The Book of Genesis in Art: a ‘Talk in the Chapel’ for bible month 2024, by Dr Miriam Stevenson at Bishop Street Methodist Church, Leicester on Thursday 30th May 2024
well welcome everyone to um another talk in the chapel this is a talk to coincide with Bible month which begins on Sunday and this time they have taken they they’ve taken on a lot the whole the whole of Genesis is is the subject and has also taken on a lot tell us about the art well thank you it this talk covers just over 1,800 years of mostly Christian art and as we see what has happened in the way that Genesis has been depicted by artists you’ll not only see those major strands in the way in which particularly Church art has developed but you will also see all of the the history of Christians encountering Genesis and thinking about it and trying to understand its stories and thinking about what sort of stories these are and what sort of a book of the Bible this is so the picture that you see on the screen there is from the early 16th century so it sits in a sense in the middle of the talk people who’ve presented the Bible month themes have divided the book up into four sections so looking at creation looking at the story of Jacob and Esau looking at the story of Abraham and then the story of Joseph and I’m going to broadly follow those four sections and take us really through time with a few um Kinks and bumps in the road looking at what happened Christian art is younger than even the um sort of latest um datings offered for the written books in the New Testament we really don’t have anything that we can describe as Christian art before about year 200 and what I’m showing you here is one of the very earliest datable examples in that it comes from the house Church in Dura erus um Dura erus was um besieged in 244 so that’s our cut point for the decorative church and synagogue and so on in that city and what we have here in this little box at the lower part of the screen is a very tiny very early schematic almost stick people picture of Adam and Eve clutching their fig leaves standing side by side and this is how we find them in the late 3r Century in this painting from the catacombs so if we think about what are the earliest themes from The Book of Genesis to draw the attention of Christian patrons and to be painted in churches and around TBS Adam and Eve probably are the main theme because of their theological meaning because of the The Narrative of fall and Redemption because of the way in which Paul in particular talks about Adam and Christ so in this picture we see Adam and Eve clutching their fig leaves and looking um somewhat abashed and downcast and you can see how these sorts of images are part of a dogmatic presentation so a theological use of these early chapters of Genesis to talk in particular about being a human being about being Fallen about Sin and salvation and this format you you can see here becomes embedded very very early so tree in the middle Adam and Eve on either side with their fig leaves here we have them on the sarcophagus of Junius basus um Junius basus was a person of senatorial class who was baptized as a Christian on his deathbed so we’ve moved here from the period before the Toleration of Christianity the House Church and and the time of the Catacombs through into a period where Christianity is is becoming it’s in the process of moving from a tolerated religion to effectively the official religion of the Roman Empire and it’s something which people who are socially prominent are able to embrace and able to evidence so we have a number of different Old Testament and New Testament scenes put together as you can see under these AR es on this sarcophagus and in the late Decades of the Roman Empire as its capital moves first from Rome to Milan and then from Milan to Rena we have works of art in a obviously Elegant classicizing Style and some of the images we’ve looked at um those first paintings are perhaps quite quite basic um in their form this is something very clearly classical and very clearly evident and very um elegant and well well proportioned it’s an image from Milan and it’s the image of Adam in Paradise giving the names to all the creatures so this is humanity and the creatures in Harmony and you can see this wonderful encyclopedic depiction of the creatures and this is an image we’re going to meet again later in a different context I should have said to you because we’re dealing with the Book of Genesis there will be a degree of sex violence and nudity in this lecture necessarily and we come on um to the um you the entring of violence into the world the story of um Cain and Abel here in an early painted book so alongside these Public Works of art that we’ve looked at um in the Roman period you have the the development of the idea of a book and this is something that is Central in Christianity it’s also found in um classical literary culture that move from using Scrolls to having things Bound in a codex in a volume and we have evidence that a number of books produced in this period were very very heavily Illustrated so lots and lots and lots of images either small individual scenes almost like a like a cartoon or a picture book or here ambitious tears of images with little figures moving through so this is an example from Byzantium from the Eastern Empire after the fall of the Western Empire and then this is an example from caroling jenard so this is um you know from the what becomes the Holy Roman Empire um the the kingdom of frankia um you know ruled over by Charlamagne so in the in the early um 9th century and you can see there’s a similar approach here tears of scenes and a narrative sequence so we start there um God you know puts Adam into a sleep he extracts the rib from which he’s going to Fashion Eve Eve and Adam are introduced to one another then they are instructed about the tree you can see how by turning the figures to face each other or putting the trees in between the scene the artist is taking us through the story then on the the third row down we have Eve and the serpent she’s picking the fruit she’s sharing the fruit with Adam then the scene that you’re both familiar with clutching the big leaves um and being being You Know spoken to by God and finally the scene of them being expelled from Paradise and ending up there on the earth Adam delving and Eve with her baby and so you have this whole narrative playing out in an elaborately decorated book by the time we get to the turn of the Millennium we start to see in great churches and abies of Western Europe northern Europe the use of these scenes particularly this Genesis story the story creation and fall in a very public way so these are the beautiful bronze doors from Hilder time and you can see here that same scene of Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise and I hope you can see here we’ve got all of that demonstrative dramatic language the the picture language where people pointed each other and um you know show in their bodies how they feel but we have perhaps here something a bit more emotive so a reflection on the the emotive feeling what was it like for Adam and Eve to be cast out um Eve there is giving a plaintive backward glance while the angel you can tell what the angel is saying to them with its speaking finger and its brandished sword and so by the time we come into the Romanesque period these images is are you part of the public um demonstration of the the church and its ideas and its doctrines this is the very famous and beautiful representation of Eve formerly part of one of the doors of the Church of s Lazard of Tom um and you will see in many of these images how it’s not only that Adam an eve have their fig leaves but also very often foliage is quite strategically placed between us and these figures because of course they are in their preap area they’re innocent State and entirely naked and unashamed but we aren’t so we don’t get to stare at them the foliage is strategically placed um there for us and you can see there Eve she’s touching the side of her face she’s listening to the words of the serpent she’s reaching back you can see her hand picking the fruit from the tree you can see the slithering serpent there crossing over her foot so that Romanesque style where you have a lot of um bodies showing words bodies showing speech this is a part of a a cycle of images at the front of a sulter in this period it was very common to put new testament scenes or biblical scenes in front of the book of Psalms so you have the text of the book of Psalms but then you can relate them back into the Old Testament and forward into the New Testament and here again we have Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise we have Eve spinning and her child in the Cradle at her feet and Adam delving so that remember this saying from The Peasant Revolt when Adam Del and Eve span where than the gentle man this is the origin of humanity and these stories they are popularized as that saying suggests this is one of the Old Testament stories that probably nearly everybody in medieval Europe knew it’s not true of a lot of the stories especially when we look at things such as wall paintings in Parish churches scenes from the Old Testament in general and even Genesis are fairly rare but the story of Adam and Eve is probably the archetypal story and here we have um Adam on the left Eve on the right discussing um whether they should eat the fruit should they should they not um at hardam in Sussex and when you have the development of printing and mass production at the end of the Middle Ages um this is a story which is here prominent in the the world Chronicle the nurburg world Chronicle so this is one of the things that we’ll see with this story it moves into different contexts from being a theological image or an image that’s associated with the public teaching of the church it then ends up in different places it ends up in history here and we’ll also see how it starts to end up in Works which we might roly think of as being scientific or instructional this is the beautiful Mosaic Dome from the early 13th century at St Marks in Venice the 26 scenes here in this circular form and the circular form of the Dome this circle of creation is going to be something that we’ll see turning up in a number of places this Mosaic is really interesting because it appears to be based on um this manuscript which came probably from Alexandria in the fourth or fifth centuries so a very early um you know elaborately decorated copy of the Book of Genesis probably with between 340 and 360 separate pictures in it unfortunately this book was in the konian library fire and as you can see very very badly damaged by that fire so you’ve got there um on the left the scene of of God introducing Eve to Adam from the mosaic and that might help you to see that on this fragment we also have the standing figure of God and we have the rather elegant classicizing figure of Eve so this idea of the circle of creation or the the roota we talk about learning things by rot because in this period the 11th 12th century the idea of organizing knowledge visually and using wheels and trees and buildings to