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'Ye shall be as gods'

What is up with that serpent in Genesis? The narrator tells us it is a wild animal like any other made by God, but "more crafty." And then it starts talking – and somehow it knows more about the Tree of Knowledge than God had revealed to Eve and Adam. "When you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” the serpent says.

The depiction in this early 16th century woodcut engraving by Lucas Cranach the Elder is appropriately enigmatic: a snake-tailed woman whispering in Eve's ear. The print is in the British Museum [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0]

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'with blood almost all things are cleansed'

Showers of blood from the wounds of a crucified Jesus rain down upon a gathering of naked, sinful followers in this 17th century print from the Rijksmuseum. It was made by an unknown artist in the Netherlands.

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They ain't heavy

Jesus carries a demonic figure, perhaps Satan himself, along with several lifeless bodies as he climbs up to die by crucifixion. Below, John the Baptist and a personification of Christian faith lead a naked man seeking directions to the right path. The stained glass window, made by an unknown artist around 1560, is in the Rijksmuseum.

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Really getting into Jesus

This perplexing illustration comes from the Rothschild canticles, a prayer book made in Flanders or Germany around 1300. Why is the woman aiming a spear at Christ's bloody, open wound?

Art historian Sherry Lindquist, makes this observation:

"Jeffrey Hamburger’s work has given us suggestive case studies that sensitively describe the unusually intimate extra-liturgical relationship that certain nuns and devout laywomen in Flanders and Germany forged with the body of Christ through their images. These images often included memorable nudes, such as we find in the Rothschild Canticles, where a woman, presumably the sponsa, or allegorical bride of Christ, aims her phallic spear to the other side of the bifolium where a nude Christ holding a whip points to his gaping and bloody side wound." [source: "The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art: An Introduction" by Sherry C.M. Lindquist ]

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'As I have done, so God has paid me back'

The Canaanite king Adoni-Bezek made a habit of mutilating the limbs of rulers he defeated. In Judges (1:4-7), the Israelite forces led by Judah and Simeon kill 10,000 men in their bloody assault on Canaan, capture the Canaanite king Adoni-Bezek, and go full-on eye-for-an-eye with him: “Seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off used to pick up scraps under my table," Adoni-Bezek says. "As I have done, so God has paid me back.”

The image is from a lavishly illustrated edition of the Weltchronik manuscript copied and illuminated around 1400, now belonging to the Getty Museum.

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'I am called the spirit of lust'

Many stories about Saint Anthony’s temptation and torture by Satan were recorded in a biography written in Greek around 360 AD by Athanasius of Alexandria. In one quotable passage, the tempter tells the saint: "I am called the spirit of lust. How many have I deceived who wished to live soberly, how many are the chaste whom by my incitements I have over-persuaded! I am he on account of whom also the prophet reproves those who have fallen, saying Hosea 4:12, You have been caused to err by the spirit of whoredom. For by me they have been tripped up. I am he who have so often troubled you.”

The images are details from a 1950 painting by William Roberts from the Tate Collection.

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Your Valentine

Saint Valentine’s skull, crowned with flowers, is kept on display in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome.

[photo by Dnalor_01 via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)]

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‘Come, I will show you the judgment of the great whore’

The image of the Whore of Babylon is a detail from an engraving made around 1550 by French Renaissance printmaker Jean Duvet. He is known for his crowded, seething compositions and highly personal, idiosyncratic style, “full of a childlike, naive solemnity and seriousness which led him to indulge in somewhat painstaking efforts to represent the things that were called for by the words of the texts he had set out to illustrate,” a modern critic noted in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. In Duvet's Apocalypse engravings, “we can see how much of movement and surge and roar and thickness of event he managed to crowd into them, and instead of being bothered by it as by an incompetency, we find it to be extraordinary and exciting, and a true sign of the artist's fundamental honesty and greatness.”

You can study the full print online at the National Gallery of Art.

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'Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe'

Artist Ian Stone says he was inspired by Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas, a painting of the apostle who refuses to believe Jesus has returned from the dead until the risen Christ personally invites him to insert his hand into the spear wound in his side. The doubter in Stone's 2023 painting seems to be accepting a trans person's identity.

"The realism I work in is as real as trans people have always been," Stone says, "and we will look back at this discrimination and bigotry in the same shameful way we have with any other human rights issue."

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Circumcision knife

The "binding of Isaac" scene from Genesis is carved in the wood handle of this 17th century Italian circumcision knife in the collections of The Israel Museum.

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A wedding ring for a virgin bride

The gospel account of Christ's circumcision (Luke 2:21) is matter-of-fact about the event, it being a longstanding Jewish tradition. “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child.” By the Middle Ages, Christians seemingly forgot about the Jewishness of circumcision and embraced a new symbolism: the first shedding of the blood that would save humanity. Churches and monasteries across Europe claimed to possess the severed foreskin, delivered by angel and miraculously preserved. Catherine of Siena, the 14th century mystic, imagines it as a wedding ring in mystical visions in which she becomes the virgin bride of Christ. The image here is a detail from a 16th century painting in the Wellcome Collection, which is based on an engraving made in 1594 by Hendrik Goltzius.

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'fairer than the children of men'

That line from Psalm 45 has been often interpreted as a description of the coming Messiah. Hans Baldung Grien takes the whiteness to a Casper-the-friendly-ghost level in his nativity, painted around 1525-1530 and now in the Staedel Museum.

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Naughty little Jesus

Max Ernst made the painting in 1926, showcasing "the holy Virgin herself caught in a hitherto unpublicized moment," critic and art historian Leo Steinberg observed. "With her naked boy (who seems to be about five years old) sprawled on her lap, she flails at his blushing buttocks, while his halo rolls free, and the painter signs its diameter."

Ernst called it The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Child Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B. [André Breton], P.E. [Paul Eluard], and the Artist. Steinberg points out that putative witnesses Breton and Eluard actually "ignore the spectacle with surreal disdain" while Ernst fixes his gaze on viewers of his painting.

"This is a test," Steinberg asserts. "The painting is engineered to embarrass: so long as I look, I am exposed to the artist’s accusing gaze as he watches the churl in me trapped in the act of ogling a sacrilege—a provocation which my betters scorn to acknowledge."

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mary with the child jesus

in a copy of "speculum humanae salvationis", france, c. 1462

source: Lyon, BM, ms. 0245 (0177), fol. 127v

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The virgin’s instant message from God

The messenger, Gabriel, said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great.”

Mary was like, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”

The image is a detail from a painting of the annunciation made by Simone Martini in 1333 for the altar of St. Ansanus in the Siena cathedral, now part of the collections of the Galleria Uffizi.

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noah's ark (with dead bodies floating in the water)

in a book of hours, france, c. 1440–50

source: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Auct. D. inf. 2. 11, fol. 59v

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'Jésus était une femme'

Elle magazine cover, Feb. 5, 1975