biblical art Archives

Poke in the Eye Object Spotlight: Susanna and the Elders

Nicole Block on Aug 26 2024

Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture is now on view at SAM! This homegrown exhibition features 87 ceramics, sculptures, paintings, and drawings from SAM’s collection—some of which are being shown for the first time. Throughout the run of the exhibition, we’ll be periodically sharing insight on a few of the eclectic artworks on view.

Please note: The following article includes mentions of nudity, coercion, and sexual assault.

Like many works on view in Poke in the Eye at SAM, this painting’s vibrant colors and figurative style draws the viewer in, then flips expectations upside down.

From a distance, Susanna and the Elders (Novelty Hotel) (1980) looks like a cartoon, but the artist, Robert Colsecott (1925–2009), often used this visually appealing strategy to hook viewers and make them confront the more serious issues of race and gender that are in his works.

This intriguing painting is titled after a story from the Bible that perhaps wouldn’t be so well known if not for the many Renaissance artists who painted it. Although Colescott didn’t cite one particular artwork as inspiration for his work, he was familiar with this subject from historical artists like Tintoretto, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt van Rijn, and many others who depicted the story.

In this tale, found in the Book of Daniel, two men are spying upon Susanna bathing in the garden of her home. They catch each other peeping and unite to coerce Susanna into having sex with them. They threaten to blackmail her, but still she refuses. They have her arrested and publicly accuse her of adultery. These two respected men are judges and elders in their community and Susanna is sentenced to death on their word until the prophet Daniel appears and questions them. He finds major differences in their stories and declares Susanna innocent.

Although a somewhat minor anecdote in the Bible, Susanna’s story became popular partly because it allowed artists to display their talent at depicting nude women. During the Renaissance, artists often portrayed Susanna lounging naked, sometimes unaware of the men watching, or other times, seeming to seduce them. Like the elders watching the oblivious Susanna, the patrons and viewers of these paintings also act as voyeurs of Susanna and lust after her with the excuse that the artwork depicts a biblical story.

Robert Colecott interprets this tale in his own way: a naked blonde woman emerges from behind a shower curtain, much to the glee of three ogling men and one rubber ducky. At the Novelty Hotel (a real hotel that Colescott visited in Paris), a bald white man in a red robe, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and a Black janitor holding a mop are directly next to this Susanna, physically leaning on one another as they witness this scene. Another Black man peers in through the open window, a self-portrait of Colescott himself with his signature glasses and facial hair. The rubber ducky also seems to be looking up at her eagerly from the tub. None of them are touching Susanna or harming her, but they are intruding on the privacy of her hotel room and her body.

Much like the men in this scene, the viewer is also a voyeur complicit in this visual violation. With its bright colors and cartoonish style, paired with the towering seven-foot-tall canvas on which it sits, Colescott’s painting is unmissable. Visitors passing by can’t help but stop and stare at the intrusive tableau.

Susanna’s eyes appear closed as if she’s unaware of those watching her. Alternatively, Susanna’s facial expression could be interpreted as giving the voyeurs a flirtatious smile over her shoulder, as if performing for them. With all these eyes looking at her, it seems impossible that she wouldn’t notice these men around her, but is she to blame for their actions? By calling her Susanna in the title, she is aligned with the innocent and happens to be the unfortunate subject of this male attention.

Colescott grew up in Oakland, California and attended the University of California, Berkeley where he studied painting. He studied in Paris for a year, working with Fernand Leger. Colescott’s Night and Day, You Are the One (1969), also on display in Poke in the Eye, more closely resembles Leger’s Cubist-inspired, rhythmic style. Colescott visited and lived in Paris throughout his life, but returned to Berkeley for his master’s degree before becoming an art teacher in the Pacific Northwest, at a junior high school in Seattle and Portland State College. He later held other teaching positions in Cairo, Egypt, California, and Arizona.

From the mid-1970s on, Colescott was well-known for creating artworks that spoofed and remixed art history. He was a satirist, taking the serious subjects of the art world and translating them with critique, wit, and humor into offbeat commentaries.

