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Marc Michael Epstein is Professor of Religion and Visual Culture on the Mackie M. Paschall (1899) & Norman Davis Chair at Vassar College. [1]
Epstein received his B.A. from Oberlin College and earned the M.A., M.Phil., and PhD degrees in Religious Studies at Yale University. He completed much of his graduate research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [2]
Epstein is a scholar of religion, focusing on Jewish and Christian religious culture in the Middle Ages. The objects of his study are monuments of visual and material culture. He has written on various topics regarding Jewish visual and material culture, and many of his publications concern Medieval manuscript illumination. His book Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Manuscript Illumination (2015) was awarded the Jewish Book Council's National Jewish Book Award (winner in Visual Arts [3] and finalist in Scholarship. [4] The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination (2011), was named one of the “Best Books of the Year” by the London Times Literary Supplement. [5]
Epstein was Director of the Hebrew Books and Manuscripts division of Sotheby's Judaica Department throughout the 1980s, and continued to work as a consultant of rare Hebrew Books and Manuscripts. He continues to be a consultant and curator to a number of museums, auction houses, libraries, and private collections, notably including the Herbert and Eileen Bernhard Museum at Temple Emanu-El, the Goldsmith Family Museum and the Jewish Museum London. [2]
Epstein's academic stance suggests that medieval Jewish and Christian visual culture as mutually interdependent. In his teaching and written work, he shows that there was a curiosity regarding Christian visual culture on the part of Jews both in Iberia and Franco-Germany, resulting in equal measures of reactive avoidance and fascinated emulation of that culture. His first book conceptualized Jewish iconography as almost inevitably polemicizing against Christian images, expressing "messages of protest and dreams of subversion," [6] —a "love story in aggressive garb." [7] He has subsequently moderated his position to acknowledge that neither Jews nor Christians owned medieval visual culture, positing a much more "open" Middle Ages, with a stream of essentially common culture drawn upon by both Jews and Christians in "a sort of parallel fishing expedition." [7] He continues to observe that concertedly Christian motifs were occasionally—even often—adapted by Jews with didactic or polemic intent (the Flight into Egypt is a particularly obvious example [8] ). But he has come to recognize that this is not always, or even usually, the case. His works testify that if one has to posit a viable tradition of Jewish iconography, one needs to stand up for the independence or interdependence of that tradition, rather than revert to a codependent model.
Epstein has served as the Corcoran Visiting Chair of Jewish-Christian Relations at Boston College, [9] and as the Shoshana Shier Distinguished Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at The University of Toronto. [10]
Books
"If Lions Could Carve Stones..." The Medieval Jewish Minority and the Allegorization of the Animal Kingdom: A Textual and Iconographic Study (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1993)
The Jerusalem Haggadah: Gateway to the Haggadah (Jerusalem: Aryeh Editions, 1997)
Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature. (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997)
The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2011)
Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Manuscript Illumination (Princeton, London: Princeton University Press, 2015)
The Brother Haggadah: A Medieval Sephardi Masterpiece in Facsimile (London, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2016)
The medieval art of the Western world covers a vast scope of time and place, with over 1000 years of art in Europe, and at certain periods in Western Asia and Northern Africa. It includes major art movements and periods, national and regional art, genres, revivals, the artists' crafts, and the artists themselves.
Iconography, as a branch of art history, studies the identification, description and interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct from artistic style. The word iconography comes from the Greek εἰκών ("image") and γράφειν.
The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose object is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. It includes most of the arts making objects for the interiors of buildings, and interior design, but not usually architecture. ceramic art, metalwork, furniture, jewellery, fashion, various forms of the textile arts and glassware are major groupings.
