The people … by passing through the Red Sea, proclaimed good tidings of salvation by water. The people passed over, and the Egyptian king and his host was engulfed, and by these actions this sacrament [of baptism] was foretold. For even now, whensoever the people is in the water of regeneration, fleeing from Egypt, from the burden of sin, it is set free and saved. (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Baptism of Christ) 

The Crossing of the Red Sea is a dramatic episode in the book of Exodus and a pivotal moment in the sacred histories of both Christians and (especially) Jews.

It also features as one of the earliest identifiable narrative scenes in both Christian and Jewish art: the oldest surviving depiction of the scene was found in a Jewish synagogue in Dura Europos, in present day Syria, dated to the mid-third century CE.

A similar painted scene appears in a funerary context in the fourth-century Christian catacomb of the Via Latina in Rome—suiting the triumphal tone of much early Christian figurative art, which frequently celebrated moments of victory over danger and death.

Thus, the fourth-century marble sarcophagus in this exhibition is one of several coffins with reliefs of the Crossing of the Red Sea. In them we see the story of Pharaoh’s pursuit, the drowning of the Egyptian army, and the ultimate celebration of salvation by the liberated Israelites. The typological link between the Israelites’ passing through the waters and that undergone by Christians in baptism offers assurance that death has no ultimate power over the believer: in baptism they have already died with Christ, and will rise with him.

For sixteenth-century Calvinists, as for centuries of Christians before them, the Crossing of the Red Sea evoked a connection between baptism and spiritual cleansing. According to one of their most important doctrinal texts:

God signifies to us that just as water washes away the dirt of the body when it is poured on us and also is seen on the bodies of those who are baptized when it is sprinkled on them, so too the blood of Christ does the same thing internally, in the soul, by the Holy Spirit. (de Brès 1567)

But, as the same text goes on to say, the Crossing also signified an escape from tyranny into a new space of freedom. Although Cornelis van Haarlem was a Roman Catholic, he was commissioned to paint this scene at a time when Dutch Calvinists were celebrating the emergence of their church from Spanish Catholic domination. The event of salvation depicted in this work must have seemed especially resonant in such a context. For many, the Egyptians would have recalled the Spanish Catholic Church whereas the promised land of Canaan represented the Calvinist Dutch Republic. 

After his 1931 commission by the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard to illustrate the Bible—resulting eventually in two volumes containing 105 etchings—Marc Chagall continued to return to biblical subjects throughout his life. In revisiting some of these subjects, Chagall varied the media he used. He made both lithographic and oil-painted versions of the Crossing of the Red Sea in addition to this large ceramic mural composed of 90 tiles. 

Chagall was commissioned to create the mural for the baptistery of the Notre-Dame de Tout-Grâce church in Plateau d'Assy, France. The episode was an informed choice for that location, because of the link between the sacrament of baptism and the story of the Red Sea crossing. The church was consecrated in 1950 by the Dominican-led Sacred Art Movement who—post-World War II—were seeking to revitalize church architecture through the contributions of the finest artists of the 1950s, regardless of their faith.

Despite already having painted many New Testament subjects in his biblical works, Chagall was uncharacteristically plagued by self-doubt when he first received the commission for the baptistery of the Plateau d’Assy Church. He even turned to both the chief rabbi of France and the president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, for reassurance that as a Jew it would be acceptable to take on the commission. In the event, he revised his earlier treatments of the Crossing by adding an image of the Crucifixion, and by doing this he reconciled the requirements of this very Christian commission with an expression of his own Jewishness—for in his previous work he had developed the image of the Crucifixion into a way of both highlighting and exploring the sufferings of the Jewish people.

By combining both Jewish and Christian symbolism in this Crossing of the Red Sea, Chagall harnesses not only the baptismal themes of new creation, and of liberation, but also of reconciliation: a new incorporation of divided traditions and peoples. He speaks powerfully of the possibility of a cohesive civilization in which Jews and Christians share key religious motifs.      

References

de Brès, Guido. 2007 [1567]. ‘Belgic Confessions 1567, Article 34’, in The Belgic Confession, ed. by N. Gootjes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic)

Schaff, Philip (ed.), W. Moore and H. Wace (trans.). 1893. ‘On the Baptism of Christ’, in Gregory of Nyssa Dogmatic Treaties etc., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2.5 (Christian Literature Company), p. 518, available at https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf205/npnf205/Page_518.html