Public domain Catholic and Bible paintings from the medieval art period.
About the Image: The brothers Jacob H. and Philipp Schiff were members of one of the old Jewish families in Frankfurt. Jacob H. Schiff was eighteen when he emigrated to America, where he became a very successful banker. He contributed most of his considerable fortune - some 100 million dollars...
About the Image: This imposing, cruelly exact image depicts the corpse of one of the two criminals crucified with Jesus. Executed in the workshop of Robert Campin in Tournai around 1430 – at about the same time as the Van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece – it is all that remains of one...
About the Image: The religious artwork is known as the Coronation of the Virgin. This type of artwork typically depicts the Virgin Mary being crowned by Jesus Christ and sometimes surrounded by angels or other saints. The term "coronation" refers to the act of crowning, which in this...
Details: The illuminator is unknown, but his style seems to conform to that known as "Antwerp Mannerism." It emerged among a group of Antwerp painters during the first half of the 1500s. Bolstered by its rich trade and cultural contacts, the port city of Antwerp attracted hundreds of...
Details: An impressive eight-line initial represents a kneeling David praying before an altar amid stylized topiaries and set against a burnished gold ground. The text introduces Psalm 101: Domine exaudi orationem meam (Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee). Facial types for the figures are...
This is an image from the manuscript of a medieval French poem called "Roman de la Rose." The poem was written in the 13th century and is considered a masterpiece of medieval literature. Abelard and Héloïse were two individuals who lived in the 12th century and are known...
Details: This leaf was an opening page of a mariegola, or register, painted by Cristoforo Cortese, the most famous and prolific Venetian illuminator of the first half of the fifteenth century, for a German confraternity in Venice. The lay members of this confraternity are shown kneeling at the feet of...
Details: Andrei Rublev was born in the 1360s. He was a Muscovite icon painter and he was known as one of the greatest medieval icon painters. Rublev lived in Russia and decorated icons and frescos for many churches including the Cathedral of the Annunciation of the Moscow Kremlin. He died...
Details: This miniature, together with another illuminated music-making angel (Robert Lehman Collection, 1975.1.2465b), is a fragment of the decorative border of a manuscript folio. The leaf may have belonged to an antiphonary—a choir book containing sung portions of the Divine Office—that was commissioned in 1401 for...
Details: Pentecost is a Christian holiday that takes place on the 50th day after Easter Sunday. It commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and other followers of Jesus Christ while they were in Jerusalem celebrating the Feast of Weeks, as described in the Acts of the...
Details: Guillaume Vrelant, born in Utrecht, was known to be in Bruges from 1454 onward where he died around 1481. He probably went there to sidestep a 1427 law which banned the sale of Utrecht images. A painter very much in vogue, he founded the Illuminators’ Guild in Bruges under...
Details: According to the Bible's New Testament, the Apostles are the primary disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure in Christianity. During the life and ministry of Jesus in the first century AD, the apostles were his closest followers and became the primary teachers of the gospel...
Details: This hypnotic panel, painted front and back and with its original frame, shows two angels holding the cloth on which Christ's head was miraculously imprinted (Veronica's veil). The inscription on Christ's collar suggests that it may have been used during the Mass as...
Details: This type of icon is known as the Virgin Eleousa (Virgin of Tenderness) characterized by the touching cheeks of mother and child in a loving moment. The icon signifies Christ’s incarnation, suffering, and death for the sake of humankind. Three ornamental stars on the Virgin’s cloak are...
Leaf from an Antiphonary Coronation of the Virgin Cleveland Museum of Art0:00/ 0:291×Details: The unidentified illuminator of this leaf is named after his work on a painted triptych that once hung behind the altar of the Church of Santa Maria del Ponte in the small village of...
Details: The Ascension of Jesus (anglicized from the Vulgate Latin: ascensio Iesu, lit. 'ascent of Jesus') is the Christian teaching that Christ physically departed from Earth by rising into Heaven, in the presence of eleven of his apostles. According to the New Testament narrative, the Ascension occurred on...
Details: Psalters were commonly used in monasteries and convents during the Middle Ages; the exact origin of this detached psalter leaf, however, is unclear. Stylistically it relates to a small number of manuscripts produced at Prüfening Abbey near Regensburg and to other examples associated with scriptoria at Augsburg from the...
Details: This large initial A introduces the matins (about 2:30 AM) response for Easter: Angelus Domini descendit de celo... (An angel of the Lord descended from heaven...). The letter that begins the text is commonly and appropriately decorated with a depiction of this Easter morning event. The three holy...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! This splendid crucifixion scene originally served as the canon illustration in a liturgical missal. The open landscape is remarkable since it is not found in Dutch missals before the end of the 1500s. The large number...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! In the late 1400s and early 1500s Rouen was an established and important center of book production. The city’s cathedral had a wealthy chapter that spent large sums of money to commission books and to...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! Paul of Thebes is known to posterity because around the year 342, Anthony the Great was told in a dream about the older hermit's existence, and went to find him. Jerome related that Anthony...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! The crucifixion of Jesus occurred in 1st-century Judea, most likely in either AD 30 or AD 33. Jesus' crucifixion is described in the four canonical gospels, referred to in the New Testament epistles, attested to...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! For the medieval viewer, this Crucifixion instantly recalled wrenching extra-biblical details, like the fact that Christ could not rest his head to the side lest his shoulders be pierced with thorns. The German tract Christi Leiden...
Please Subscribe or Donate [https://sdcason.com/donate] to Help Keep This Site Free! As Passion obsession developed, so did indulgences, which reduced one's punishment for sins. In the fifteenth century, people who prayed to Christ's body could earn 300 days per limb. Thomas à Kempis,...
