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Maurycy Gottlieb saw his art as essential to his universalist vision, namely, as a way to improve Polish-Jewish relations. As he said, “I am a Jew and a Pole and, God willing, I want to serve both.”…
This medal for St. Stephanskirche in Vienna provides an example of the style innovated by its engraver Jacques Wiener (1815–1899), in which the exterior of a building appears on one side and the…
The title of this painting, Flight into Egypt, refers to the story in the Christian Gospels in which Joseph and Mary flee with the infant Jesus to Egypt to escape the wrath of King Herod. Rabin, born…
When Max Liebermann first exhibited this painting, it caused not only a sensation but a scandal. Some critics objected to a Jew daring to depict Jesus, and they were offended by Liebermann’s realistic…
Once I was young, hung out
in doorways, listening to Socrates.
My closest pal, my lover
Had the finest chest in Athens.
Then came Caesar, and a world
glittering with marble—I
the last to go. For my…
The Christian parable of the prodigal son, from Luke 15:11–12, was a favorite subject of artists from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. A son squanders his inheritance and is reduced to…
Calvary was not the first time Marc Chagall portrayed the crucifixion in a painting, and it would not be the last. Chagall saw the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as a symbol of Jewish suffering. In this…
We live in a time of Sturm und Drang [storm and stress]. Every day brings new disappointments and new hopes. Old forms lose their value, no new ones are being created. And the synthetic gaze of…
In this baroque Christian altarpiece that Anton Raphael Mengs painted for the Catholic church, the Colegiata of Castrojeriz, which is near Burgos, Spain, the Madonna is holding an open book. The angel…