Often, Colescott subverts artistic precedents by changing the racial makeup of the scene, substituting Black figures for the historically White main roles. Another work on display in the galleries of Poke in the Eye, Les Demoiselles d’Alabama: Vestidas (1985) plays on Pablo Picasso’s famous Cubist painting of sex workers, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Picasso’s original took direct influence from African masks, at the time regarded as “primitive” in the wake of ongoing colonization of that continent, but Colescott puts actual Black figures in this key moment in art history.

In Susanna and the Elders, the men overcome their racial differences to unite in their ogling of the modern Susanna. They are all complicit in this behavior and caught red-handed. However, Susanna seems to still have the upper hand—she stands tall, powerful, and unbothered.

By the 1980s, thanks to the previous decades’ feminist movement, American and European women received more recognition of their social and political rights and a degree of sexual liberation. Even with these men watching her in the hotel shower, she will not be accused of adultery and sentenced to death as the original Susanna was. These older men don’t pose a mortal threat to her in the same way that the biblical judges did. Colescott instead transforms the story into a comical episode that shifts the power in favor of the female lead.

– Nicole Block, SAM Collections Associate

Photos: Chloe Collyer. Susanna and the Elders (Novelty Hotel), 1980, Robert Colescott, American, 1925-2009, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 1/8 in. (213.4 x 183.2 cm), Mary Arrington Small Estate Acquisition Fund, 84.170 © Estate of Robert Colescott/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Object of the Week: The Creation of Eve

Seattle Art Museum on Aug 13 2022

At the dawn of world history God gives life to the first humans under a luminous pastel sky. This small panel, painted around 1510 by Renaissance artist Bartolomeo di Paolo, known as Fra Bartolomeo, is titled The Creation of Eve and is currently on view in SAM’s European art galleries. While the religious content of this picture, based on the book of Genesis, would have been immediately recognizable to its prevalently Christian audience in 16th century Italy, the way Fra Bartolomeo chose to visualize this biblical story sheds light on Renaissance ideas around the role of women and the arts in early-modern western society that can still inspire us today.

At the center, Eve rises from the side of a sleeping Adam, reaching for support as she prepares to take her first step into the world. Her right hand is met by the Creator’s, who lifts and blesses her—his fluttering cloak and the motion of his feet indicating forward movement. His commanding presence contrast with her crouched pose and unstable balance, highlighting her suspended state of becoming. Scholars have termed this way of depicting Eve’s creation “emergence iconography” to stress the image’s departure from the Genesis text, where the first woman is said to have been modeled by God from a rib taken from Adam. The challenges to a naturalistic and efficient representation posed by that plot led artists to evolve this solution, which was interpreted most famously by Michelangelo in the Sistine ceiling just a few years before Fra Bartolomeo painted this picture.

In addition to emphasizing the corporeality of Eve’s body, softly modeled to accentuate the underlying structure of bones and muscles and imbued with the illusion of gravity, Fra Bartolomeo’s composition offers a visual translation of the first woman’s role as a companion and an equal to Adam that early Christian theologians had formulated in their interpretation of scriptures. They reflected on the fact that in Hebrew (the original language of Genesis) the term tsela used in the creation passage meant both “rib” and “side,” focusing on the latter translation to argue for the equality of man and woman, whose union they intended as the basic unit of human society.

This idea materializes in Fra Bartolomeo’s Creation of Eve, unique among Renaissance depictions of this popular subject matter for combining the creation episode with a group portrait of the first family (Adam, Eve, and their children Cain and Abel are featured in the middle ground) and a cityscape in the distance to signify the modern accomplishments of their descendants. Sixteenth-century Florence—where this picture was likely painted—was a city-state whose strong tradition of independent self-governance and artistic excellence were a point of civic pride for artists and patrons alike.

Here, the omission of the episode of The Fall that traditionally followed the creation of Eve in most Genesis cycles also suggests our artist’s intent to celebrate humanity’s achievements rather than emphasize the consequences of the first sin. In this respect, God’s physical hold on Eve’s hand may evoke the Renaissance trope of the artist as a divinely inspired creator, further exalting the intellectual potential of the visual arts.

