CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Christian Art and Architecture
Churches, altarpieces, icons, frescoes and devotional objects made for Christian worship, from Roman catacombs to modern chapels.
664 works · 10 related artists
About
For nearly two thousand years Christianity has been one of the great commissioners of images and buildings, even while arguing over whether images belong in worship. The earliest survivors are modest: 3rd-century paintings in the Roman catacombs show a young shepherd carrying a lamb. Once the faith gained imperial favour in the 4th century, basilicas, carved sarcophagi and apse mosaics gave it monumental form.
Medieval Europe built pilgrimage churches and Gothic cathedrals whose stained glass taught scripture in coloured light. Painters brought growing human feeling to the same stories, from Giotto's fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel at Padua (about 1305) to Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion on the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16). The Reformation stripped many northern churches of images, while Catholic art answered with drama, as in Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600). Look for recurring subjects: the Annunciation, Crucifixion, and Virgin and Child. Henri Matisse's chapel at Vence, finished in 1951, shows the tradition continuing.
