Psalms exhibit traces King David’s lament

(UNDATED) King David is mum and pointing at his tongue. He has promised to speak no evil word, writing “I will bridle my mouth, so long as the wicked are in my presence.” And “the wicked” are in very corporeal attendance. While an angel hovers near the king’s head with a concerned look, a furry […]

(RNS3-JUNE09) In this 13th century French artist's take on Psalm 39, King David is mum as he has promised to speak no evil word, writing ``I will bridle my mouth, so long as the wicked are in my presence.'' The image is one of 21 objects included in ``Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David'' opening Tuesday (June 9) at Los Angeles' Getty Center. For use with RNS-PSALMS-EXHIBIT, transmitted June 9, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy The Getty Center.

(RNS3-JUNE09) In this 13th century French artist’s take on Psalm 39, King David is mum as he has promised to speak no evil word, writing “I will bridle my mouth, so long as the wicked are in my presence.” The image is one of 21 objects included in “Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David” opening Tuesday (June 9) at Los Angeles’ Getty Center. For use with RNS-PSALMS-EXHIBIT, transmitted June 9, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy The Getty Center.

(RNS3-JUNE09) In this 13th century French artist's take on Psalm 39, King David is mum as he has promised to speak no evil word, writing ``I will bridle my mouth, so long as the wicked are in my presence.'' The image is one of 21 objects included in ``Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David'' opening Tuesday (June 9) at Los Angeles' Getty Center. For use with RNS-PSALMS-EXHIBIT, transmitted June 9, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy The Getty Center.

(RNS3-JUNE09) In this 13th century French artist’s take on Psalm 39, King David is mum as he has promised to speak no evil word, writing “I will bridle my mouth, so long as the wicked are in my presence.” The image is one of 21 objects included in “Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David” opening Tuesday (June 9) at Los Angeles’ Getty Center. For use with RNS-PSALMS-EXHIBIT, transmitted June 9, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy The Getty Center.

(RNS3-JUNE09) In this 13th century French artist's take on Psalm 39, King David is mum as he has promised to speak no evil word, writing ``I will bridle my mouth, so long as the wicked are in my presence.'' The image is one of 21 objects included in ``Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David'' opening Tuesday (June 9) at Los Angeles' Getty Center. For use with RNS-PSALMS-EXHIBIT, transmitted June 9, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy The Getty Center.

(RNS3-JUNE09) In this 13th century French artist’s take on Psalm 39, King David is mum as he has promised to speak no evil word, writing “I will bridle my mouth, so long as the wicked are in my presence.” The image is one of 21 objects included in “Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David” opening Tuesday (June 9) at Los Angeles’ Getty Center. For use with RNS-PSALMS-EXHIBIT, transmitted June 9, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy The Getty Center.


(UNDATED) King David is mum and pointing at his tongue. He has promised to speak no evil word, writing “I will bridle my mouth, so long as the wicked are in my presence.” And “the wicked” are in very corporeal attendance. While an angel hovers near the king’s head with a concerned look, a furry devil is clutching urgently at his leg.

That tableau, a 13th-century French artist’s fanciful interpretation of Psalm 39, is just one of the arresting images in a small but striking show called “Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David” opening Tuesday (June 9) at Los Angeles’ Getty Center.

Through just 21 objects, the exhibit presents a marvelous 400-year “snapshot” of medieval Christianity as it wrestled the ancient Jewish songs — and the soap-opera saga of King David that had become attached to them — into an acceptable Christian understanding.

In recent years, the museum has enjoyed success with specific Christian themes, including an exhibit last year on images of Christ through the ages. The museum reached out to religious communities for that show, and Thomas Kren, Getty’s senior curator for manuscripts, says, “We see great value in connecting with people of faith.”

For its next show, Kren’s staff settled on the Psalms. What they produced is a small show that nonetheless offers a broad religious panorama.

Early church theologians like St. Augustine fell in love with the Psalms — he devoted more than 200 sermons to them — and painstakingly worked out a Christian dimension that found in them prophecies of the Christ or the voice of the crucified Messiah himself.


But in a largely illiterate culture, pictorial representations were just as important. What the Getty show reveals, through images great and small, is the development of that impulse as Christian art itself was developing.

The illustrations, in various hand-painted media, date from the 12th to the 16th century and deal exclusively with the image of King David. Although best known for his work with a slingshot, the biblical David went on to become the great warrior, bard, king of Israel — and the subject of one of the Bible’s juiciest tabloid scandals: spying a naked Bathsheba in the tub, seducing and impregnating her, and then arranging for her husband to be killed in battle.

Jews had their own means of reconciling David’s bad-boy behavior with his ongoing standing as God’s beloved. One was using the Psalms as a kind of internal monologue, including their wrenchingly beautiful songs of penance (Psalm 51 is the classic example).

For early Christians, David was seen as a connection to Christ in a variety of powerful ways; the Gospel of Matthew, for example, lists David as one of Jesus’ ancestors, and St. Luke locates his birth in Jerusalem, “the city of David.” As Christianity reconceived the Jewish Bible as the “Old Testament,” Kren explains, believers treated God’s redemption of David’s sins as prophetic of Christ’s redemption of all humanity.

It all plays out in wonderful pictures at the Getty.

Several images underscore David’s connections to the Psalms, such as the French artist’s literal take on the tight-lipped David and his supernatural companions. A Flemish prayer book from 1480, meanwhile, shows a decidedly blase Goliath awaiting David’s first stone as a sheep grazes nearby. In a French diptych from 1500, a lower frame shows David surveying a very naked Bathsheba from his castle window; in the upper one, the prophet Nathan upbraids the king for his sins and predicts tragedy to come.

Other works deal directly with the Christian adoption of David’s story. One of the most magnificent, from a book of hours (a medieval devotional prayer book), shows David in prayer on one page and Christ at the Last Judgment on the next. A serenely surreal treatment from 13th-century Germany features David’s father Jesse, asleep in a womblike garment, dreaming his family tree into the future, all the way to Jesus.


Will these images, as the curators hope, draw not just Christians, but Jews and other Psalm-lovers to the Getty? Undoubtedly. Those interested in the Jewish artistic take on David (without the Christian overlay) may search for historical Passover Haggadahs that include his image, even though he’s not part of the Exodus/Passover story.

Meanwhile, folks wishing to trade the traditional museum audio guide for something racier — and perhaps blasphemous yet also profoundly spiritual — should download a version of Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” while they peruse the exhibit: “Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord/ That David played, and it pleased the Lord … Your faith was strong but you needed proof/ You saw her bathing on the roof/ Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya…”

Either way, the artistic richness and sacred time travel represented by the illustrations alone should be enough to create a fine mystical buzz all by themselves.

(“Temptation and Salvation” runs June 9-Aug. 16 at The Getty Center in Los Angeles. More information is available at http://www.getty.edu.)

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