The Unpublished Apocalypse of Peter Mohyla: Work of Art and Visual Exegesis

The Unpublished Apocalypse of Peter Mohyla:Work of Art and Visual Exegesis

Receiving the Word in Image: Federico Zuccaro’s the Annunciation Broadcast by Prophets (1565) and the Reception History of the Bible in the Counter-Reformation

The Annunciation Broadcast by Prophets (1565) was an altarpiece created by Federico Zuccaro (1541–1609) for the Church of the Annunciation, Rome. It was the first image commissioned by the Order of the Jesuits, a movement involved in propagating the objectives of the Counter-Reformation Church. Altarpieces were particularly effective points of communication between the Catholic Church and the lay beholder, and used visual exegesis as a means to communicate appropriated receptions of biblical texts. The intimate connection that these objects have to their theological and political context marks them as significant moments of biblical reception, that have, up to this point, been overlooked by historians in the field. This article identifies the broader lacuna in scholarship surrounding the reception history of the Bible during the Counter-Reformation. Whilst this is due to a preference for studies of the Bible in the Protestant Reformation, the lack of scholarly investment poorly reflects the relevance of the Counter-Reformation period to the reception-historical methodology. The context prioritized the interpretation of the Bible through the lens of Church tradition, or in other words, the history of the Bible’s reception. This affinity is echoed in the reception-historical approach found in contemporary biblical scholarship, creating a hermeneutical link between the two contexts. Visual culture was a valuable expression of Counter-Reformation rhetoric and visualized the mediation of biblical texts through Church tradition. This article uses Zuccaro’s altarpiece as a tool to argue this hypothesis and postulate the intimate relationship maintained between texts and their reception in Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

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.

Illustrated Manuscripts of the Septuagint

The chapter provides a brief overview of illustrated Greek manuscripts of the Bible, starting from Late Antiquity until the end of the Byzantine Empire. It outlines different, often conflicting, hypotheses on the origins, development, and transmission of the illustrative cycles in Byzantine Bibles. The material is organized according to the diverse biblical textual units preserved in illustrated Byzantine manuscripts. The chapter traces connections between codices, and continuity in the use of pictorial vocabulary. At the same time, it flags diverse approaches to illustrating the biblical text, from literal illustrations through to highly symbolic visual exegesis.

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

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.

Becoming the Past: Time and Memory in Stanley Fung’s Biblical Icons

This paper analyzes a contemporary Taiwanese artist Stanley Fung’s portrait photography and his contextual biblical interpretation of time and memory: the experience of the coming of the kingdom can be lingered on in an artist’s imagination. As a biblical interpreter, Fung’s visual exegesis asks the viewer to reconsider how the historical consciousness of self and community together impact one’s sense of time. Fung uses clothing and plants to invoke the viewer’s longing for a new, local culture where the gospel can be dressed, and a new soil where it can be planted. Photography as a legitimate extension of the sacred text engages the viewer’s biblical imagination and demands a response. Eternal beings and Christian anthropology, as manifested in Fung’s work serve to remind us of the distinction between memory and the sacred, life and destruction, creation and redemption.