Citing a Scene From the Cycle

References Belong to the Picture

A site-wide bibliography is decoration: it tells you what somebody once read, not what stands behind the canvas in front of you. Every reference here is therefore attached to a single entry, pointing at the fields it supports.

When those references are on the page, the chain from value to record is short and you can walk all of it yourself.

When they are missing, no secret is being kept and no verification has occurred — the sourcing pass simply has not arrived. That is still the condition of most of this collection, and an entry without a Sources section should be read as a record we copied and never confirmed.

The Records We Actually Open

Public, machine-readable, verifiable by anyone. Not opened, and never claimed: closed archives, private correspondence, dissertations, journals behind a paywall. No one is interviewed. No institution collaborates with us; we read what they publish for everybody.

Museum collection records

Open catalogue APIs, and the origin of an episode's name. If a museum files a supper as the Feast in the House of Levi, that is the name this site carries, whatever the painting may have been called earlier in its life.

Wikidata

Identified statements about date, material and depicted subject, each traceable to its own item page.

Getty Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)

The authority for a painter's identity and dates, which is what keeps one hand from becoming two entries. It says nothing about which moment of the narrative a canvas shows.

Wikipedia

Context and reception, treated as a signpost toward a primary record. A scene identified only by a Wikipedia sentence has not been identified.

Questions These Records Cannot Answer

Which episode a picture belongs to; whether the figures at the table are apostles or disciples on the Emmaus road; whether a detail comes from Matthew, from John, or from an apocryphal infancy gospel that never made the canon. Those are decided by reading Scripture and its commentators against the painting, and that reading happens elsewhere, by other people. We inherit the museum's answer and pass it on unedited.

Liturgical use, devotional function and the theology a patron was paying for fall outside our records entirely. Nothing on an entry should be taken as a statement about any of them.

One Field, Two Answers

Where an authority file and a museum give different dates or different dimensions, the entry prints one of them and the source it came from, never a comparison. The order in which sources are consulted is fixed and the earliest answer survives; the others are discarded at the moment of collection, not stored for display. Knowing whose figure you are looking at is what makes the disagreement checkable at all.

Do Not Cite the Commentary

Those paragraphs are model output built from the entry's own sources. They carry no authority and do not belong in a bibliography as scholarship. For a fact, cite the record we link to. For our wording, cite the entry and describe it accurately.

Why the site is built that way is explained in the editorial policy.

Reference Forms

Each work carries a citation page that writes the reference for you in APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard. The link on any artwork page leads there, at /cite/{artist}/{title}.

Two practical notes. The Master ID is permanent, so a corrected spelling or a rewritten URL never changes which object your footnote points to. And where an entry shows a verification date, use it as the last-updated field of your reference — it is the only date on the page that means anything. Where there is none, cite your access date instead.

Site-level reference: Jesus Christ Oil Paintings, jesusoilpaintings.com.