Transcript: Bible and Art Reframed, S1 E2
Theme: Gold
Michelle 0:00
Hello, and welcome to Bible and Art Reframed. I'm Michelle Fletcher, and I'm a biblical scholar.
Joost 0:05
And I'm Joost Joustra, and I'm an art historian. Together, we lead the Visual Commentary on Scripture, featuring over 1000 artworks and commentaries from experts around the World. It's the internet's premier place for Bible and art. Thank you for tuning into Bible and Art Reframed, where we choose some of our favourite works from across the site and bring them together to explore unexpected themes that pop up in the Bible. And don't forget to click the link in the episode description, so that you can check out the images that we're chatting about today. So, what are we looking at today, Michelle?
Michelle 0:41
Well, today, Joost, we are looking at gold, and you're going to have to refrain from doing your best Spandau ballet impression during this episode.
Joost 0:49
Gold!
Michelle 0:51
Gold is something that I thought, yeah, it's in the Bible, but I don't know what I'm going to say about it, and oh my goodness, is it a topic and a half. Obviously, gold is rife in the Bible. There are over 300 mentions, closer to 400 mentions of gold within the text, which is quite a lot of mentions, and it pops up in lots of different ways. It's there coating the ark of the covenant, it's there at the end in the book of Revelation with this giant gold cube that comes down out of heaven, it's something that's brought into Israel from other nations, and as we see today, we'll find out some of the ways that it actually does come to the land of Israel. It's seen to represent holiness, purity, and things that are sacred, and throughout human history it has a long and really, really complicated inheritance. It's associated with power, with greed, with idolatry, and lots of other things that we will be talking about more today. So, what are we looking at to kick us off?
Joost 1:52
Well, we've got to start small, and actually quite small. This work is referred to on the website as a tiny masterpiece, and I like that phrasing. It's a gold daric, which is actually a coin. So, we're talking about an object that is not more than a centimetre, maybe even millimetres in size. And what's interesting about it is that we don't ever think about coins as works of art in our daily life, but when you look at an object like this, and you really consider it as a piece of sculpture, it's an incredibly impressive thing to look at. But it was produced in great numbers, of course, it was mass produced, and therefore we might not consider it as special as some of the other things we think about.
Michelle 2:36
It's got an amazing history, this specific type of coin, it comes about through invasion, so it's actually in Lydia that the first gold coins are minted under the famous Croesus, and through a series of invasions it becomes part of the Persian Empire to also make gold coins. And the thing about gold coins, in this very pure form - this one weighs 8.5 grams and is actually 95% gold - is that they have an equal weight, so it's a way of having a standardised currency that allows trade to happen. Lots of economies at this time didn't actually use currency in this form as we know it today. There were systems of barter, so I'd give you 10 camels and you'd give me 15 rugs, but actually these are coins that are being exchanged, and it's a really fascinating way to get into the practical world of the biblical texts, specifically here thinking about the book of Ezra. It's a story about the Israelites returning from captivity. Cyrus is given an edict saying that they can return, and then in 458 Ezra leads this group back to the land of Israel, and it is told that they go forth with huge wealth and much gold. And it's also described some of these gold objects, 20 bowls, which weigh 1000 daric, and so we can actually see this really specific type of coin, this is actually a type two in the minting process being taken back -
Joost 4:03
Type two?
Michelle 4:05
Type two - so there were four different types over the time, so this is like the second type to be minted of the darics, and they would have been taken back into Israel. And actually that means that iconography of a human, which is not exactly allowed under Israelite law would have been taken back by the people ready for them to rebuild the temple and to start again.
Joost 4:28
That’s fascinating, because you would never question the iconography of a human being in today's works of art, but at this time it was actually quite special. So, the figure we're looking at, that tiny crouching king holding a bow and a spear is more exceptional than you would think in looking at this object in first instance.
Michelle 4:47
He's kind of running, isn't he? It's this kneeling running archer, so it's a really specific iconography. Moving on from the lion that was used in the Croesus coins, the lion and bull, and talking of a bull - I think we can think of another way that gold might appear in the Bible by looking at our second work of art, which is based on the book of Exodus, chapter 32 and the famous incident of the golden calf. So, Joost, tell me a bit more about what we're looking at in this manuscript today.
