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12 Christian and Jewish Iconographies of Job in Fifteenth-Century Italy Fabrizio Lelli Throughout the Renaissance, the book of Job played a significant role in the intellectual exchanges between Italian Jewish and Christian scholars. Several commentaries1 on this biblical text were composed between the second half of the fifteenth and the end of the sixteenth century; at the same time, this book and its chief characters also exercised a crucial influence on literary2 and artistic production. The story of the biblical hero who faithfully endures terrible trials and tribulations sent to him by God had long played a major role in Christian and Jewish exegesis in antiquity and during the Middle Ages.3 Until the fifteenth century, however, scholarly relations between the two faiths pertaining to biblical interpretation were rare, the almost unique interlocutors of Jewish exegetes being the ecclesiastical elites.4 In contrast, from the second half of the fifteenth century a new attitude to the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible became manifest: Christians—both secular and clerical—and Jews adopted common humanist themes of reflection only partly grounded in earlier exegesis, while new approaches to the Scripture were borrowed by Christian intellectuals from Jewish scholars.5 Beside a new humanist attitude to the exegesis of the Scripture according to the Hebraica Veritas (the Hebrew truth preserved by the original text of the Bible), new biblical interpretations were inspired by the widespread theory of the prisca theologia.6 According to this belief, which originated in Late Antiquity but reached its apex in the Renaissance , scholars assumed that different cultures ultimately derived from the same religious truths. The intellectual’s goal was to determine the correspondences between the ‘‘pristine traditions’’ preserved in divergent literary corpora and contemporary systems of thought. This hermeneutic allowed scholars to identify hidden messages of their own religious beliefs according to specific exegeses of ancient or Job 215 allegedly ancient material—including Scripture, the texts attributed, inter alia, to Plato or Aristotle, to Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus or Zoroaster , and also the kabbalistic literature: seeing that Jewish sources were understood to have developed common truths, Christian interpreters of Scripture could make use of ancient and medieval Hebrew commentaries . In such an intellectual context, like the Greek and Roman authorities reappraised by the humanists, ancient authors of biblical writings were turned into living fonts of timeless truths.7 Job, the alleged author of the biblical book, could be depicted as a priscus philosophus whose life had taken place in a certain historical period. This attempt to create a concord between different truths and to attribute historical and humanist traits to legendary figures was carried out in Italy (and especially in the Florentine intellectual environment of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico8 ) also thanks to a profound cooperation between Christian and Jewish scholars9 and had its impact especially on Renaissance art.10 In this study I will attempt to demonstrate, on the basis of visual testimonies pertaining to the book of Job, the extent to which Italian art of the late fifteenth century reread traditional Jewish and Christian iconographies of the biblical text according to the major intellectual concerns that were shared simultaneously by members of both faith communities. Renaissance art testifies to a new, fluid exchange of themes of speculation and exegesis shared by both Jews and Christians, who discussed similar issues in the context of the humanist environment. Renaissance art inherited most of its iconographic themes from the past. In the case of Job, the iconographic patterns used in late medieval art to portray the biblical figure11 were grounded on two major theological understandings: the first one stressed the man’s sufferings, Job being thus the paradigm of the righteous man who has been smitten with affliction without being able to rationally comprehend God’s reasons for it. The second understanding focused on the final redemption of Job, whose faith and endurance are ultimately rewarded. Each perspective gave rise to its own iconography. According to what I will call the first pattern, which was especially common in Western Europe, Job was depicted as a suffering old man, who was featured either lying naked, scar-covered, on a heap of ashes, on piles of straw or on a dunghill—alone, with his three friends or only with Elihu, or being urged by his wife to rebel against God’s will.12 According to the second pattern, which was more popular in Byzantine milieus, Job was portrayed as a saint, a king, or a wealthy man, his...

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