The Book that Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s “Religious Ceremonies of the World”

Source: tnr

The Book that Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s “Religious Ceremonies of the World”
By Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt
(Harvard University Press, 383 pp., $32.95)

A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason
By Guy G. Stroumsa
(Harvard University Press, 223 pp., $35)

The scene is familiar. A family is sitting around a table, in a well-appointed eighteenthcentury dining space. Only if you look closely, and only if you know what to look for, do you realize that this is a Passover seder. The caption below the image, “the Passover meal,” is for everyone else. Around the table sits a family, with their servant, all finely dressed—these are, after all, the wealthy Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam—and with their heads covered, both the men and the women. All except for one, that is: on the far left sits a man who follows along with the reading of the Haggadah, but bare-headed. This is likely the artist, Bernard Picart.

Picart’s engravings of Jewish scenes—such as the interior of the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam, the blowing of the shofar, the parade of the four species on Sukkot, the search for leaven, and the ritual implements of marriage and circumcision—are well known, widely collected, and heavily anthologized. But who was this artist? Why did he make these pictures? And what explains the intimacy and friendly sensitivity to an alien faith?