organ ored knowledge becomes very prominent so this is the beautiful Herona creation tapestry with all the the days of creation um surrounding the image of God the Creator and if you look around it there all sorts of different pieces of information that have been included here we’ve got representations of the different winds we’ve got representations of the different planets we’ve got the seasons of the months there’s something very encyclopedic about this tapestry was probably meant to go over over an altar and like a lot of works of art from um Spain around the time of the Millennium it it has parallels in Islamic morish art as well as in Christian art another as it were scientific type of work that you get in the this period from the 12th century onwards is the heavily Illustrated besty so the besty was a a work which combined natural history and natural history authors particularly from the classical world and the early Christian World encyclopedia’s daughters authors such as Isador of ceville um it combined their work with moralizing Tales effectively it’s a big Quarry of sermon illustrations based around the supposed behavior of all sorts of natural and um perhaps more legendary creatures and I hope you can see here we’ve got a medal version of that scene we saw on the ivory panel from Milan we’ve got a you know a clothed and quite magisterial looking Adam sitting in a chair like a a medieval teacher or a medieval Monarch and announcing to all the various gathered creatures what their names are to be and you can see we’ve got some highly recognizable creatures the cats and the rabbits and the goats as well as the more um Fantastical creatures so this idea of Genesis the naming of the creatures Humanity’s relationship with creatures is there this is this really the opening part of the representation of the best similarly the idea of the human being within creation and the human being as a microcosm of creation um is used for example here by hild theard bingan um in her book of divine works and you can see how she has the standing figure of Adam and surrounded by this schematic circular image of the earth and the firmament and the the Spheres of the planets obviously we’re thinking about a um you know an earth Centric model of the universe and then God as the burning fire surrounding all of that and um Hilgard shows herself as this tiny vignette in the bottom left hand corner looking up and seeing this vision of humanity held within all of creation and this circular um model and if you like an astronomical or scientific model of creation turns up in a lot of later medieval and early Renaissance pictures of creation so you can see here in this image of the expulsion from Paradise so again Adam and Eve and the angel as we’re familiar with you’ve also got the image of God creating the world as this series of concentric spheres the Earth um with its different elements in the center and then the Spheres of the planets and then finally the the the signs of the zodiac so the representation of ccle of time and I hope you can see that this image is effectively a version of the same image but this image comes from a different context because this is from the um you know Luther’s translation of the Bible so this is an early Protestant vernacular Bible but the printed image in its iconography in it imagery it’s looking back to these um essentially classically inspired but medieval scientific images of what creation is what the universe is so we have this o over this crossover between images of creation and images of science we also have with the Renaissance a growing sense of the um the appreciation of the human body Adam and Eve they are naked and they are unashamed they are characters rare examples of characters within the Jewish and Christian context who can be shown in an unclad State and as with most Renaissance art the um the medium of sculpture leads the way so here we have a beautiful 13th century image of Adam and then as we go on into the 15th century in northern Europe um vanik shows us figure of Adam with all of this wonderful sense of Deep detail and structure and the the Flesh and the bones so a very very human you know perhaps rather rather vulnerable image of Adam rather different from the Angelic um elegant statue that we were looking at and massachio takes us further in that we not only have the beauty of the human body but we have the human body racked with emotions so that sense of emotion we saw in a very stylized and mannered way in the Roman esque art here we see it in a much more recognizably naturalistic way Adam and Eve overcome cast out and you can tell where this is going obviously leading up to the cinee chapel you knew were going to have that image this evening um but I thought you’d be interested to see this is and jao de qu’s image an image which Michelangelo We Believe would be familiar with um showing God creating Adam and you can see here um all of the the Beauty and the ability to depict the human body that we would associate with classical art is very readily present and there’s that sense of interaction between Adam and God it’s not as as demonstrative or stages some of the earlier images but you’ve got that sense of their connection and Adam raises his hand and a Gest to show that he is he is listening he is awakened by the voice of God and God reaches out in to Adam and you can see how an image like that is then dramatized and pulled out and made um you know tter and more in a sense more significant in the way which Michelangelo presents it the start of the 16th century so we have this miraculous