Breitling Navitimer Quartz Chrono BT-220

 

Exploring antisemitic imagery in Middle Ages: Church used art to condemn religions different from its own.Pointed hats, money purses and yellow badges were some of the Breitling Navitimer Quartz Chrono BT-219 images used n medieval and Renaissance church art to portray Jews in an unfavorable and negative light. By extension, these images, the people thought, served to enhance the Catholic faith.

In a small, but revelatory exhibit at the Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College, titled "The Blessed and the Damned: Jesuits and Jews in the Visual Arts," Curatorial intern Noga La'or explores the relationship between visual images and religious doctrine. Drawing mostly from the museum's permanent collection, the 16 works, Breitling Navitimer Quartz Chrono BT-220 works on paper, sculpture and paintings, effectively demonstrate the power of the visual image to sway public thought and opinion.

The exhibit focuses on ways in which different religious groups used visual imagery to propagate their faith. Most of the images relating to Jews were negative. There were exceptions, and La'or, working under the guidance of Marjorie Wieseman, the museum's acting director and curator of Western art before 1850, has taken care to include a few of them in her well-balanced presentation.

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, she explains, Jews were artistically rendered in ways that would distinguish them from Christians. In addition to being depicted Breitling Navitimer Quartz Chrono BT-221 ruddy faces and a goatee or beard, they were also singled out by their garb, the result of government and church decrees that said Jews had to dress a certain way. This meant being forced to wear pointed or triangular hats in public to simulate the prevailing belief that Jews grew horns from their heads. Jews also had to wear badges to further differentiate themselves from Christians.

In a 15th-century engraving of a crucifixion scene, Jews are identified by their conical hats, money purses attached to their belts, and their ugly, exaggerated features. They are dressed in contemporary (15th-century) clothing, not in the garb they would have been wearing at the time of the crucifixion. "contemporary Jewry Breitling Navitimer Quartz Chronograph BT-155 being placed in the context of a biblical situation," explains La'or, thereby "connecting the crimes that biblical Jewry was believed to have committed with their 15th-century contemporaries."