides viewers with a very cinematic imagining of the Building of the Ark, which perhaps best anticipates Aronofsky’s film. Thiemeyer is a German author and illustrator whose works have a strong narrative quality and a highly polished fantastical look to them. This particular painting places the ark in sort of sci-fi landscape—a wild world populated by giants and other mythical creatures. The epic nature of the scene reminds us of the monumental impact the story of Noah has had on our culture and how it continues to inspire the visual arts.

Fountains of the Deep is on view at 462 West Broadway through Saturday, March 29.

Noah will premiere in theaters worldwide on Friday, March 28.

– D.L. for MOBIA

Spotlight: St. Thomas Becket

Detail from Bay 18 window, early 13th c.
stained glass
Chartres Cathedral, France

When Henry VIII of England carried out the Dissolution of the Monasteries one of his objectives was to erase one particular name from history: Thomas Becket. In 1538 the shrine housing the saint’s bones, which had been the central attraction for pilgrims to Canterbury since 1220, was destroyed on orders from the king. But Henry’s efforts were in vain; Becket remains a legendary figure in English history and his image appears in countless artworks from the twelfth century onwards. Becket, after all, was not merely a local martyr; the political circumstances and gruesome details of his murder at Canterbury Cathedral turned him into an international celebrity the likes of which had not been previously seen.

Who Was Thomas Becket?

Thomas Becket was born in London in 1120 to a prosperous Norman family who provided him with the privilege of a formal education. Making a living as a clerk, he acquired a position in the household of Theobald of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, and made the acquaintance of Henry II, whom he quickly befriended. The king would go on to appoint Becket as his Lord Chancellor and after Theobald’s passing, to the seat of Archbishop of Canterbury. King Henry expected that Thomas would continue to act as his political servant, but as archbishop Becket adopted an austere lifestyle and a new ideology that placed the interests of the Church before those of the State. His refusal to compromise with Henry made Becket an enemy of the crown.

Pilgrim’s Badge with head of Saint Thomas à Becket, 15th c.
Canterbury, England
Metropolitan Museum of Art

On the fifth day of Christmas, 1170, Becket was in the middle of leading Vespers when through the doors of Canterbury Cathedral entered four of Henry’s knights. Believing themselves to be acting according to the king’s wishes, the men approached the altar, drew their swords and killed the archbishop. In the aftermath of the event, Henry began a campaign of public penance culminating in an act before Becket’s tomb, where he confessed his sins and then allowed each bishop present to give him five blows from a rod, followed by granting each of the 80 monks on site three blows. Becket was canonized as a saint in 1173 after Henry’s reconciliation with the papacy over the murder of one of their clergymen. His cult spread throughout Europe quickly and the consequences of this were promptly seen in the arts.

Reliquary Casket with Scenes from the Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket, ca. 1173–80
English or German
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Medieval Celebrity

It is difficult for us to evaluate the horror with which the news of Thomas Becket’s murder was received, but public fascination with the event was strong enough for at least ten different biographies on Thomas to be written by different authors before the end of the twelfth century. Comparisons have been made in recent years between Becket’s martyrdom and the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and John F. Kennedy in 1963, two shocking episodes in American history which we actively study and commemorate today. The popularity of Becket’s shrine at Canterbury was entirely dependent upon his renown abroad, and for centuries he was a model of faith and fearlessness to Christians throughout the European continent.

There are some practical means by which the story of Becket’s martyrdom reached the Christian world beyond England. Henry II, the great-grandson of William the Conqueror, was a Norman ruler—one of many who had assumed regal power throughout Europe—and therefore had strong ties to other courts. His three eldest sons held control over the territories of western France.  His daughters were married off to princes in Germany, Spain, France, and Sicily. With all of these royal connections throughout Europe, the western world was more than prepared to venerate the martyr with beautiful images and luxurious objects.

Icon of St. Thomas Becket, late 12th c.
mosaic
Monreale Cathedral, Sicily

The earliest known icon of Thomas Becket is a mosaic located in Monreale Cathedral in Sicily. It’s a rare image, considering it only portrays the saint himself and not a hint of his background story, which is so important to the cult of Becket. The martyrdom itself is depicted in some of the finest medieval metal works to come out of France—reliquary caskets from the Limoges region. About fifty of these are still around today and can be found in collections ranging from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to the Louvre in Paris. At Chartres Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a stained glass window in the south east ambulatory illustrates the entire story from Becket’s consecration as archbishop to his relics healing the sick after his death. Reverence for the saint quickly reached as far as Scandinavia, where English clergymen working in the church of Lyngsjö, Sweden, commissioned a baptismal font made of sandstone that depicts the tale of his martyrdom.

Becket would also go on to make a significant impact on our literary tradition—the most influential work to be written in vernacular English in the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,  is staged around a group of pilgrims on a journey from Southwark in London to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury Cathedral.

Baptismal font, ca. 1200
Church of Lyngsjo, Sweden

Becket in New York

Although the vast majority of artwork related to Becket permanently resides in Europe (much of it is attached to ecclesiastic buildings) The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses a number of small works of art which bear his image.  Among these are a silver reliquary box with scenes from the martyrdom, a pilgrim’s badge with the head of St. Thomas, and a highly detailed ivory plaque from the fifteenth century showing the murder in the Cathedral.

An alabaster panel depicting St. Thomas’s consecration as archbishop will be exhibited at MOBIA in our upcoming exhibition, Object of Devotion: Medieval English Alabaster Sculpture from the Victoria and Albert Museum.  One of several fifteenth-century alabaster panels centered on his life that survive, it still bears traces of the paint that brought the scene of St. Thomas’s triumph into vibrant color.  The work will be on view from this Friday, March 7, through June 8.

Saint Thomas Becket Consecrated as Archbishop, c. 1460-1500
Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum

In Today’s World

Several modern literary works based on the life of Thomas Becket have been written. The twentieth century brought us T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral and Jean Anouilh’s drama Becket. Anouilh’s play was turned into the classic film starring Peter O’Toole as Henry II and Richard Burton as Becket. Ken Follett’s popular 1989 novel The Pillars of the Earth features the murder of Thomas Becket in one of the last scenes. More recently, Paul Webb’s play Four Nights in Knaresborough, which premiered in 1999, recounts the aftermath of the assassination by four knights making “the worst career choice in history.” Webb has adapted his play for the screen and sold the rights to The Weinstein Company, which means we could be seeing Becket on the big screen again very soon!

– D.L. for MOBIA