International Conference
Dekanats-Sitzungszimmer der Katholisch-Theologischen Fakultät
University of Vienna
June 8-9, 2026
Organized by the "Center for the Study of Bible, Culture, and Modernity" and the "Network for European Philosophy and the Jewish Tradition" in cooperation with the research center at the University of Vienna "Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society"
This interdisciplinary conference aims to enter the millennia-long dialogue between biblical narrative and the visual arts. Exploring the practices, products, aesthetics and ethics that emerged in historically wide-ranging contacts between artmaking and Scripture, as artists interpreted and imagined biblical texts, we hope to sharpen our understanding of the Hebrew Bible's enduring influence on visual cultures and how visual cultures have affected biblical exegesis. Bringing together—in Vienna, with its world-renowned art museums and rare books libraries—international scholars of biblical, religious. and Jewish Studies, philosophers of aesthetics, literary critics and art historians, the two-day conference will combine historical and philosophical presentations with object-based discussion in the idea that the material matrices of visual communication profoundly affect the how and why of pictorial representation. Topics include Bible illustrations as foundational objects in the discipline of art history and aesthetics (e.g., Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte); the Bible and biblical exegesis in relation to an “ethics” of the Image, the challenge of modern “biblical” art, the medium-specificity of narrative, and the challenge placed on vision by an invisible God.
Click here to download the conference poster.