The Apocalypse of John: the architectural symbolism of visual exegesis

A hermeneutic literary criticism of the last text of the New Testament canon can be complemented by an architectural criticism of metaphorical and rhetorical structures and plots, presented as an ultimate resolution to fundamental problems, posed both by the kerigma and by the Hellinised religious experience of the Old Testament (apocalyptic and epistolary genres). The text of the Revelation has staging structures that imply its performative reading, and suggested radical eschatological ways of resolving conflicts allow for equally radical exegetic methods, with a feminist orientation, for example. Analytical metaphors that we have employed, taken from the arsenal of art history, such as ‘polyptich’ or ‘non-figurative painting’, prompt us to use an experimental paradigm of diagrammatics: a visualization of compositional schemata as the equivalents of a cognitive apparatus. The hearer/reader has the opportunity to set off on an eschatological journey with the author of the Revelation but also to have an epistemological walk with its exegetes and commentators.

Download Full-text

The “Last Word” in Pictures: Enhanced Visual Interpretation of Revelation in Luther’s High German Bible (1534)

Postscripts The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds ◽

10.1558/post.17389 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 5-33

Author(s):

W. Gordon Campbell

Keyword(s):

New Testament ◽

Old Testament ◽

Supporting Evidence ◽

Visual Interpretation ◽

Analysis And Evaluation ◽

Close Analysis ◽

Pictorial Illustration ◽

The Reformation ◽

The New Testament ◽

Visual Exegesis

For the last twenty-five years of his life, Martin Luther and his associates were active in Bible translation, publishing first the New Testament, from 1522 onwards, and by 1534—at roughly the mid-point of these endeavours—the whole Bible in German. Across this entire period, until his death, Luther continuously offered reader-viewers of the final New Testament book, Revelation, not only verbal commentary—in a preface (1522), or replacement preface with accompanying marginal notes (1530)—but visual exegesis, in the form of successive series of woodcut engravings designed to illustrate the text. A set of images commissioned for Luther’s 1534 German Bible was the crowning achievement of this visual interpretation: the 1534 Bible even extended pictorial illustration and adornment to the Gospels and Epistles, as well as Old Testament texts. From the perspective of art history, to regard these acclaimed illustrations as “the last word in pictures” represents no novelty, for the 1534 Luther Bible has long been counted among “the finest things that the art of printing produced in the Reformation period” (Schramm 1923, 22–23; my translation). However, to make the same assertion about the Revelation illustrations specifically, from an explicitly exegetical standpoint—and in English—is new and requires substantiation through supporting evidence. I will provide this through close analysis and evaluation of the interpretative moves that the 1534 images make, in conjunction with Luther’s translation and comment, over and against the visual exegesis of their predecessors created, from 1522 onwards, for Luther’s German New Testament.

Download Full-text

The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199665716.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Keyword(s):

New Testament ◽

Old Testament ◽

Art History ◽

Jewish Population ◽

Textual Criticism ◽

Greek Language ◽

Hebrew Scriptures ◽

The New Testament ◽

New Testament Studies ◽

History Of

The Septuagint is the term commonly used to refer to the corpus of early Greek versions of Hebrew Scriptures. The collection is of immense importance in the history of both Judaism and Christianity. The renderings of individual books attest to the religious interests of the substantial Jewish population of Egypt during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and to the development of the Greek language in its Koine phase. The narrative ascribing the Septuagint’s origins to the work of seventy translators in Alexandria attained legendary status among both Jews and Christians. The Septuagint was the version of Scripture most familiar to the writers of the New Testament, and became the authoritative Old Testament of the Greek and Latin Churches. In the early centuries of Christianity it was itself translated into several other languages, and it has had a continuing influence on the style and content of biblical translations. In the Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint leading experts in the field write on the history and manuscript transmission of the version, and explain the study of translation technique and textual criticism. They provide surveys of previous and current research on individual books of the Septuagint corpus, on alternative Jewish Greek versions, the Christian ‘daughter’ translations, and reception in early Jewish and Christian writers. The handbook also includes several ‘conversations’ with related fields of interest such as New Testament studies, liturgy, and art history.

Download Full-text

Un/Becoming Claude Cahun: Zigzagging in a Pack

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422734.003.0008 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

renée c. hoogland

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Art History ◽

Gender Politics ◽

High Modernism ◽

Claude Cahun

Considered odd, obscene, a genius nonetheless, at the time she created her best-known works, French photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894-1950) cuts a particularly unruly figure in literary criticism and art history. Her recalcitrant faux autobiography Aveux non avenus, [Disavowals, or, Cancelled Confessions] (1930), a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages, have encouraged the artist’s association with High Modernism and Surrealism while her photographic self-portraits have been claimed for an affirmative (feminist) gender politics. However, the proliferous and mercurial nature of Cahun’s disavowed confessions and self-stagings defy easy “domestication.” Instead she constructs a continuously shifting configuration of fragments and collages: assemblages of singularities that are always in a multiplicity, in a pack. Escaping dominant forms of expression, Cahun’s work has nothing to do with recognition or imitation, nor does it constitute a relation of representation. The chapter argues instead that Cahun presents us in both her writing and in her photographic work with the successful experience of becoming in the absence of any final term or form. A becoming-animal that moves beyond destruction into the zone of indiscernibility where a work, or, perhaps, an oeuvre comes into view—an oeuvre that nonetheless remains decidedly outlandish.

Download Full-text