Art and the Bible in the Middle Ages: Sign and Design

typewritten, double-spaced (please number the pages and do not forget to put your name on the first page)
Please submit your paper to Turnitin on the class website on Canvas

The Bible
The Bible is composed of two parts: the Old Testament or the scripture of the Jews, beginning with the book of Genesis, and the New Testament, which contains the story of Christ in the four Gospels. But it was more than mere reading material for Christians in the Middle Ages. It was regarded as the great repository of the revelation of God to man; it could even be equated with God himself. The Gospel of John opens with this sentence: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God,” thus asserting for Christianity the primacy of the word over the image. The fact is that Christian art developed long after the New Testament, and indeed the Bible as whole, was finished. To a large extent the role that Christian artists saw for themselves was to give visual form to the stories conveyed in the divinely inspired words in the Biblical text. The Old and New Testaments together served as the major source of inspiration for artists in the Middle Ages, who based many of the images that they made on the stories told in the Bible.

The Relationship between Words and Images
But words and images are not the same. They do not communicate in the same way, nor are they capable of saying exactly the same thing. In order to put words into pictures, Christian artists often had to add something that was not spelled out explicitly in the text, such as the position or expression of a figure or group of figures or some element of the background or setting. Or they could leave something out from the text, making the image a reduction of it, not an expansion.
Images thus became much more than the mirror of the text; they became an interpretation of it. The history of Christian art can be seen as the ongoing project of coming to terms with—of understanding (that is to say, interpreting)—the Biblical text, which Christians believed to be the word of God.

What I would like you to do is the following:
--Chose an image or a set of images that illustrate a passage or passages from the Bible.
--Identify the passage or passages from the Bible, either in the Old Testament or the New Testament, upon which the images are based.
--And most importantly, describe the similarities and differences between the images and the text and offer some explanation as to why they occurred. Look at the images in the context of the text passage. How do they correspond and how do they differ? What does the artist do to fill in information that is not conveyed in the text?

If you have a copy of the Bible, that’s great. You can also access the full text of the Bible online and search it by subject in BibleGateway.com (And for consistency’s sake, let’s use the American Standard version). If you use this digital resource, however, make sure that you read around the passage that you pull out in order to get a sense of its context. Why do you think the subject of the image was important to Christians?

In order to locate images, I would urge to take a look at, and to use, the digital image library called Artstor, www(dot)artstor(dot)org (Links to an external site.). It is a resource open to all at UCSD but you need a password to access it, which you can obtain from the Library, either by talking to the person at the information desk on the main floor or calling the information desk. Once in, you can type in a subject and then get all of the images of it that Artstor contains.