Bible Artists

Ivan Kramskoi

1837–1887

Russian

Kramskoi portrayed Jesus as a deeply human figure confronting spiritual struggle and moral choice.

Georges de La Tour

1593–1652

French

Georges de La Tour was a seventeenth-century painter of religious and everyday subjects, especially admired for quiet scenes illuminated by a single candle or lamp.

Lorenzo Lotto

c. 1480–1556/57

Italian

Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480–1556/57) was an Italian Renaissance painter whose religious works combine vivid color with unusually personal expressions of faith and emotion. Born in Venice, Lotto spent much of his career working elsewhere in northern and central Italy, particularly in Treviso, Bergamo, and the Marches. Biblical subjects remained important throug...

Jan Luyken

1649–1712

Dutch

Jan Luyken was a Dutch engraver, poet, and illustrator whose biblical prints and religious books joined detailed narrative imagery with a strong devotional purpose.

Andrea Mantegna

c. 1431–1506

Italian

Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506) was an Italian Renaissance painter and printmaker whose biblical art combines careful narrative with an intense interest in classical antiquity. Trained in Padua, he developed a distinctive style characterized by sculptural figures, sharply defined forms, carefully constructed perspective, rocky landscapes, and architecture...

John Martin

1789–1854

British

John Martin was a British Romantic painter and printmaker celebrated for immense, dramatic visions of biblical catastrophe and divine judgment.

Masaccio

1401–1428

Italian

Masaccio helped transform painting by giving biblical figures convincing physical weight and placing them in coherent architectural and natural spaces.

Janet McKenzie

American

Janet McKenzie is an American contemporary sacred artist known for inclusive representations of Jesus and other biblical figures. Her painting Jesus of the People (1999) received international attention.

Claude Mellan

1598–1688

French

Mellan produced one of the most technically remarkable images of the face of Christ in European printmaking.

Hans Memling

c. 1430–1494

Netherlandish

Hans Memling (c. 1430–1494) was a leading painter of the Early Netherlandish tradition who spent most of his documented career in Bruges. His religious paintings combine careful observation with a calm and orderly approach to biblical and devotional subjects. Memling was strongly influenced by Rogier van der Weyden, in whose workshop he may have worked, b...

Matthäus Merian the Elder

1593–1650

Swiss-German

Matthäus Merian the Elder was a Swiss-born engraver and publisher whose illustrated biblical narratives helped circulate Scripture in visual form across seventeenth-century Europe.

Michelangelo

1475–1564

Italian

Michelangelo (1475–1564) was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet whose biblical works became some of the most recognizable images in Western art. He regarded sculpture as his principal calling, yet two of his greatest achievements were painted in the Sistine Chapel. Its ceiling presents scenes from Genesis within a much larger meditation on...