246 CHAPTER NINE
How precisely are we to recover this message? Here consensus breaks down.
Programmatic readings of ancient synagogue art usually depend on texts .Of
course, texts are indispensable for the interpretation of ancient art, especially
the symbolic decoration of synagogues and churches: it is mainly texts that
provide us with entre ́e into the ethos and cultural assumptions of the patrons,
producers, and viewers of the art .Furthermore, the special status of some texts
for Jews and Christians, and the fact that the art frequently refers to these
texts quite directly, make recourse to them inescapable .Any approach to the
interpretation of such pavements as those at Sepphoris, Bet Alfa, Gaza, Susi-
yah, and many others must begin with the Bible .But there are many nonbibli-
cal elements in these pavements, and in any case it seems clear that the pave-
ments are more than simply evocative of the biblical text .Consequently, many
art historians depend on additional corpora of texts to supplement the Bible
when they interpret the art .The nearly universal reliance on rabbinic texts
for this purpose raises special problems.
Interpreters of Jewish art have as a matter of course adopted the methods
used by classical and early Christian art historians .The latter concern them-
selves mainly with elite products—monuments produced by emperors and
senators, art that decorated public and private buildings commissioned by, at
the very least, local aristocrats, the decorations in churches like those at Ra-
venna or in the great monastic centers .(Scholars rarely attempt more than
the most modest and general interpretation of nonelite products, such as the
mosaic pavements of small parish churches.) Emperors, senators, decurions,
the leading bishops, and ascetics were the people by whom and for whom the
surviving classical and patristic literature was produced .It is perfectly reason-
able to assume that the literature reflects, if only roughly and indirectly for
the most part, the cultural assumptions of the patrons, and in some cases even
the audiences, of the art .Its interpretation remains a complex and necessarily
imprecise undertaking, but it is not, obviously, a misguided one.
But there are no ancient Jewish counterparts to the Ara Pacis, the Ravennate
churches, or the monastery of St .Catherine at Mount Sinai, and the domestic
art commissioned by the curial classes of the cities of high imperial Galilee
so obviously participates in the ethos of empire wide Greco-Roman culture
that it is not clear in what sense it can be considered Jewish .By contrast, no
patrons of late antique Jewish funerary or synagogue art can be definitely
connected to any corpus of literature except the Hebrew Bible .There is no
way to know, a priori, whether the intentions of the patrons and the assump-
tions of the viewers are best sought in the Palestinian Talmud, themidrashim,
the Hekhalot, thepiyyut, Sefer Harazim, and related magical material, the
late antique apocalypses, or indeed the works of Philo and the later Platonic
tradition .Or they may have been incorporated in literary works that do not
survive, in a body of lore that was never committed to writing, or all of the
martin jones
(Martin Jones)
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