you know almost touching finger gesture God and Adam looking into each other’s eyes and in the northern Renaissance artists such as kanak who reveled in the freedom of um Lutheranism to depict the human body so you have this you know what happens in the high Italian Renaissance and you have it happening in a in a slightly different way but particularly with the support of Lutheran protestantism here the image of Adam and Eve and Adam rather scratching his head about the Apple Eve looking a little bit more assertive at all of the creatures um beautifully displayed around them so the idea of s of the historical and the scientific and then the idea of humanity and the human body and its expressiveness and this leads us to something which I’m not going to dwell on a lot tonight but I want you to just take on board which is that all of these stories from Genesis have had lots and lots of theological moral and social meanings grafted onto them they’ve been used to prove and disprove and exemplify all sorts of different ideas and even some of those earlier statements about Humanity in Genesis they’ve been used to um create all sorts of dichotomies and polarities so this for example would be very true about the way in which the figure of Eve has been often historically used um so I thought I would show you this through this extraordinary picture of the tree of life Eve is often seen um in contrast to the figure of the Virgin Mary just as in the New Testament Christ and Adam are just opposed and you can see here on the the left hand side so on the as it were the right hand of God’s side the approved side we have this um is an interesting almost transgressive image of the Virgin Mary taking these posts off the tree and as a priest giving the post to these kneeling church goers she’s Associated there with the image of Christ on the cross we see Adam dead Adam at the foot of the tree the snake going up the tree and on the other side we have Eve um Distributing the the apple of sin um again as if she was giving people communion so this idea of these two female figures and the way in which they represent potentially you know these opposing archetypes and that the Virgin also represents the church that Eve also represents the mother of us all she represents Humanity but she also represents the um you know the the as many people would have seen it the guilt the specific guilt of women in the fall so this idea uh of using these stories to represent different sorts of theological meanings social meanings um we find this all the way through from early Christian art so for example um in San Vitali in Rena um we have the scene of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac and Abraham entertaining the three strangers and this is a scene which talks about the meaning of the the Eucharist so the meaning of Holy Communion this scene was next to the adjacent to the freestanding altar in the middle of this church so it was typologically um prefiguring and adding to the the meaning expanding the meaning of what happened in the space it was also very very pointed because at the time these mosaics were being um creative Rena was in the process of moving from being under the rule of the um the ostrogothic um Kingdom of Italy back to being under the rule of the Byzantine Empire um and this was particularly around the time of the 500 the the ostrogothic kings of Italy the ostrogothic king of Italy theodoric was an ostrogoth so he didn’t believe in the Holy Trinity so this picture looks like it’s probably very pointed you know using the Old Testament to argue about this contemporary theological debate this stained glass window from Canter which shows the three sons of Noah pointing to the three at that time the three continents of the Earth with which each of them are associated is then glossed in Latin as representing three different states of Life three different virtuous ways of living so we have the figure of the church on the left we have these figures each pointing to each of the three continents you can see how they’re shown in this beautiful schematic form but actually all of the the the Poetry around this is a is a typology not of um geography it’s about different states of life in the same way if we think about the different ways in which New Testament writers use the Book of Genesis just as Paul often draws on the stories of um Adam and the story of Abraham and the various the various stories of the Patriarchs if we think about the book of Hebrews there where we’re thinking about a Priestly aspect of the figure of Christ this story the story of Abraham meeting melkisedek um the priest king of Salon is much more important and again this image was used in an alter piece which was expounding the doctrine of communion the idea of the role of the priest and the role of communion so we have these theological uses in Christian art of of stories of Genesis and we also have moralizing uses of the story here on the outside of the the does Palace in Venice we have an image of the drunkenness of Noah so you know this is a Public Image in a public place it’s using the Old Testament to illustrate something you shouldn’t do you shouldn’t get drunk and Li out without your clothes on it’s not going to end well and in a sense even more more grimly this is a a top a subject which was often shown in art in the 16th and 15th 16th and 17th centuries which is lot and his daughters and we see lot and his daughters moving away from Sodom and of course the story ends with them um getting him completely drunk and committing incest with him um so here again