Art Museum Journal

 

Scripture for the Eyes... Exhibition at MOBIA and Carlos Museum
By STAN PARCHIN
August 16, 2009

Hendrick Goltzius (Netherlandish,1558-1617), Adoration of the Magi from the Life of the Virgin series (1593-94). Engraving. Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art.

 
The role of printed images of Old and New Testament themes in the Low Countries during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation is the focus of Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustrations in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century. Their transformative effect on Northern European art and the religious conflicts of Renaissance Europe is explained through some 80 engravings, woodcuts, illustrated Bibles and books by Flemish and Dutch masters of the age.
 
The exhibition's 13 lenders include: the British Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Plantin Museum, Antwerp; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and Emory University Libraries, Atlanta.
 
The prints in Scripture for the Eyes... are arranged according to function and not chronologically. They're displayed as important visual tools used by Roman Catholics and Protestants to interpret the word of God and not merely as illustrations that imitated achievements in Renaissance painting. Among the show's featured artists are Lucas van Leyden, Maarten van Heemskerck, Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, Philips Galle, Hendrick Goltzius and Hieronymus Hierix. Five volumes of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible, with their side-by-side translations of text in several languages (including Latin and Hebrew), demonstrate the importance of vernacular versions of scripture in 16th-century Antwerp and Amsterdam.

 

Adoration of the Virgin by Hendrick Goltzius
Draftman, painter and engraver Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) became famous as a printmaker despite the use of only one hand. The fingers on his right hand were severely maimed in a fire. The secretive artist imitated the styles of a half-dozen Italian and Northern Renaissance masters in his Life of the Virgin (1593-94), a series of six engravings. The group's Adoration of the Virgin was executed in the manner of Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533). Catholics perceived Goltzius' devotional image of the Magi's journey to the infant Jesus' crib as a metaphor for persecution by the Protestants before the heretics' return to the Roman Church's fold. Reformers interpreted the same image as illustrative of their challenge to papal authority (under the threat of excommunication) and their eventual communion with the Savior.

 

 

Source
Clifton, James and Walter S. Melion. Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustrations in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century (exh. cat.). London: D. Giles Ltd., 2009.