IDOL ANXIETY:

Art That Does Not Hide Itself
Art
By Menachem Wecker The Forward)
Thu. Jul 24, 2008

Most of the works that appear in the exhibit Idol Anxiety, at the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, feature Christian and pagan content. But exhibit curator Aaron Tugendhaft credits the “heightened awareness” he developed from studying the Talmud as a child with helping him discover “valuable distinctions not seen by others” in the process of how objects avoid becoming idols.

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This spectrum is evident in two objects, one Jewish and one Christian, that hang side by side in the show. The Jewish image, an ink-on-parchment 19th-century Yemeni “Holy Tree” amulet, incorporates Hebrew text and diagrams of the 10 sephirot, or divine attributes in Kabbalah. The show suggests that this amulet avoids the Second Commandment’s ban on representing the divine by giving physical form to the divine attributes rather than trying to depict God directly. In modern art terms, the amulet is an abstraction rather than a naturalistic portrait.

The Christian kabbalist who created the companion piece shared no such concerns about directly representing God. The 1515 woodcut from the first printed edition of the New Testament in Syriac shows Jesus crucified, with a haloed saint looking up at him. An eagle beside the saint identifies him as John, and between him and the cross is the first verse of John’s Gospel, “In principio erat verbum” (“In the beginning was the word”). Behind Saint John are a seven-branch menorah and a football-shaped form that circumscribes the 10 sephirot. The artist joined the sephirot with the crucifixion through lines representing the stigmata that connect each sephirah with one of Jesus’ wounds. Where the “Holy Tree” carefully draws the line at representing attributes of God, the woodcut maps the divine body over the human body.

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There are photos of both pieces in the article.