Joost 5:20
Yeah, Michelle, you know, I love manuscripts...
Michelle 5:23
I do.
Joost 5:24
This is a particularly good one. It's kept today in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and it's actually a manuscript that was taken apart at some point, but we still have the illuminated pages mostly together. It was made by a man called William De Brailes, and it's quite exceptional that for a medieval artist we have a name connected to it. William is actually one of two named artists in the 13th century in the context of British art, so quite exceptional to have someone identified as the maker of this manuscript. The page we're looking at here shows the Israelites worshipping the golden calf. So we can see Moses standing on the left, and we can see a group of really intent worshippers staring at this golden calf with their hands clasped in prayer.
Michelle 6:18
This story is the quintessential story of idolatry within the Bible. Moses has gone off up Sinai, the mountain, to speak to God, and there's been this massive theophany, the show of God's divine presence in Exodus 19, but he hasn't come back down. And so they feel this man, who's led them this far into the wilderness, has left them, and they start demanding from Aaron that they want to see the Gods that brought them up out of Egypt, and so this calf is made. Now it's made from the earrings in their ears, and we're told in Exodus 12 that actually the Israelites were packed off out of Egypt with a load of booty. So this is how some of the gold comes into the Israelite camp, it's from Egypt, and then this is melted down and turned into this calf, but the rabbis had quite a lot of problems with this story. Why would Aaron, who is the priest of Israel, be making this image when graven images are banned? And one of the ways that Rashi explains it is he actually said take the earrings out of the women's ears, and the women wouldn't want to give up their gold jewellery, and so the calf wouldn't go away. So, actually, the men are so keen to have this gold, according to Rashi, that they take the earrings out of their own ears, and it gets made from that in the rabbinic reading of this story, and they really like that. It's got a little bit of innate sexism in it, with the idea that women wouldn't give it up in the Bible, men are less bothered about it, but it's also got that sense of trying to explain this really difficult story of idolatry that's happening so close to this revelation at Sinai, and what's really interesting in this manuscript is actually the calf isn't gold, is it?
Joost 8:01
That's what I found so striking about it. The things you thought would be made in gold are not made of gold. So, the calf on its pedestal is a sort of brownish pigment, but also Moses has his horns, which is a complicated story that is based on a mistranslation, as far as I understand.
Michelle 8:22
Indeed it's this idea of horn and glory getting muddled up.
Joost 8:26
again. You would expect these horns to glow and be a bit more golden like, but it's actually the background of the page that is most gold, and it really adds a striking contrast to this group of worshippers in the front and this golden, almost heavenly glow in the background.
Michelle 8:47
And the gold at the background is gold leaf, which is gold that's beaten incredibly fine, and that allows in medieval iconography, in the idea of theology, to have this divine presence. And our next work takes us into a way that it is used early on in Christian art to be able to show this idea of divine presence through mosaics, and this is the mosaic showing the transfiguration from the sixth century in St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai. So, tell me a little bit more about it.
Joost 9:21
Well, first of all, the place we've arrived at is very special, St. Catherine's Monastery, and you already mentioned the date, Michelle, sixth century, but it's in fact the oldest continuously inhabited monastery in existence. So this has been going since the sixth century, which means it includes some of the most important early works of Christian art, including exceptional icons, but also exceptional mosaics, like the one we're looking at here. The monastery was actually not only known for its artworks, but it's also the site of the burning bush, so there's a Bible story quite closely connected through it in its history. So back to the apse mosaic. We're standing inside the church in St. Catherine's Monastery, looking at a depiction of the Transfiguration, which is a very popular theme for artists. Think of Raphael's famous painting, but actually it's a theme that not many people really understand, so what are we looking at here, Michelle? What is the transfiguration?
