Most religious paintings were not made for a museum. They hung where people ate, climbed to bed or waited to have a limb amputated, and they spoke to those people first. That is why some of their details look so odd today, like the creature crouching in the corner of a hospital altarpiece, which its first viewers would have recognized at once.
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How These Were Chosen
A religious painting tells a story its audience already knows by heart. For centuries, churches, religious orders and rich families paid for exactly that: a sacred scene clear enough to be recognized at a glance, and strong enough to be looked at again every day.
That daily viewer is the thread of this list. Most of the twelve were made for a precise room, a dining hall, a staircase, a hospital church, a family chapel, and each makes the most sense through the eyes of the people who passed it.
Seen from that room, a detail that looks strange in a museum often turns out to be addressed to them. There is one painting per artist and nothing after 1700, and the countdown runs back in time, from the newest picture to the oldest.
12. Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son (about 1668)
A young man with a shaved head kneels in torn clothes and presses his face against the chest of an old man in a red cloak, who bends over him with his eyes almost closed. Rembrandt painted The Return of the Prodigal Son in Amsterdam in about 1668. In the Dutch Republic, the Reformed Church kept paintings out of its places of worship, so biblical scenes like this one hung in private homes.
The story is the parable of the prodigal son, told in chapter 15 of Luke's Gospel. When the son comes home, the father, in verse 22, sends his servants for three things: the best robe, a ring for his hand and shoes for his feet.
Rembrandt stops the scene before any of them arrives, and the son's feet show it. He is still in rags. One foot is bare, its sole turned toward the viewer, with the sandal that slipped off lying beside it, and the other still wears a battered one.
Those feet are my favorite piece of Bible reading on the canvas. They mark the exact verse at which Rembrandt halted the story: the robe, the ring and the shoes are still on their way, and the father embraces his son without them.
At a Glance
Artist: Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 to 1669)
Painted: About 1668
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 262 × 205 cm (103.1 × 80.7 in)
Where to see it: State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
11. Diego Velázquez, Christ Crucified (about 1632)
Alone against a dark ground, the dead Christ hangs at life size from a cross of planed wood. His feet rest side by side on a small wooden block, and a lock of hair falls over half of his bowed face.
The crucifix is by Diego Velázquez, who painted it in Madrid in about 1632, soon after his return from Italy, for San Plácido, a convent of Benedictine nuns. Its patron ordered it in a summer when the Inquisition had only just suspended a case against him, and Madrid was still talking about a crucifix said to have been whipped and thrown into a fire.