34 - The Bible in art

Summary

The range and quantity of biblical illustration, art in the Bible, by 1875, had risen beyond measure; prints of sacred art had become widely available and public galleries had come within reach in the age of the train. Of the old school, Giambattista Tiepolo was the last of the great Venetian painters of large-scale religious works, whose Roman Catholic patrons generally asked for images of the Virgin and the saints. Bible illustrations and engraved views of the Holy Land led the contribution of modern artists. Holman-Hunt's source for the sacerdotal breastplate inThe Light of the World, for example, was the richly illustrated Pictorial Bible which inspired so much of his work. In modern Britain, one of the last examples of the Bible in art in the twentieth century reflected in its irony the postmodern secularism of the developed West. Damien Hirst painted a series of labels for foodstuffs that might have made up a modern last supper.