Free downloadable Catholic paintings which are in the public domain
As was customary for promising Dutch painters in the 1600s, Gerrit van Honthorst traveled to Italy to complete his artistic training. In Rome he fell under the spell of Caravaggio's revolutionary style and adopted his use of realistic figures and dramatic lighting, known as chiaroscuro. In Italy he...
Drops of blood are visible on Christ's brow as he carries the cross to his Crucifixion. The immediacy of this close-up image invites the viewer to contemplate the pain and meaning of Christ's sacrifice. Associated with Leonardo da Vinci, Marco d'Oggiono subtly manipulated...
In Giovanni Lanfranco's highly original design, a few large figures stand in a shallow foreground space. Using a low viewpoint and dramatic foreshortening, Lanfranco depicted the figures as if seen from below, imbuing them with monumentality. The powerful composition communicated both to spectators standing far away and to...
This brooding, wild-looking man is identified by some scholars as Saint Onuphrius, a Christian hermit who spent sixty years alone in the Egyptian wilderness, praying and meditating. Onuphrius is commonly depicted as an elderly, almost disturbed man deep in contemplation, covered by his unkempt hair and beard, and clothed...
In this painting, the Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist, and Saint Mary Magdalene grieve over the body of Christ while displaying it to the viewer. Although Gerard David and earlier Netherlandish painters often treated the Lamentation as a private devotional subject, this panel was part of a large altarpiece...
Saint Augustine is a giant in many ways. He had a powerful and forceful personality which he used both before and after his conversion. He had a passion for whatever he did, and this showed up in his theological teachings. Yet Augustine was also a man of great love, as...
Gertrude, a Benedictine nun in Helfta, Saxony, was one of the great mystics of the 13th century. Together with her friend and teacher Saint Mechtild, she practiced a spirituality called “nuptial mysticism,” that is, she came to see herself as the bride of Christ. Her spiritual life was a deeply...
This painting was once a panel from the important five-panel altarpiece commissioned by Queen Isabella for the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores near Burgos, site of the royal tombs of her parents and brother. The altarpiece, of which the other panels survive, was likely painted during the artist’s early...
Stories of Christ’s childhood and adolescence became increasingly popular during the Counter-Reformation because they were easily understood by a broad public. Rather than taking a story from the Bible, Zurbarán appears to have invented this subject, in which Jesus pricks himself on a crown of thorns he is...
The artist covered the sides and reverse of this panel with a thin layer of gesso (a type of plaster), allowing the texture of the rough wood to remain visible. He then painted it to resemble porphyry, a beautiful and valuable stone. Source [https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1924.199]...
This small devotional picture by an anonymous 17th-century Venetian artist drew his composition from Guido Reni's large St. Andrew Led to Martyrdom fresco in Rome's Church of San Gregorio al Celio. The CMA painting portrays the central image of Reni's 1608 fresco by...
Not all subjects are easy to identify. This museum long thought that the subject was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, largely because tears are part of the standard representation of this ancient thinker. However, ter Brugghen omits the other crucial key to identifying Heraclitus--a globe over which he weeps. Instead,...
Bernat Martorell was the greatest painter of the first half of the fifteenth century in Catalonia in northeastern Spain. Depicted here is the most frequently represented episode from the popular legend of Saint George, in which the model Christian knight saves a town and rescues a beautiful princess. Conceived in...
The liberation of the apostle Peter is an event described in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 12 in which the apostle Peter is rescued from prison by an angel. Although described in a short textual passage, the tale has given rise to theological discussions and has been the subject...
This loosely painted sketch is the preliminary design for an altarpiece in the Church of Saint Ulrich, Vienna. Mary and Joseph have brought the infant Jesus to the temple to be inducted into the Jewish faith; the aged priest Simeon cradles the infant in his arms, turning his gaze to...
Saint Paul and Saint Sirus are panel paintings likely from the same large altarpiece. Panel painting was a lengthy process that required many steps. The panel is a plank of wood that was prepared with many layers of gesso, a glue-size-chalk substance that forms the white base layer...
Boucher painted this picture for his patron, Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV. Partly to please the religious faction at court, she commissioned devotional pictures for the chapels in her various residences. She ordered this one of Saint John, her patron saint, for a chapel in the Capuchin...
These panels depicting Saints Anthony the Abbot and Michael originally flanked a central scene of the Madonna and Child with Angels, now lost, to form a triptych. Giovanni di Cosimo de’Medici of Florence commissioned the ensemble in 1457 as a gift to Alfonso V of Aragon. Fra Filippo Lippi,...
This is a rare example of a surviving 15th-century painting from the northern provinces of the Netherlands (present-day Holland). This region had fewer centers of artistic production than the more populous southern Netherlands, and it also experienced substantial destruction of artworks during the iconoclastic outbursts of the mid-...
Sebastian, a bodyguard for the Roman emperor Diocletian, was shot with arrows and was eventually drowned for his commitment to Christianity. While the arrow alludes to Saint Sebastian, the young man’s clothing dates to the late 1400s, indicating that this is a contemporary portrait, rather than an image of...
The style of this painting suggests that it comes from Catalonia in northeastern Spain, though the identity of its artist remains unknown. The painting represents a youthful bishop-saint identifiable by a bishop’s symbols of authority, his miter and crozier. He wears rich vestments. Below, the figure in black...
Vouet worked in Rome for several years before he was summoned back to France in 1627 to serve as court painter to King Louis XIII. This painting, executed soon after his return, reveals how skillfully Vouet adapted his Italian experiences to local tastes: the focus on a single monumental figure,...
Saint Catherine (1347-1380) was the daughter of a prosperous Sienese cloth dyer. At the age of six, she saw a vision of Christ and thereafter dedicated herself to chastity, penance, and good works. She became much beloved in Siena for selflessly caring for victims of the Black Death. This...
Saint Catherine holds the sword with which she was martyred, and Saint Barbara holds both a book and a ring symbolizing her scholarly pursuits and union with God. According to legend, the leather thongs with which she was beaten were transformed into peacock plumes. These two paintings were originally the...
