GREAT ISSUES IN FINE ARTS
Leslie Cavell & Sarianna Metso

Honors 171H – CRN 4312
Tuesday & Thursday 8:40a.m. – 10:00a.m.
Vulgamore 301

Art of the Bible

OVERVIEW
Western culture is filled with themes, metaphors, images, and allusions drawn from the Bible; anyone studying the humanities soon discovers the need to be acquainted with biblical imagery and the canonical texts on which it is based, because of their pervasive historical and cultural importance.
This course uses, first, methods of historical biblical criticism (i.e., modern biblical exegesis) that put a strong emphasis on understanding the Bible against its historical background, asking questions about authorship, sources, social and political context, and the like. We will attempt to read the texts and read “behind the texts,” to recover knowledge about the actual conditions of the lives of ancient writers. This kind of interpretation aims at evoking meanings that belong to the text itself, determined by the circumstances under which the text was produced. In addition, we will consider biblical writings as a contemporary resource for questions of religion and values. Second, we explore a series of beautiful visual images that themselves interpret biblical text. The people who created these images invested them with meanings more or less clear to their intended audiences--we are among the intended audiences and we can learn what their makers intended these images say. What are the components of a visual text and how do such components convey meaning? Also, how can the skills we develop in reading visual texts help us read biblical texts? In this course, we will combine textual and visual interpretations to arrive at a richer understanding of the Bible and its cultural authority.

GOALS
A serious analysis of biblical texts and their visual interpretations trains a student to (1) distinguish what the text said “back then” and what we might interpret them to say today; (2) distinguish between specific texts as literary or artistic expressions of humans in Antiquity and the Middle Ages responding to their cultural problems and texts as bearers of meaning for today’s religious questions; (3) consider the extent to which the historical meaning of texts—written or visual—in their original contexts regulates how we understand and enforce them in our present context; and (4) to think about whether texts have their own independent meaning that does not change, regardless of context, or whether a text is a living thing whose meaning changes with the communities that read and seek to interpret them.