Recounting the biblical stories through visual images was the most prestigious form of commission for a Renaissance artist. In this book Jules Lubbock examines some of the most famous of these pictorial narratives by prominent artists including Giovanni Pisano, Giotto, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Masaccio. The author explains how artists portrayed biblical events so as to be easily recognizable and, at the same time, to captivate the viewer long enough to encourage the search for deeper meanings.
Lubbock shows that the Church favored the production of images that lent themselves to being read and interpreted in this way, and he demonstrates how the pleasurable activity of deciphering these meanings can work in practice. The book is richly illustrated, with many photographs specially taken to show how the paintings and relief sculptures appear in the settings for which they were originally designed.