Jewish culture is the culture of the Jewish people, from its formation in ancient times until the current age. Judaism itself is not a faith-based religion, but an orthoprax and ethnoreligion, pertaining to deed, practice, and identity. Jewish culture covers many aspects, including religion and worldviews, literature, media, and cinema, art and architecture, cuisine and traditional dress, attitudes to gender, marriage, family, social customs and lifestyles, music and dance. Some elements of Jewish culture come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with host populations, and others still from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community. Before the 18th century, religion dominated virtually all aspects of Jewish life, and infused culture. Since the advent of secularization, wholly secular Jewish culture emerged likewise.
Arthur Szyk ; June 3, 1894 – September 13, 1951) was a Polish-born Jewish artist who worked primarily as a book illustrator and political artist throughout his career. Arthur Szyk was born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family in Łódź, in the part of Poland which was under Russian rule in the 19th century. An acculturated Polish Jew, Szyk always proudly regarded himself both as a Pole and a Jew. From 1921, he lived and created his works mainly in France and Poland, and in 1937 he moved to the United Kingdom. In 1940, he settled permanently in the United States, where he was granted American citizenship in 1948.
The Jewish hat, also known as the Jewish cap, Judenhut (German) or Latin pileus cornutus, was a cone-shaped pointed hat, often white or yellow, worn by Jews in Medieval Europe. Initially worn by choice, its wearing was enforced in some places in Europe after the 1215 Fourth Council of the Lateran for adult male Jews to wear while outside a ghetto to distinguish them from others. Like the Phrygian cap that it often resembles, the hat may have originated in pre-Islamic Persia, as a similar hat was worn by Babylonian Jews.
Aniconism in Judaism covers a number of areas. The portrayal of God in any kind of human or concrete form is strictly prohibited.
A religious image is a work of visual art that is representational and has a religious purpose, subject or connection. All major historical religions have made some use of religious images, although their use is strictly controlled and often controversial in many religions, especially Abrahamic ones. General terms associated with religious images include cult image, a term for images, especially in sculpture which are or have been claimed to be the object of religious worship in their own right, and icon strictly a term for Eastern Orthodox religious images, but often used more widely, in and outside the area of religion.
Jeffrey F. Hamburger is an American art historian specializing in medieval religious art and illuminated manuscripts. In 2000 he joined the faculty of Harvard University, where in 2008 he was appointed the Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture. Hamburger received his B.A., M.A and Ph.D from Yale and has previously held professorships at Oberlin College and the University of Toronto. Elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy in 2001, he has won numerous awards for his publications, among them: the Charles Rufus Morey Prize of the College Art Association (1999), the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize in Art & Music (1999), the Otto Gründler Prize of the International Congress on Medieval Studies (1999), the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society (1998), the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America (1994), and the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities of the American Council of Graduate Schools (1991). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2009 Hamburger was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2010, of the American Philosophical Society. In 2015 he was awarded an Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2022 he was awarded the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz and the Internationale Gutenberg-Gesellschaft.
The Hand of God, or Manus Dei in Latin, also known as Dextera domini/dei, is a motif in Jewish and Christian art, especially of the Late Antique and Early Medieval periods, when depiction of Yahweh or God the Father as a full human figure was considered unacceptable. The hand, sometimes including a portion of an arm, or ending about the wrist, is used to indicate the intervention in or approval of affairs on Earth by God, and sometimes as a subject in itself. It is an artistic metaphor that is generally not intended to indicate that a hand was physically present or seen at any subject depicted. The Hand is seen appearing from above in a fairly restricted number of narrative contexts, often in a blessing gesture, but sometimes performing an action. In later Christian works it tends to be replaced by a fully realized figure of God the Father, whose depiction had become acceptable in Western Christianity, although not in Eastern Orthodox or Jewish art. Though the hand of God has traditionally been understood as a symbol for God's intervention or approval of human affairs, it is also possible that the hand of God reflects the anthropomorphic conceptions of the deity that may have persisted in late antiquity.
