By calling this excellent exhibition Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, has created a welcoming public invitation to what is, in fact, a scholarly and focused view of the origins of Chris tian pictorial art. A worthy successor to The Age of Spiritual ity, held 30 years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and to Aurea Roma, held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome from 2000 through 2001, Picturing the Bible is more modest in scale but similarly concerned with presenting both the latest scholarship and a larger vision of Early Christian art. Although focused on the fourth and fifth centuries, the exhibition includes artworks from the early third to the mid seventh centuries, from a coin of 217-2181 to the silver David plates of ca. 628-630.2 The installation of Picturing the Bible is remarkable. Black and-white photograph murals suggest the original architec tural context of the art: the synagogue at Dura Europos, San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome, the apse mosaics of Santa Costanza and Santa Pudenziana, and the carved wooden doors of Santa Sabina. The photographs so harmonize with the Kimbell's travertine walls in tone that they seem to merge with the setting. This muted scheme enhances the glitter of gold glass and silver and bronze objects. The exhibition concludes with a blaze of color in the Rabbula Gospels3 and the Vatican's jeweled reliquary of the True Cross,4 known as the Cross of Justin II. In general, the labels in the exhibition are good, and many have useful visual aids, such as drawings of objects in an earlier condition. On the entrance walls of the exhibition, selections from the famous Wilpert Collection of watercolors, created before the invention of color photography, evoke the art of the cata combs. These watercolors are the product of a monumental Vatican project. Beginning in 1897, the German priest and archaeologist Josef Wilpert started to use the relatively new art of photography to record the paintings in the catacombs. Pompeo and Renato Sansaini, a father and son, took black and-white photographs, which Carlo Tabanelli then painted over with watercolor to reproduce the original colors. Today, the most popular and often reproduced catacomb paintings have deteriorated, but these watercolors capture the appear ance of the originals as they could have been seen a century ago.5 In Picturing the Bible, these photograph watercolors flank the black-and-white, mural-sized photograph of the reliquary Cross of Justin II. Here, then, is the alpha and omega of the exhibition, for the last work on display is the Vatican's True Cross, with its veiled relic,6 encrusted with (later) jewels in barbaric splendor. Leaving the catacombs, the viewer enters a darkened gal lery (fig. 1). This darkness will come as a surprise for many visitors, as the museum, designed by Louis Kahn (1901-1974) and established by Kay Kimbell and Velma Fuller Kimbell in 1964, is renowned for the classic simplicity of its design and for the innovative use of natural light in its galleries. Kahn included skylights, which he described as narrow slits to the sky. When combined with perforated metal reflectors that spread the sunlight over the underside of curving (cycloid shaped) vaults, these skylights permit daylight to illuminate the walls and works of art. How, then, did the exhibition's designer, Tim Dawson, supported by operations manager Larry Eubank, control or eliminate this natural light? They simply covered the skylights with an opaque material. The material is virtually invisible to the viewer because it rests on the outer surface of the vaults. The covered skylights can be seen between rows of spotlights in figure 1. The works of art also presented challenges beyond prob lems of light. Their sensitivity to changes in temperature and