Sukkah Decoration

Micrography has been called the only original Jewish art form. This sukkah decoration is an excellent example of the art, the use of lines of miniature writing to form images. Here the text of Ecclesiastes shapes an astrolabe, an instrument used to measure the sun's altitude. It was probably chosen as an allusion to the repeated references to the sun and its movements in the text.

The holiday of Sukkot (Tabernacles) was one of the great festivals of the Temple in Jerusalem. Its name derives from the sukkah (booth) that individual families build as a reminder of the temporary dwellings inhabited by their ancestors during the forty-years journey in the wilderness. During the holiday, the sukkah is the locus of meals, of study, and even a place to sleep. Its decoration varies according to the customs of the country in which the owner resides. Italian Jews of the 18th century favored elaborate paper decorations incorporating texts and images appropriate to the festival. Since the reading of Ecclesiastes in the synagogue is a special tradition of this holiday, this text became a favorite source of motifs and several extant Italian decorative cycles for the sukkah are based on it. Luzzato's elaborate micrography was part of a similar set, the remainder of which is now in the Smithsonian Institution. Each of these six additional panels bears one or two passages from Psalm 76 whose third line begins "In Salem also is set His tabernacle (sukko)," making it an appropriate text to be used for a cycle of sukkah decorations. The lettering, floral decoration, and palette of the Smithsonian plaques indicate that they are the work of the same artist as the larger Ecclesiastes piece in The Jewish Museum, though the latter is the only one signed by the artist, Israel David Luzzatto.

Luzatto's micrography draws on an artistic tradition that is first known in the works of a family of scribes active in Tiberius in the late 9th century. Instead of merely listing notes to the Scriptures they were copying, these scribes arranged their minute writing into designs whose small size and patterns contrasted with the larger letters and regular lines of the main text. Their achievement was something new, unrelated to the Carolingian practice, based on antique precedent, of filling drawn outlines with lines of text. In micrography, the line of text is the line of drawing, and when the image relates to the content of the text and both relate to the purpose for which the image was made, as here, then the result is a work of harmonious unity.

Source: Norman L. Kleeblatt and Vivian B. Mann. TREASURES OF THE JEWISH MUSEUM. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1986, pp. 86-87.