this this subject is used for a very moralizing purpose as we will see a lot of 16th and 17th century paintings of these subjects they have this ambiguous moral feel to them because there’s a bit of a feel of having your cake and eating it um we we we have this salacious closeup into this really problematic story it’s being used to encourage us to be good and upright um and these stories are used very widely in both Protestant and Catholic circles but either side of the Alps in this period um but at the same time we get to we get to enjoy um the the more sensuous part of the story and another example of the way in which um these early chapters of Genesis are used within wider culture um is the production of Noah’s arcs so this was a an industrial form of production went on in the the cottages and The Villages of urer in Eastern Germany um in the 19th century because the Noah’s Ark was in the Bible it was a toy you were allowed to play with on Sundays and it was a respectable toy and there was huge demand for these mass-produced Noah arcs you see finished and painted by you know families of women and children you know in this forested mountainous area um these were carefully stitched onto cards made up into sets and exported particularly to North America in the late 19th century so the whole idea of the Noah’s Arc comes out of um this the fact that it it occupies this particular place that makes it both very desirable and also unusually permissible as a toy um in 19th century Western Europe and North America when we think about the artists of the 17th century in particular I think we see with them a willingness to engage with some of the more problematic aspects of the story particularly The Narrative around Abraham in those periods we’ve looked at already often this these stories are immediately turned into allegory so they immediately become a way of teaching a theological idea or a moral idea um and the what is actually really difficult humanly Difficult about them is is perhaps not brought out um whereas what we see in artists um of this period so we’re thinking BST such as Caravaggio and gbrand they take us into the heart of these stories and they remind us that these stories you know a full of of human tension and human drama so here for example we have Abraham pleading with Sarah his wife not to make him send Hagar away and you can see she is you know her body language is resist she is resolved she needs her husband to man up and do this and he is um you full of of plaintiveness he’s trying to get her to change her mind and we see him again an extremist here caravaggio’s very graphic image of the sacrifice of Isaac if you read the picture from left to right you see the angel coming in and instructing Abraham to stay his hand you see Abraham caught with his darkened face in the middle of this and you see that the violence with which he is preparing to kill his only child his his his his you know his son by whom his Generations will be reckoned so caravano is aware that this is a story which is a type of you know a prefiguring of the crucifixion the father and the son and ideas of sacrifice but he doesn’t just make it into a theological idea he takes us into the humanity of the story or here in His image of the the Jewish bride perhaps an image of Isaac and his wife seen caught in an intimate moment by aimc um the king who they had deceived about the nature of their relationship ship it’s a very tender image but it speaks of a very tense moment a moment caught between a public face and a private face and a number of Rembrandt’s pupils went on to work with these sorts of scenes so we see Rembrandt’s drawings here of Abraham dismissing Hagar and Ishmael worked on by his pupil um mice this is mice’s earliest surviving picture so you can see again all of the emotion there and how Abraham is is sending them away but very reluctantly and they understand completely how how devastating it is to be expelled in this way we see that on the face of Hagar on the face of the child fitus imagines Hagar here breaking down and weeping in the arms of Abraham while ishmail looks on innocently and uncomprehendingly and perhaps most disturbingly we have a number of pictures which represent um Sarah offering Hagar offering her servant to her husband so he can father a child and you’ll see these pictures really leave very little to the imagination so all that is that is humanly problematic about this subject is Play Down in this um closeup um cinematic detail and even here where we have a more classicizing appearance given to the subject with people who look like so many Greek statues the problematic nature of this this story can’t really be disguised from us and of course at its best this sort of painting takes us into the human drama of the story so here we have you know Isaac blessing Jacob so the deception of Isaac by his son and of course you all remember the the hairy man and the smooth man here we see the the fur covered hand of the son and his father’s hand pale against the covet touching it so this sort of representation takes us into the story and it gives us I think a of sort of dramatic and human um representation of the story which is not just teaching us an straightforward theological or moral lesson in brighter colors we can see tiapo doing the same thing hear the angel coming to Sarah and Sarah grinning at the idea that she could possibly bear a child in her Advanced years or hear the the angel coming to Hagar um you know the prone body of little ishma and the angel pointing Hagar towards the water that will rescue them Tio