Heretical Hebrew

Abstract This article discusses a Christian devotional painting by the Early Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna. It traces its iconographic traits to illustrate its anti-Jewish implications by focusing on the depiction of an inscribed, pseudo-Hebrew paper crown. This attribute situates Mantegna’s painting within the humanist studies of Hebrew, the Veritas Hebraica, which was a means to access antique sources and to delegitimize Jewish belief. The article further draws a parallel to the burning of heretics, who wore similar crowns when they were condemned. Since Mantegna depicts the Jews with such crowns while they hold Jesus in their hands, Mantegna invents a cunning way to invert the accusers and the accused and embeds a hitherto unexplored, anti-Jewish statement. The article traces the development of the visual tradition of the ostracization of Jews in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.