On Water, on Land, and in the Air

On Water, on Land, and in the Air Comparative commentary by Geoffrey Nuttall Bible Passage The Ten Plagues of Egypt are amongst the best-known narratives of the Old Testament—their part in the titanic struggle between Pharaoh and Moses immortalized in twentieth-century popular culture by Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). Though the depictions of the plagues of blood, frogs, and gnats discussed in this exhibition were imagined in very different times and for very different audiences, each one, in the idiom of its time, also realizes the dramatic potential of these powerful passages of Scripture. Though the dramatic focus of the Golden Haggadah miniature appears to be the interaction between Pharaoh and Moses, the inscription that accompanies the miniature—‘[a]nd all the Egyptians dug round about the river for water to drink’ (Exodus 7:24)—highlights the impact of the plague not just on the ruling elite, but on the mass of the Egyptian people, represented by the two labourers vainly excavating the earth. This recognition of a wider suffering that transcends social status reflects the intellectual as well as spiritual context in which this image and its accompanying text would have been studied and discussed within the intimate setting of a Jewish household at the feast of Passover. In contrast, the context of Marcello Fogolino’s depiction of the plague of frogs—decorating a reception room of the magnificent palace built by Filos Roverella during his long incumbency as bishop of Ascoli Piceno (1518 until his death in 1558), could not be more different to the very private and intensely contemplative Golden Haggadah. On semi-public view, and one of twelve large scenes from the Life of Moses covering all four sides of the room, it was designed not to enhance devotion or to serve religious ritual, but to stimulate conversation amongst an intellectual elite of humanist scholars. The action takes place outside a palace that Roverella’s contemporaries would have instantly recognized as the pleasure garden the bishop had created at Ascoli Piceno. The pharaoh (positioned as master of the palace, and thus occupying the position of Roverella himself) is portrayed as a sixteenth-century prince, surrounded by courtiers who in the variety of their costumes reflect the cosmopolitan society of mid-sixteenth century Italy, and its engagement, not so much with Egypt but with the Ottoman empire. Here, instead of a powerful moral message, the horrific reality of plague is reduced to a theatrical entertainment, even the frogs observing a polite decorum that, probably intentionally, borders on the amusing. In Jan Luyken’s engraving of the plague of gnats, all the dramatic potential of the Old Testament story is realised on an epic scale worthy of DeMille’s Ten Commandments, and in a form—print—that was more easily accessible to a popular audience than manuscript illumination or palace decoration. Far from being used as an aid to the ritual recall of the Exodus narrative in the context of the Passover Seder, as was the Golden Haggadah in medieval Catalonia, or as, essentially, a sophisticated, almost profane adjunct to the pleasures of a Renaissance court, as was the case in Fogolino’s wall painting in Renaissance Ascoli Piceno, Luyken’s engraving was made for a very different audience—the Protestant merchants and tradesmen of northern Europe. It appeared in a new version of the Bible, L’Histoire du Vieux et du Nouveaux Testament, with the foreword and text for each plate written by the French Protestant theologian David Martin (1639–1721), who was resident in the Netherlands. The work was issued simultaneously in Dutch. Known (after its publisher) as the Mortier Bible, it incorporated some 400 illustrations. These included chronological tables, detailed reconstructions of Noah’s Ark, and maps of the New World, that purportedly lent historical authority to the teachings of Scripture, thus satisfying the intellectual curiosity of the nascent eighteenth-century Enlightenment. No less authentic than the sets of a Hollywood blockbuster, it reimagined the ancient Egyptian world of Alexandria, Memphis, and Thebes with pseudo-historical accuracy. Examples include the carefully observed camels in the foreground, and the variety of monumental architectural forms in the background. But as befitted the Dutch republic under whose governance this Bible was made, its real subjects are not the prophets and pharaohs of Scripture, nor the token labourers digging for water in the garb of medieval peasants, nor the foppish courtiers of Ascoli Piceno, but the citizens of a great metropolis, as innumerable as the insects that plague them.