Marc Chagall's five paintings of the Song of Songs, created between 1958 and 1966 and now permanently displayed in the Musee National Marc Chagall (the Biblical Message Museum) in Nice, represent his most sustained engagement with the most celebrated love poem in the biblical canon - and one of the most joyous expressions of sacred eros in the history of Western art.
The Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon, Canticles) is eight chapters of erotic poetry celebrating human love between a woman and her beloved. Its inclusion in the Jewish and Christian canons was disputed in rabbinic antiquity - Rabbi Akiva famously declared it the 'holy of holies' among the writings, while others were uncertain of its sacred status - and has been interpreted by both traditions primarily through allegorical lenses: the love between Israel and God in Jewish reading, the love between Christ and the Church (or the soul) in Christian reading.
Chagall refused to choose between the literal and allegorical. His paintings present the Song's imagery directly: lovers in embrace, the woman described as 'a lily among thorns' (Song 2:2), the beloved 'like a gazelle or a young stag' (Song 2:9), fragrant gardens, nighttime searching, morning light on the beloved's face. But surrounding and interpenetrating the human lovers are floating animals, angels, musicians, and biblical figures from across the Hebrew Bible, creating a visual environment in which erotic love and cosmic love cannot be separated.
The dominant color of the series is red - the color of passion, of vitality, of the blood that pulses through love's body - deployed in Chagall's characteristic luminous manner as a field of warmth and energy within which the figures float. Pinks and roses shade toward crimson and vermilion; the lovers are rosy-cheeked and warm-skinned against glowing backgrounds. The effect is of sunrise and evening, of the warmth described in Song 1:2: 'Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for your love is better than wine.'
Chagall had been illustrating the Bible since the 1930s, when Ambroise Vollard commissioned his famous series of etchings, and his approach to the Song of Songs drew on a lifetime of engagement with the Hebrew text. He grew up in Vitebsk, Russia, in a devout Hasidic Jewish household where the Song was read each Sabbath eve as a welcome to the Shekhinah - the divine presence imagined as a bride - making the poem's erotic imagery inseparable from weekly sacred practice.
The Musee National Marc Chagall in Nice was purpose-built to house Chagall's biblical cycle, which he donated to the French state. The Song of Songs paintings are displayed in a dedicated room where their chromatic intensity and joyful theological vision can be experienced in the quality of southern French light that was Chagall's adoptive environment for the final decades of his life.