DESERET NEWS
By Daniel Peterson
A stroll through almost any large art museum will show that religious art often gets the details of biblical stories wrong. The cyclopean walls and bulging biceps of
Arnold Friberg’s Book of Mormon illustrations aren’t “lies.” They’re designed to represent the larger than life qualities of the stories that the artist wished to emphasize. Search online, for example, for paintings of “the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.” Their actual route would have taken Joseph, Mary and Jesus either along the dry Mediterranean coast of Palestine or through the Negev Desert. But innumerable paintings take them through northern European forests or perhaps the Rhine River Valley, sometimes escorted by winged angels and little cherubs. The church, say these critics, is lying about its history. But artists aren’t historians. [
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