While this picture offers a limited representation of humanity that reflects the ableist, heteronormative canons of its time, it also speaks to present-day concerns around bodily autonomy by reminding us of a time when Renaissance humanism affirmed confidence in the human potential to achieve greatness through free will, and in the dignity and beauty of the human body.

– Gloria de Liberali, SAM Guest Contributor & Art History Ph.D

Photo: Alborz Kamalizad.

Object of the Week: The Sacrifice of Isaac

Seattle Art Museum on Dec 24 2021

When talking about biblical studies, Rabbi Emily Meyer once said, “every translation is a commentary.” This is true, not only for verbal and written languages, but also for the language of visual art, particularly when it comes to biblical interpretation, where artistic design choices can change the context of the narrative. Alessandro Algardi’s Early Modern Italian relief sculpture, The Sacrifice of Isaac, is a prime example of how art can act as its own biblical commentary, both through image alone and in conjunction with verbal interpretation.

The Sacrifice, or Binding of Isaac narrative, is found in Genesis, the first book of Torah, also called the Hebrew Bible, chapter 22. In the chapter, Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, but he is stopped at the last moment by an angel, who tells Abraham he has proved his fear of God, and he instead sacrifices a nearby ram (or lamb in some interpretations).

In the original narrative, the angel calls out to Abraham as he is about to strike.¹ Abraham simply responds, “Here I am.” Yet, in Algardi’s visual interpretation, the angel grabs onto the knife mid-swing, as if needing to physically halt Abraham’s actions, removing some of the sense of agency Abraham may have had in the original text; it is not Abraham’s choice to pause in his actions, but a result of forceful intervention by the angel. This compositional choice therefore acts as visual biblical commentary, adding to, and expanding upon, interpretations of the original text.

Similarly, Algardi chose to portray Isaac as an older adolescent kneeling on the altar with his head hung low, as if resigned to his fate. Much religious commentary has been written about Isaac’s age, as the story found in Torah does not mention any detail about Isaac, his thoughts, or his actions. Some interpretations portray him as an innocent young boy who is complacent and oblivious to his fate, others as a young man, aware and accepting of his fate. These varying interpretations can change the meaning of the narrative for different religious groups and are reflected in visual depictions across almost 2,000 years. Algardi’s Isaac falls closer to the “aware and accepting” interpretation. This tracks with Christian interpretations of the narrative, in which the character of Isaac is viewed as typological, a precursor or prefiguration to the sacrifice of Jesus. Considering that this object was undoubtedly made in and for a Christian setting, this compositional choice is no surprise.

Marc Chagall, *The Sacrifice of Isaac*, 1966, oil on canvas, 230 cm x 235 cm.

It is a worthy endeavor to look at different portrayals of the Sacrifice of Isaac from across different religious groups, geographical backgrounds, and time periods to understand how the same original text may change—or maintain—meaning, representation, importance, and impact depending on its context. Each visual translation of the story, from contemporary versions like the painting by Marc Chagall, to late antique portrayals like the mosaics found in the 6th century CE Beit Alpha Synagogue in Israel and Basilical of San Vitale in Italy, truly is its own commentary.

– Abby Massarano, SAM Blakemore Intern for Japanese and Korean Art

1 ¹⁰And Abraham picked up the knife to slay his son. ¹¹The angel of the LORD called to him from heaven: “Abraham, Abraham!” And he answered, “Here I am.” ¹²And he said, “Do not raise your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me.” ¹³When Abraham looked up, his eye fell upon a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering in place of his son.” Jewish Publication Society, JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh: The Traditional Hebrew Text and the New JPS Translation, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999), 40.

Image: The Sacrifice of Isaac, ca. 1638-39, Alessandro Algardi, Terracotta with white paint, 31 1/2 x 22 1/4 x 4 in., Overall h.: 33 in., Overall w.: 24 in., Overall diam.: 6 in., Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection, 55.109.