Herbert L. Kessler

How and when, Herbert L. Kessler asks, was the Jewish prohibition against graven images transformed into a Christian imperative to picture God's invisibility once God had taken human form in the body of Jesus Christ?

Picturing God's Invisibility in Medieval Art

Spiritual Seeing

Renowned art historian Herbert L. Kessler authors a love song to medieval art inviting students, teachers, and professional medievalists to experience the wondrous, complex art of the Middle Ages.

Experiencing Medieval Art

Kurt Weitzmann

The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art

Old St. Peter's and Church Decoration in Medieval Italy

Paul Edward Dutton

Audrad le Petit

A major artistic study of a famous medieval masterpiece

The Poetry and Paintings of the First Bible of Charles the Bald

Words, Images, and the Medieval Anxiety about Art

Neither God Nor Man

David Nirenberg

Christian cultures across the centuries have invoked Judaism in order to debate, represent, and contain the dangers presented by the sensual nature of art. By engaging Judaism, both real and imagined, they explored and expanded the perils and possibilities for Christian representation of the material world. The thirteen essays in Judaism and Christian Art reveal that Christian art has always defined itself through the figures of Judaism that it produces. From its beginnings, Christianity confronted a host of questions about visual representation. Should Christians make art, or does attention to the beautiful works of human hands constitute a misplaced emphasis on the things of this world or, worse, a form of idolatry ("Thou shalt make no graven image")? And if art is allowed, upon what styles, motifs, and symbols should it draw? Christian artists, theologians, and philosophers answered these questions and many others by thinking about and representing the relationship of Christianity to Judaism. This volume is the first dedicated to the long history, from the catacombs to colonialism but with special emphasis on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, of the ways in which Christian art deployed cohorts of "Jews"—more figurative than real—in order to conquer, defend, and explore its own territory.

Herbert L. Kessler

Books

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