Michelle 10:27
Well, this is also one of the earliest representations of the transfiguration, fascinatingly. So to have it here in this apse mosaic as the central thing to be looked at, this is one of the earliest types of this iconography that will move out later into Byzantine iconography, so it's really fascinating to encounter it. The transfiguration happens in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in Matthew 17, Mark nine, and Luke nine, and this is an event where Jesus goes up a mountain and his appearance is changed before three of his disciples, and what happens is his heavenly glory is seen. He is described as being white in one of them, whiter than any fuller could bleach your clothes, and the sense here in this mosaic is that actually we are seeing something of the divine, and that is what the gold is doing here. It is a really key point in the history of Christianity, there's been an argument about the nature of Christ, is He man and God, God and man together, and this mosaic at this point is actually making quite a heavy statement about Christ being fully God and fully human. He here looks like a man, but at the same time we can see that gold all around, which is showing the presence of that heavenly aspect. But the gold actually comes onto his clothing, it's around him, and it's also on his little sandals. If you zoom in, he's got these shiny feet.
Joost 11:57
Lovely little sandals.
Michelle 11:58
So it's showing him as really having this idea of the heavenly, which is this use of gold in Christian art, but also the human, where not all of him is turned into this gold.
Joost 12:11
And would you say you could make a general point that gold in works of art is often an indication of the divine? It is always, yeah, it is always there to signal that divine element, whether it's made in halos, in rays, in these apparitions. Gold is heaven.
Michelle 12:31
And actually Resh Lakish, in the third century, the rabbi, said that gold is actually for one purpose, which is for the temple, so it's for the glory of God, and it's for worship rather than for human gain.
Joost 12:42
So, we really shouldn't be wearing any gold, probably.
Michelle 12:45
I'm not...
Joost 12:48
But talking about wearing gold, I think the next work of art is quite interesting in that respect, because it looks like it's something that could actually be wearable.
Michelle 12:58
This is an amazing object. The first time I saw this, when our author chose it for the site, I was really blown away. This is a gold crown, around 25 centimetres, made by beating Gold very, very finely, and is decorated with precious jewels, such as topaz, and it's made in Peru, in Arequipa, in the 18th century. And it is actually not a crown for wearing, in the sense of a human is to wear this, but it's a crown which is to replicate the crown of thorns that we're told that Jesus is given in Matthew 27 Mark 15, and John 19, during his passion, where the soldiers are mocking him.
Joost 13:44
And the crown of thorns is, of course, famously an instrument of torture, but what we're looking at here, a piece of jewellery made out of gold and other precious materials, sort of adds a counterintuitive distinction to the object making it into a beautiful piece of jewellery instead of an instrument of torture. I think that tension is so fascinating when you look at this work, but that has another dimension too, that's the colonial dimension of gold. I mean, we are used to having expensive golden objects, especially in churches, in church treasuries, but where did the gold come from? A lot of the gold came from the New World. What we're looking at here is an object connected to a very problematic colonial history as well. So, if you just see a photograph, you might be taken in by its gruesome beauty, but it actually has an element of gruesomeness attached to it as well.
Michelle 14:45
The number of people that died during colonisation, which was in so many ways driven by the search for gold, we see it in Columbus's diaries, this sense that South America was this place for Gold, with gold, which is actually connected to the biblical idea of the land of fear, of fear being this place that King Solomon is said to have sailed through the Red Sea to to buy gold to bring back for the first temple. And there's always this sense of where did Israel get all this gold from? As I've said before, it isn't a place that has gold, and Columbus, and later invaders were driven by this want to find gold and wealth in South America, but this object, what's really nice about it, it is made in South America, and it has remained there, and is in the cathedral in Arequipa today to be looked at, and I think it does help us turn this idea of want on its head to have a bit of a pun with a crown, in the sense it's not made for wearing, it's made for looking at. In the Bible, Jesus has bought gold when he is a child in Matthew chapter two as one of the gifts, and the gift that the Magi bring here is being repurposed in a sense to be made for a crown of glory, that crown that he was crowned with being a Stephanos, which is a glory crown, one you'd be given to celebrate something, and here it's celebrating his conquest over death. But our final object is again dealing with this problematic colonial history, and also resonates with what we've seen with gold mosaics, with the sense of the sacred, and it is Olga de Amaral's work, part of her alchemy series.
