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Visual Narratives, Picturing the Text

Since its inception, Christian art has been rooted in Bible stories. In fact, apart from simple symbols (e.g., anchor, dove, boat), narrative art is the oldest and most enduring form of Christian iconography. The images that Christians commissioned for their tombs or churches were inspired by those sacred stories and reflected the importance of certain ones for consoling the bereaved or visually enlivening the liturgy. Through the centuries, biblically based iconography continued to appear in wall paintings, carved limestone, stained glass, woven tapestries, precious metal vessels, ivory book covers, illuminated manuscripts, and glittering mosaics, all of which shaped the visual context for both public worship and private devotions. Such rich display of biblical narratives allows one to conclude that Christians encountered their scriptures in pictures as much as they read them or heard them proclaimed by lectors or preachers. It is almost a cliché to conclude that such pictorial scriptures were aimed at those who were otherwise unable to receive their lessons in a verbal mode—a substitute, as it were, for reading. Historians frequently cite two letters of Pope Gregory I to Serenus of Marseilles as an ancient formulation of this idea. According to these letters, Gregory admonishes Serenus for having destroyed certain images in his church, which had attracted the adoration of some members of his flock. Gregory tells his brother bishop that he should have preserved the images but corrected the misguided behavior. It is not that adoration should be permitted, but he believes the pictures have a useful function: ‘‘so those who are ignorant of letters might have a means of knowing their stories.’’ In a follow-up letter, Gregory explains that pictures are necessary particularly for the non-Latin speakers (the ‘‘gentibus’’). They are ‘‘instead of’’ reading. Gregory thus implies that pictures are necessary tools for the sake of the illiterate, or that looking at pictures is at least an alternative for reading the stories they illustrate. Numerous theologians, from Bede to Bonaventure to Thomas Aquinas, echoed Gregory’s argument. Like Gregory, most of these writers defended the usefulness of images for teaching scripture, and similarly subordinated images to words. They clearly allotted higher value to reading the text, although they sometimes found value in the images for their own sake. Bonaventure, for example, maintained that visual images were needed for the sake of the ignorant and uneducated, that statues and paintings served as some kind of visible scriptures. However, he also extolled images’ efficacy