is probably most playful with some of the more obscure stories this is Rachel hiding the household Idols from her father laan um when Rachel leaves with her husband they Nick her father’s household Idols they knit his luck and basically when he she’s sitting on them they’re in these big saddle bags that she’s sitting on and when her dad wants to kiss her goodbye she says oh Dad please excuse me I don’t get up you know I I’m having my monthly so she lies to her dad claiming that it’s her period and she can’t get up and and and greet him and you can see here how Tio plays with that story and we see this rather cheeky fashionable figure sitting on the saddle BS because one of the things you have noticed about all of these images is to an to what a greater or lesser extent they imagine these stories as if they were happening contemporaneously so they imagine them in contemporary dress we see these people looking like medieval people or we see them looking like Renaissance people 18th century people here you know all of the fashion of roko Northern Europe are played out on these figures and we’re going to see now in this this final section how that starts to shift um as we get into the 19th century in particular so we have in the early 19th century a strand which is going to continue all the way through which is an interest in the the Visionary aspect of these stories this is a picture which probably represents the vision of Jacob’s lad very early in its original format painting by by Turner worked on him through later years but imagining a sort of ladderless ladder um you showing this this Visionary meeting of Heaven and Earth and for those of you who like are interested in the brones this is a rare example of um branwell brones art it’s a piece that he was asked to do basically creating a color version of an image which was in a magazine so it was engraving in a in a monthly magazine and he he renders it here um and you can see how on the one hand the figures are perhaps you know a little bit little bit lumpen but there’s a great interest in the sense of light and the drama of light in the scene and imagining what this dream of the staircase or the lad at the meeting of Heaven and Earth might be and Goan thinking about the simple piety of the Breton peasants thinking about the way in which they have um you know an authentic Faith a faith that takes you back beyond all the trappings of civilization into something which is pure and direct and Visionary he shows them after a sermon experiencing this vision of Jacob wrestling the angel so we have this Visionary aspect respect but on the other hand we have um you know what is first a sort of um rapael like um imagining of these scenes and then as you will see becomes a much more historical or ethnographical imagining of these scenes so in the early 19th century we have a series of youthful reforming art movements we have the nazarin the pites and you’re going to see they imagine these scenes very much as in the case of the nazarin images after Raphael and in the case of the prer rites as images from the period before rapael but with a sort of idealized sharp Beauty so here we have um Joseph embracing his brothers so this very human scene here similarly very rapael like with very soft colors smooth smooth Landscapes and interestingly we have almost no pictures of the scenes from the Old Testament At All by rapael so this is an imagining of these in this rapel like genre um with these idealized human figures very um you beautiful and tightly drawn and of course this picture you can go and see in the museum at Leicester very much falls into that category D from that generation just before the prolite movement but with a similar interest in trying to create something that was um authentic and had a of a genuine religious spirit in it and you can see how he imagines this scene as a sort of you know raphaelesque scene but also you can see he’s got some palm trees in there in the background so what happens in the 19th century is aware of archaeology history geography aware of the collections in places such as the L and the British museum artists start to want to show these scenes of the lives of Patriarchs as if they actually were happening in the Middle East with the climate and the topography and some of the um the costume details that I either they’ve got from um archaeological sources or and this is a very common idea in the 19th century when people traveled to the Middle East and they saw the Customs um because of because of that sense of continuity they often assume this must be exactly how it looked you know in the time of the Book of Genesis so they they say this is a very straightforward context to illustrate so here for example we’ve got Joseph sold by his Brethren and you can see how this is very very different from that sort of classical vision of what this life of Joseph should be now we are out under the big open with the expanse of the desert and we have the prone figure of Joseph and Traders with their camels approaching in France V was one of the artist who assumed that what he could see when he visited the Middle East what he saw among the lives of the Arabs and the bedoin was effectively um a very simple continuation of the time of the Bible here his is his image of um you know Joseph’s coat being besched with blood so as to trick his father and from the prolit here we have Ford madx Brown picture of the coat so Ford madx Brown didn’t himself travel to the Holy Land unlike for example hman hunt but he created this image for an illustrated Bible which came out in the 