Joost 16:33
Yeah, and it seems a bit more abstract when you first look at it. It was in fact made in 1987 so it's a quite recent work, and it really has that visual language of modernism. This is not figurative art. This feels completely abstracted. We're looking at something that almost looks like a tapestry, but made of gold leaf, among other things. So, gold is not strictly representational here, in the sense that we've seen it in other works, where it clearly identifies a heavenly, divine aspect. Here we have to think about those aspects ourselves. But what I find fascinating, and I've mentioned this art theorist in other episodes, Leon Battista Alberti, again the great art theorist of the 15th century talks about that artists actually shouldn't use real gold, they should represent gold, so they mix their pigments when they paint, and they make something look like gold, but not use real gold. So, for a lot of time, from the Renaissance onwards, artists actually didn't use that much gold as they did in the Middle Ages, but artists in the contemporary period again started experimenting with what gold can do, and I think Olga de Amaral's work is a perfect example.
Michelle 17:52
It is, it's mounted on canvas, on linen, and it is sewn together, and she uses groups of women to bring the squares together, so it's a collectively made product, which I really love. It's not that kind of idea as an artist as a single maker, but at the same time she's using gold because she is a Colombian artist with this nod to the pre-Columbian, pre-conquest period, where gold was the sacred object. It wasn't something for trade it was something that was associated with the gods and with divinity, and it was even cast into lakes, and we find stories of the colonial people going and actually trying to drain Lake Guatavita to find these gold objects, some of which we can actually see in the Gold Museum in Bogota today, so having the real gold shown here, having that sense of the gold mosaic, the interior of the churches helps bring this product before us and make us consider its worth, and that is why we have it on the site in relation to a passage from the book of One Peter. One Peter is a letter to people struggling in the Roman Empire, struggling with their faith and struggling under persecution, and what the author tells them is that, in actual fact, their faith is more important and more precious than gold. Their faith is being refined like gold through fire, through these persecutions, but the letter says that gold ultimately can perish, although it doesn't tarnish. It is true, if you throw it into a volcano, it will deplete but the point is you can't easily do that. Yeah, but their faith is something that will survive to eternity. Gold is part of the created order, whereas faith is something which moves beyond that, and so we want to think about the sense that gold has worth, but actually it's a human worth, and we might want to look beyond that. So, to sum up what we've been looking at today, we have been looking at gold as used in lots of different ways of understanding what is precious. We've looked at the idea of divine, light, we've looked at the idea of idolatry. We've discussed the ideas of people invading each other and causing mass devastation. We've also talked about the Israelites and returning and being given great wealth, both from Egypt when they left Egypt, and when they returned after their captivity in Babylon, and so it's allowed us to explore some of these aspects of gold, these human aspects in relation to the divine.
Joost 20:30
Michelle, as we're wrapping up the episode, do you know what I'm going to ask you next, right?
Michelle 20:34
You're going to ask me if I want to take some gold home with me.
Joost 20:38
Yeah, would you want to take some gold home, and in, in more specifically, which gold would you take home?
Michelle 20:44
I think, in light of what we've said today, I would probably take the manuscript, because it's got such a small amount of gold leaf, and the calf is so brown that I think it would help me to remind myself to look at everything but gold as having worth - to look outside of the created by human hand into the wider world that is filled with God's presence and to think of that as being worthwhile. So that is why I would select this one.
Joost 21:13
That's a great choice, Michelle.
Michelle 21:15
You can't choose the manuscript this time.
Joost 21:17
I can't choose the manuscript this time, but actually I wasn't going to, I was going to pick that wonderful 18th century crown of thorns from Peru, an object I find hauntingly beautiful, and I think hauntingly beautiful is the right terminology.
Michelle 21:33
It’s a fantastic way of describing it.
Joost 21:36
Yeah, it's an object of a beautiful suffering and expressed through the gold medium very appropriately. Well, that was this week's episode. We look forward to you joining us next time, when we will be discussing wisdom and discernment. And don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and to click on the link in the episode to look up the high-res images of what we have been discussing today. Thank you for listening, and see you next time.