Free to use stock images of antique Catholic items created hundreds of years ago such as: statues, holy books, chalices, crosses, and more.
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! This is an eastern cross – a medieval patriarchal relic from Jerusalem guarded in this city, at first by the Order of the Temple and later by the Order of Santiago and owns a miracle narrative of...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! This work is quite atypical for the period due to its physiognomy and composition: Christ's figure is stout in comparison to the slender, elongated figures more common at the time. This effect is compounded...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! This narrative relief illustrates a scene from a popular thirteenth-century text that emphasized the humanity of Christ and the Virgin Mary. With the Christ child on her lap, Mary is approached by young Saint John the...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! During the Renaissance, busts of Saint John the Baptist as a boy were commonly displayed in Florentine homes. Saint John’s fine and innocent face and curly hair embody the ideal of youthful beauty at that...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! Saint Vincent de Paul (1581–1660) dedicated his life to helping the poorest of the poor in France, including abandoned and abused children. About a hundred years later, during the Enlightenment, when the French celebrated scientific...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! This sculpture originally represented a philosopher or a god, and was transformed into St. Peter in the late 16th century by adding the expressive head, hands, and feet in gilt bronze, and a throne. An unknown...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! The Old Testament prophet Jonah is shown with his hands raised in prayer. It is unclear which moment of the biblical story of Jonah is depicted here. He may be praying in the belly of the...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! This chalice is likely from a Christian community in Syria and Palestine, probably forced to bury their church silver to hide it from the Persians or Arabs, who conquered their lands in the first half of...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! The image of Saint Michael killing a dragon comes from the description of an epic battle between good and evil found in Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible: “And war broke out in heaven;...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! Tobias, a young Jewish man, has been sent by his blind father to retrieve money left with a relative. Accompanying him on the journey are his dog and a hired guide who, unbeknownst to him, is...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! This exquisitely wrought religious pendant, a masterful combination of worldliness and spirituality, would have been worn on a chain around its owner's neck. The central scene depicts Christ's dead body being taken...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! Longinus (/ˌlɒnˈdʒaɪnəs/) is the name given to the unnamed Roman soldier who pierced the side of Jesus with a lance and who in medieval and some modern Christian traditions is described as a convert to Christianity....
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! This pyx shows Christ as Pantokrator (Ruler of the World), the Apostles, and the Virgin as a continuous frieze of figures seated in high-backed chairs with cushions. The tapered lip of the body of the pyx...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! Surrounded by the deep blue, lapis lazuli background of the gold frame, the silver Virgin Mary, crowned as Queen of Heaven, projects from the background in an elegant swirl of drapery. She stands on a globe,...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! When he presented Jesus to the Jews demanding his Crucifixion, Pontius Pilate cried Ecce homo (Behold the man). The words Ecce Homo have come to signify a type of devotional image that depicts Jesus after the...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! Saint Joan of Arc lived in the 1400's during the Hundred Years' War. As a young girl—from 17–19 years-old—she played a major part in the war between two warring French...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! With remorse and anguish because he has just betrayed Jesus, the apostle Peter clasps his hands and closes his eyes, clearly in torment. His deeply carved facial features and furrowed brow express his spiritual pain, as...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! Representative of the early work of Lorenzo Monaco, a Camaldolese monk and leading Florentine painter of the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth century, the delicate colors and simplified forms of...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! This statue of Saint James the Less was made by Angelo de Rossi. Angelo (1671 – June 12, 1715) was an Italian sculptor. Born in Genoa, he was apprenticed to Filippo Parodi in 1680; Parodi's...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! Christina is an early virgin Christian martyr. She was born into a rich family, and her father was governor of Tyre. By the age of 11 the girl was exceptionally beautiful, and many wanted to marry...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! Saint John the Baptist cradles the Holy Lamb, a symbol of the sacrificial Christ. The sculpture illustrates the saint's exclamation, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world&...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! Catholics believe that the consecrated bread is literally the body of Christ. The Host thus became an object of veneration, and containers were made in which to keep or display it to the faithful. The monstrance...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! This reliquary uses the form of a miniature Gothic tower. It makes an elaborate architectural frame for a transparent rock-crystal vessel holding a relic that is identified as a tooth of Saint John the Baptist by...
The son of God is represented seated on heaven's throne, with his right hand raised, palm faced outward with three fingers extended. This gesture communicated a particular message to medieval Catholics in Western Europe. It is part of an iconographic pose called in Latin the "Maiestas Domini,...