1860s and from the time particularly of hman Hunt’s trip to the Holy Land just after he painted the famous painting of the light of the world from that time onwards the idea of painting these scenes from The Bible as if they were actually taking place in the Middle East with an appearance of light and costumes and topography this became particularly associated with the idea of Illustrated bies and um teaching materials about the Bible and the Bible lands so in order to paint this picture Ford MX Brown Drew on two different strands he draw on this very archaeological strand you can see how he’s um you know imagined one of the little grandchildren of the family as if they were a figure off an Egyptian Mur kneeling there with that heart he’s he borrowed some African textiles from his friend Rosetti so that he could show um the coat he made the neckace that the leading figure this figure here in profile showing the coat demonstratively is Levi and he made this necklace so he was making these props he was going and drawing things at the British museum he had a drawing of um a landscape around a well by his his friend sedan which he used um to be the backdrop here he went off to the museum sorry went off to the zoo to draw the camel that’s in the picture so he was bringing together all these sources he was trying to be much more AU gentic and archaeological he also and you might have noticed this if you look in the top left hand corner of the picture there’s something rather weird because we have a a ladder and you can just see two feet there in the top left hand corner on the ladder so the ladder here is acting as an attribute for Jacob see the earlier story of Jacob and Jacob’s Ladder the vision of the ladder so this ladder has been put into the picture the picture also has this very strong diagonal so on the left hand side here we see Jacob we see the little grandchild and we see the trans you know transfixed and horrified younger brother Benjamin staring at the coat on the other side we have Levi pointing at the coat we have the figure of Judah in blue watching for his what his dad is going to react um with the figure of Simeon standing with his sandals off so this desire to show different appropriate Customs to embellish with ethnographic detail this story and then in the background we have isar and as with a lot of Victorian pictures um the main part of the action here is the dog and the point of the sto point of the picture is the dog is sniffing the blood the dog knows that this is a a goat goat’s blood that’s been put on this coat but of course the dog can’t tell anybody hman hunt said to for m brown that it just wouldn’t be a dog you know this was a rather I think he thought it was perhaps a rather sentimental idea but you can see how how these different ideas ideas of of human psychological drama and archaeology together in a picture such as this in the aesthetic movement at the end of the 19th century the beautiful figures of The Book of Genesis once again become the subject of um works of art exploring um human Beauty so here we have this imagined portrait of the the beauty of Rachel for this um Hungarian artist paint this picture entirely out of doors so he’s looking for that sort of authenticity and you can see how here um he depicts this scene in a much more informal way so the psychology of this scene is rather different whereas some of the pictures we’ve looked at are very you know they’re very dramatic and demonstrative and we have big gestures um here it all feels a little bit more messy and we just catch Joseph’s face a bit a bit dazed really looking out at us days and dat being you know handed over by his brothers to these Traders you could do a whole lecture about the Book of Genesis in 20th century Ark but we’re really close to the end here I just want to show you how this goes in different directions so you have something as emotive and quiet as this jacob mourning over the coat of his son you have something expressionist as this um Jacob wrestling with the [Music] angel we find in this period more works of art are coming from a Jewish perspective as well as a Christian perspective so this is um Doo burner she’s an artist um in in Germany in the 1930s she creates these images uh particularly to illustrate um Thomas man’s writing about Joseph and his brothers and you can see these are very schematic and very androgynous representations of the subject Epstein thinking about his own um namesake and thinking about how to depict scenes from the the old and the New Testament creates this marvelously blocky image of the I think we must imagine the end of the wrestling match between Jacob and the angel um Jacob utterly spent and collapsing limp in the arms of the Angel which is holding him tight this image by fush created for the the West London synagogue again showing this idea of Jacob wrestling and finally postwar Visionary image as with are based on the New Testament in the lateer 19th and 20th centuries a lot of these images they become used emblematically so rather than being used externally for theological and moral teaching they’re used individually by artists who want to show something of their own experience their own psychology their own emotional state which you see here in this beautiful um golden angel appearing out of the blue dusk in the empty desert appearing um to Joseph and um suggesting to him this um destiny that will play out for him I hope that that has been interesting and that you’ve seen quite how many ways this story is used and represented and stretched and deployed thank you [Applause]