Iconography: Textual or Visual?

I'm reading a book on biblical literalism which reminded me of a question I thought up a few years ago. Which books, literally which versions of the Bible, were artists consulting when creating works of religious art?

This might as first seem like a trivial query since you would expect all Bibles to generally say the same thing, but historically that's not completely true. The Holy Book developed over several centuries and has been inadvertently and deliberate changed up until very modern times. (Thomas Jefferson in fact wrote his own version of the Bible in the early 19th century, radically removing all miracles from Jesus' history and privileging only his spiritual teachings.) Also, the text of the Bible can significantly affect art; Moses' horns in Michelangelo's famed

statue of the Old Testament father are a result of a translation error meant to describe rays of light emanating from Moses rather than actual horns coming out of his head. Nonetheless, the biblical text said horns and so began a recurrent art historical motif.

Dependence on biblical text (or lack thereof) can most easily be seen in early Christian art when iconographic stereotypes nor the Bible itself were completely established. Typical Christian stories hadn't yet emerged so the iconography is infinitely more difficult to read. In fact, scholars have already noted that early Christian art was more influenced by the visual culture of the Roman world rather than upon source material from any common book. In this case it's because the common book itself which could have provided more homogeneous iconographic programs was fragmented and not yet fully canonized.

But even in later eras, I wonder which sources artists referenced to guide their work. Each Bible, especially before the advent of the printing press, was a highly individual, unique object which had been copied (always with a handful of errors) by a monk or scribe. When do errors like these affect the art? And during the Reformation when the Protestants opted to toss out an entire section of the Old Testament (now referred to as the Apocrypha), how did that affect the imagery of religious Protestant art? Albrecht Durer was born and died as a Roman Catholic, though he has been suspected of sympathizing with Martin Luther. Close examination and research into his iconography as it relates to biblical texts, I think could shed some light on his personal preferences.

And then there's the last question which is equally significant and dismantling to this idea; how much have artists relied on Bibles versus simply looking at iconographic tradition for their motifs? Any six year-old today who's been to three days worth of Sunday school could probably draw a decent creation scene without checking the Bible first, so naturally the greatest artists in history could do the same. Textual significance of religious iconography actually opens up a larger question of what most significantly influences artistic development: literary source and critique or inspiration from visual data?


For more on biblical literalism (not related to art history), read A Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs.