The Adoration of the Magi: Comparing and Contrasting Cultural Assumptions.

Browsing for different art images of the adoration of the Magi I came across this from a modern illustrated French Bible.

Can't think of any profound observations to make. The mixture of ethnic and cartoon art give it lightness, movement and though the whole thing seems slightly eccentric, that adds to the strangeness.

In any case what is more strange than three powerful scholar nobles, crossing several national borders through the desert to reach an obscure out sized village at the back of beyond in occupied Judea, carrying valuable gifts, and offering them reverently while kneeling at the feet of a peasant woman who has just given birth so far as the world knows, to a child of dubious parenthood?

One of the functions of cartoon art is to nudge us out of the familiar and confront us with a strangeness that may be more true than we are ready to admit.

Anyway. If what we are looking for is realism, then none of the great art masterpieces come any closer. Each sets the story in the cultural context of the artist. In that sense the strangeness is twofold – the story itself is strange, but then there is the interpretive chasm we need to span and the leap of imagination required for us to have any idea of the meaning of this scene by an unknown Fleish artist, for 15th Century Renaissance Europeans, many still unable to read, but living through the cultural flux of new knowledge challenging old certainties.

That two such different pieces of art could refer to the same biblical incident, and portray them with cultural congruence despite a gap of 400 years and generations of historical and cultural change, seems to suggest that art is its own kind of exegesis, or eisegesis; and each artist is one whose hermeneutic approach like our own, is culturally conditioned, historically limited and theologically partial. None of which need be a problem if we are open to learn, to compare, to critique and then to look again at the story and its meaning for our own time. Whatever else art does, it cautions against that first instinct to pin down a story to a single meaning, and opens up meanings we never imagined before.