Bible Story
Narrative episodes from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, told in paint, stone, glass and print.
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About
Bible stories are the narrative episodes of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament told in pictures: Adam and Eve, Noah, David and Goliath, the Annunciation, the Passion. They differ from devotional images because something happens in them. Some of the earliest surviving cycles cover the walls of the 3rd-century synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria, and medieval churches taught congregations through mosaics, stained glass and carved portals.
Artists competed to tell the stories more vividly. Giotto's frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (c. 1305), give each scene weight and feeling; Lorenzo Ghiberti's bronze Gates of Paradise (1425–52) compress Old Testament episodes into gilded perspective; and Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600) sets Christ's summons in a dim counting room. Rembrandt van Rijn returned to Scripture throughout his career, and Marc Chagall's Bible etchings, begun in 1931, read the Hebrew Bible through Jewish memory.
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