Jots & Tittles

Behind the Bible Scenes

Lot’s incestuous daughters ministered to their father in a dark German forest; the libidinous elders approached Susannah beside a marble fountain in an ornamental Italian garden; and Mary and Joseph passed through the Alps on the flight into Egypt. That might be your impression if you only knew the stories from famous paintings.

Landscapes of the Bible: Sacred Scenes in European Master Paintings, a current exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, explores how European artists (and one American, Thomas Cole) have traditionally allowed their own national heritage to dominate their depictions of the Holy Land.

Perhaps this is inevitable, for few of the 16th- to 19th-century artists featured in the show ever visited the Near East. And as museum curator Gill Pesach points out: “The Bible does not abound in detailed descriptions of scenery.” Granted, the Bible’s description of Israel as a land that “flows with milk and honey” is “one of the most striking descriptions of the Promised Land in the Holy Scriptures,” notes Pesach, but “these verses hardly provided painters of the future with a solid basis on which to anchor a visual image.”