Religious painting in the West is a system of four subjects, and this page maps all of them: the Bible scenes that taught a faith, the churches that held them, the angels who carried the sacred between worlds, and the Last Judgment that made the stakes plain. Each has its own guide on this site, and the Beaune Altarpiece is the one painting that holds all four.
For most of Western art history the church was the client. It paid for the panels, chose the subjects, and decided what a believer needed to see on the way in and on the way out of a building. Painters worked inside that brief, which is why the same four subjects return again and again across a thousand years.
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The clearest case of a patron stepping into the picture is in Padua. Enrico Scrovegni paid Giotto to decorate a chapel consecrated on March 25, 1305. His father, Reginaldo, was a banker with a reputation as a usurer, a man who lent money at interest, a sin in the eyes of the church, and Dante is traditionally read as having put the old man in the Inferno.
A familiar story follows from that: the son was buying back the family name with a building. Historians do not agree. The chapel was also the family's private oratory and a tomb for Enrico and his wife, and some art historians point out that Dante's verses on the father came after the chapel was finished, which would leave Enrico no such worry to answer. The usury story is a hypothesis, and a popular one.
Whatever his reasons, Enrico had himself painted into the Last Judgment on the west wall. He kneels at the foot of the Cross and holds out a model of the chapel to the Madonna, drawn at the same size as she and the saints. I cannot say what was on his mind, and I doubt anyone can. What the wall does show is that the church set the terms and the patron still found a way to stand inside them, and the same pressure runs through each of the four subjects below.
What You'll Discover
Who really chose what the walls showed.
Why painters kept going back to churches.
What only an angel could show.
What waited at the end of the walk.
The one altarpiece that holds all four.