In his 2007 essay “Slavery, Race, and the Global Fellowship,” Jon Sensbach highlights Johann Valentin Haidt’s renditions of The First Fruits (1740s/1750s). These Moravian paintings celebrated “spiritual multiculturalism with their many-hued gallery of redeemed figures from mission-fields in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, all delighting in God’s bounty.” I will expand Sensbach’s analysis to an ink and watercolor Fraktur (an illuminated piece of folk art) created by Philip Jacob Ferber in 1775. According to Moravian Decorative Arts in North Carolina, “This fraktur in the form of a healthy tree is symbolic of the strength of the eighteenth-century Moravian Church and of the common roots, strengths, and benefits which the Moravian communities shared.” Nevertheless, the subject is a vine rather than a tree, as manifest by the German quotation from John 15: “Ich bin der Weinstock. Ihr seid die Reben.” As with the Haidt portraits, the Fraktur combines themes of racial differentiation and Moravian unity. The stock of the vine is a wounded-and-crucified Christ, whose dripping blood waters the vine’s roots. The branches stem from the central Christ-figure, and the leaves (congregations) vary in coloration. The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Art’s metadata discusses the black leaves representing Afro-Caribbean congregations but does not mention the brown and bronze leaves (representing Native American and Inuit congregations). When properly and fully interpreted, this Moravian Fraktur abstractly portrays a multifaceted combination of global distribution, racial diversity, and ecclesial-evangelical unity.
https://mesda.org/item/collections/moravian-church-illumination/826/