The North French Hebrew Miscellany or "French Miscellany" or "London Miscellany" is an important Hebrew illuminated manuscript from 13th-century France, created c. 1278-98. A miscellany is a manuscript containing texts of different types and by different authors, and this volume contains a wide range of Hebrew language texts, mostly religious but many secular. The manuscript is exceptional among medieval Hebrew manuscripts both for its size and the diversity of the texts and the quality and lavishness of its illuminations, which as was often the case were added by Christian specialists.
The Finding of Moses, sometimes called Moses in the Bullrushes, Moses Saved from the Waters, or other variants, is the story in chapter 2 of the Book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible of the finding in the River Nile of Moses as a baby by the daughter of Pharaoh. The story became a common subject in art, especially from the Renaissance onwards.
Mickie Caspi is an Israeli-American calligrapher and artist specializing in Judaica.
The Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana is the Jewish cultural and historical collection of the University of Amsterdam Special Collections. The foundation of the collection is the personal library of Leeser Rosenthal, whose heirs presented the collection as a gift to the city of Amsterdam in 1880. In 1877 the city library had become the University Library, so the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana was essentially given to the University. The Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana has since expanded to become the largest collection of its kind in Continental Europe, featuring manuscripts, early printed books, broadsides, ephemera, archives, prints, drawings, newspapers, magazines, journals, and reference books.
The Birds' Head Haggadah is the oldest surviving illuminated Ashkenazi Passover Haggadah. The manuscript, produced in the Upper Rhine region of Southern Germany in the early 14th century, contains the full Hebrew text of the Haggadah, a ritual text recounting the story of Passover – the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt – which is recited by participants at a Passover Seder. The text is executed in block calligraphy and accompanied by colorful illustrations of Jews performing the Seder practices and reenacting Jewish historical events. The Birds' Head Haggadah is so called because all Jewish men, women, and children depicted in the manuscript have human bodies with the faces and beaks of birds. Non-Jewish and non-human faces are blank or blurred. Numerous theories have been advanced to explain the unusual iconography, usually tied to Jewish aniconism. The Haggadah is in the possession of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it is on permanent exhibition.
The Golden Haggadah is an illuminated Hebrew manuscript originating around c. 1320–1330 in Catalonia. It is an example of an Illustrated Haggadah, a religious text for Jewish Passover. It contains many lavish illustrations in the High Gothic style with Italianate influence, and is perhaps one of the most distinguished illustrated manuscripts created in Spain. The Golden Haggadah is now in the British Library and can be fully viewed as part of their Digitized Manuscript Collection MS 27210.
Claire Renkin is an Australian art historian and academic who has had a distinguished career as a scholar specialising in the areas of art history and spirituality.
The Rylands Haggadah is an illuminated Sephardi Passover Haggadah written and illuminated in Catalonia, Spain in the mid-14th century. It is generally regarded as one of the finest preserved and most ornate Haggadot in the world, and as an example of the "cross-fertilisation between Jewish and non-Jewish artists within the medium of manuscript illumination."
Colum Hourihane is an Irish-born art historian, iconographer, and editor formerly of Princeton University, specializing in medieval art and iconographic studies. From 1997 to 2014, Hourihane was the director of the Index of Christian Art, the largest thematic and iconographic index of medieval art and architecture in the world. Here, he stewarded the project during its early days of digitization and developed an annual conference program which placed the Index at the forefront of medieval art scholarly exchange. He first studied archaeology at University College Cork and the National University of Ireland Galway (1977) before earning a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1984.
The Kennicott Bible, also known as the First Kennicott Bible, is an illuminated manuscript created in the city of A Coruña in 1476. Written by the calligrapher Moses ibn Zabarah and illuminated by Joseph ibn Hayyim, this manuscript is considered by some, such as the historian Carlos Barros Guimeráns, the most important religious manuscript of medieval Galicia. It is also regarded as one of the most exquisite illuminated manuscripts in Hebrew language in an article published by the Library of the University of Santiago de Compostela, and the most lavishly illuminated Sephardic manuscript of the 15th century by Katrin Kogman-Appel.
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