Creationists build an arc in Kentucky.
After a creationist ministry built a $100 million replica of the biblical vessel, Kelly Grovier looks at a perennial symbol of refuge.
Where do you seek refuge from the world? Religion? Family? Sport? Images circulating in the news and on social media in recent days of a controversial structure that opened to the public this week in northern Kentucky demonstrate the extraordinary lengths to which some people will go to protect themselves from unwanted cultural pressures. Photographs of an enormous $100 million (£77 million) replica of Noah’s Ark, built by the creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, call to mind the obsessive brilliance of an American folk artist from the 19th Century, whose own vision of the Bible’s apocalyptic vessel sheds intriguing light on mankind’s unquenchable quest to construct a sanctuary for the soul.
Built precisely to the dimensions specified in the Book of Genesis (which recounts the story of how God warned Noah that he would destroy the world by flood as punishment for its wickedness), the newly designed ship in Williamstown, Kentucky stretches a staggering 450 feet (137m) long, stands 75 feet (23m) high and is 45 feet (14m) wide – or “300 cubits, by 50 cubits, by 30 cubits”. Adherents of the ministry responsible for the barge’s creation believe in the literal word of the Bible and estimate that the world is only 6000 years old. For them, the Ark’s reconstruction provides mankind with a palpable symbol of protection from worldly dangers and the encroachment of secularism.
But opponents of the new ark, whose interior features life-size exhibits of the ship’s comprehensive cargo of creatures (including dinosaurs), have objected to financial breaks that the enterprise received from local lawmakers. Protesting outside the structure, these detractors insist that public support for the Christian project is tantamount to the government endorsing the counter-scientific contentions of the ministry that built the vessel: an affront to federal requirements that the activities of church and state remain separate.
It is not the first time that Noah’s Ark has surfaced on the crest of tensions between competing visions of the world and what it means to be alive in it. The 19th-Century American artist and Quaker minister Edward Hicks frequently found himself wrestling with the demands of religious orthodoxy. Libertine in his youth, Hicks eventually committed himself to the principles of conservative Quaker teachings. He strove to embolden his religious dedication through the creation of an ongoing series of paintings he called The Peaceable Kingdom in which mankind and all the creatures of the earth return to an idyllic state of harmony. Among the finest of these works is his 1846 reinvention of a print by the American lithographer Nathaniel Currier, which depicts the entry, two-by-two, of the earth’s animals onto Noah’s Ark. A strangely bestial self-portrait of Hicks, fused bizarrely into the countenance of the lion who stares back at us plaintively, uncertain of the journey ahead, invests the painting with an irresistible intimacy. Placed side-by-side with the recent resuscitation of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, Hicks’s painting demonstrates the perennial appeal of preposterous transport from a world drowning in reality
After a creationist ministry built a $100 million replica of the biblical vessel, Kelly Grovier looks at a perennial symbol of refuge.
Where do you seek refuge from the world? Religion? Family? Sport? Images circulating in the news and on social media in recent days of a controversial structure that opened to the public this week in northern Kentucky demonstrate the extraordinary lengths to which some people will go to protect themselves from unwanted cultural pressures. Photographs of an enormous $100 million (£77 million) replica of Noah’s Ark, built by the creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, call to mind the obsessive brilliance of an American folk artist from the 19th Century, whose own vision of the Bible’s apocalyptic vessel sheds intriguing light on mankind’s unquenchable quest to construct a sanctuary for the soul.
Built precisely to the dimensions specified in the Book of Genesis (which recounts the story of how God warned Noah that he would destroy the world by flood as punishment for its wickedness), the newly designed ship in Williamstown, Kentucky stretches a staggering 450 feet (137m) long, stands 75 feet (23m) high and is 45 feet (14m) wide – or “300 cubits, by 50 cubits, by 30 cubits”. Adherents of the ministry responsible for the barge’s creation believe in the literal word of the Bible and estimate that the world is only 6000 years old. For them, the Ark’s reconstruction provides mankind with a palpable symbol of protection from worldly dangers and the encroachment of secularism.
But opponents of the new ark, whose interior features life-size exhibits of the ship’s comprehensive cargo of creatures (including dinosaurs), have objected to financial breaks that the enterprise received from local lawmakers. Protesting outside the structure, these detractors insist that public support for the Christian project is tantamount to the government endorsing the counter-scientific contentions of the ministry that built the vessel: an affront to federal requirements that the activities of church and state remain separate.
It is not the first time that Noah’s Ark has surfaced on the crest of tensions between competing visions of the world and what it means to be alive in it. The 19th-Century American artist and Quaker minister Edward Hicks frequently found himself wrestling with the demands of religious orthodoxy. Libertine in his youth, Hicks eventually committed himself to the principles of conservative Quaker teachings. He strove to embolden his religious dedication through the creation of an ongoing series of paintings he called The Peaceable Kingdom in which mankind and all the creatures of the earth return to an idyllic state of harmony. Among the finest of these works is his 1846 reinvention of a print by the American lithographer Nathaniel Currier, which depicts the entry, two-by-two, of the earth’s animals onto Noah’s Ark. A strangely bestial self-portrait of Hicks, fused bizarrely into the countenance of the lion who stares back at us plaintively, uncertain of the journey ahead, invests the painting with an irresistible intimacy. Placed side-by-side with the recent resuscitation of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, Hicks’s painting demonstrates the perennial appeal of preposterous transport from a world drowning in reality
