About Jesus Christ Oil Paintings

One story, told in a fixed order

Almost every other art catalogue sorts by the person who made the object. This one sorts by the moment the object depicts. The reason is that these pictures were not made as individual works to be met individually. They were made as episodes in a sequence that the viewer already knew by heart, and often as literal cycles: a chapel wall you walked along in order, a predella you read left to right, a set of stations that only makes sense as a set.

Sorting by episode puts the Annunciation of a Sienese panel of 1340 next to one painted in Antwerp in 1610 and one painted in Seville in 1660. In a museum those three are on different floors, filed under different schools. Side by side they show what changed and what did not over three centuries of painting the same eleven seconds.

A picture that is still in use

A substantial share of the works recorded here are not museum objects. They are above altars, in side chapels, in parish churches and in monastic houses, and they are in daily devotional use. That is not a footnote to the catalogue entry; it changes what the entry can say.

This site catalogues those works as paintings — support, dimensions, date, hand — while being clear that a painting in liturgical use is not only a painting. Access is at the discretion of the community that holds it, condition reports are often unpublished, and the object may have been repainted for reasons that have nothing to do with art history.

Where a title stops being enough

Assigning an episode is manual work and the title rarely settles it. A painting called "The Supper" may be the Last Supper, the meal at Emmaus, or the wedding at Cana, and the three belong to three different points in the sequence. "The Agony" can be Gethsemane or the Crucifixion. A canvas titled only "Christ and the Woman" needs the well, the jar or the crowd to be placed at all.

Where the episode cannot be settled from the picture and the record together, the entry says so rather than picking one. This catalogue documents pictures; it does not harmonise gospels and it takes no position on doctrine.

Who publishes this

Jesus Christ Oil Paintings is published by Art & See and supported by it. There is no subscription here, no paywall, no advertising and no donation form: the catalogue is paid for by the sale of hand-painted reproductions, and that is the whole of the arrangement.

Buying a reproduction of a painting catalogued here is what keeps the catalogue being written — the sourcing, the checking against collection records, and the work of keeping jesus christ oil paintings free to read. Where an entry links to a reproduction, that link is marked as commercial, because it is.

What that money does not buy is the entry itself. No painting is catalogued because it sells, no wording is chosen to move a sale, and nothing is left out because it would be inconvenient to one. Where the two purposes pull against each other, the record wins.

Art & See runs four other catalogues on the same principle — one subject each, kept separate because a reader looking for one is rarely looking for the others:

• Saints Paintings — saints and martyrs, indexed by the emblem each figure carries
• Angels Paintings — angels, archangels and the celestial hierarchy
• Horses Paintings — the horse in Western painting, by discipline
• Vincent van Gogh Paintings — the catalogued work, place by place and year by year