Guest-curator Jeffrey Spier’s Picturing the Bible at the Kimbell Art Museum is the first major exhibition of early Christian art in the United States since the Metropolitan Museum’s The Age of Spirituality in 1977. Where that was a vast installation, responding to the panoramic sweep of what had then only barely begun to be called Late Antiquity, Picturing the Bible is compact and select, focused specifically upon the modes of Christian visual expression and asking much of each object displayed. It is an exhibition of exceptional visual and intellectual elegance. Its governing insight, conveyed in its title, is most fully explicated in its early sections, and it is here that the exhibition is at its best. It opens with a selection of the photographs taken by Carlo Tabanelli between 1897 and 1903 of catacomb images over-painted in color, beginning with the theme of Jonah. Tabanelli’s photographs were made for Josef Wilpert’s magisterial Roma sotterranea: Le pitture delle catacombe romane (Rome: Desclée, Lefebvre, 1903), the first comprehensive publication of the paintings in the Roman catacombs. The imagery of Jonah has been explored exhaustively as a story, an illustrated funerary prayer, or an appropriation of classical iconography (see, above all, Eduard Stommel,...