Tuesday 29 September 2009 Scripture for the Eyes

Published by the Museum of Biblical Art, New York in association with D Giles Limited, this ground-breaking new book explores the central role played by scriptural prints of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, during one of the most complex periods of religious transformation in early modern European culture.

This major scholarly publication, which accompanies the new exhibition at the Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA), New York, Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in the Sixteenth Century Low Countries opening in Summer 2009, focuses attention on the extraordinarily rich array of biblical prints produced in the Low Countries (comprising today’s Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg) in a time of dynamic and sometimes violent religious and political change.

In cities such as Antwerp and Amsterdam prints were the primary medium for the invention and dissemination of biblical imagery that gave viewers new ways of relating to scripture and hence to God. Far from merely following artistic developments in the monumental arts, this fascinating book shows that prints of Old and New Testament subjects were agents of innovation in their own right, offering a clarifying lens through which the Bible was received and interpreted. Scripture for the Eyes studies the forms, functions and meanings of the printed images through which this most crucial of books, newly available in vernacular and Latin editions, came increasingly to be read as a living source of religious truth. Over 130 prints, engravings, woodcuts and etchings by Lucas van Leyden, Maarten van Heemskerck, Philips Galle, Hendrick Goltzius and Hieronymus Wierix, among others, are classed into five functional groups: Sacred History and Geography, Exegesis, Worship, Morality and Politics and Polemics.

The Authors
Dr James Clifton is director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and curator in Renaissance and Baroque Painting, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He is the co-author of A Portrait of the Artist, 1525–1825: Prints From The Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation (2005) and The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain, 1150–1800 (1997); Dr Walter S. Melion, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University, is the author of Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s “Schilder- Boeck” and The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625.

UK£45.00/US$65.00, hardback
ISBN: 978-1-904832-66-9 (13 digit)
ISBN: 978-1-904832-66-0 (10 digit)
224 pages, 240 x 280mm (11 x 9 ½ in.), landscape
66 colour and 70 b & w illustrations
Text: Up to 100,000 words
Publication date: September 2009
Publisher: D. Giles Limited, London in association with the Museum of Biblical Art, New York

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