About Jesus Christ Oil Paintings

Many of the originals still hang above altars and in parish churches that few people will ever visit. A reproduction is how a Nativity painted for a chapel in Siena ends up on a wall at home. The catalogue below records each original, episode by episode.

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 Access is at the discretion of the community that holds it, condition reports are often unpublished, and the object may have been repainted for reasons that have nothing to do with art history.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.