Bezalel
The project
Bezalel sets the gospel of Luke beside the art that depicted it. Every passage comes with the works that portrayed it — so that reading is not only following the text, but seeing what Western painting found in it.
Much of what you see in a biblical painting is written nowhere: it arrived through devotion, through preaching, through the apocrypha, or through the habits of a workshop. The stable at Bethlehem, the lily in Gabriel’s hand, the name Magdalene — none of it is in Luke. Where that distance is worth telling, the reading carries a note beside the work.
About this sceneThe lily in Gabriel's hand is not in Luke 1. It enters the iconography in the fourteenth century as an attribute of purity and, from then on, almost never leaves. The open book before Mary is a medieval addition as well: the text does not say what she was doing.
Luke 1:26-38 · Read the passage
About this sceneThe stable scene is a reconstruction. Luke 2:7 says only that there was no room at the inn and that the child was laid in a manger.
Luke 2:1-7 · Read the passageEvery record points at (book, chapter, verses). Changing translation — or publishing the whole book in a second language — swaps one layer and redoes no curation at all. English proved it: the works stayed matched to the same verse ranges, and what arrived was a text layer on top.
Western art did not depict the Bible evenly: it painted narrative, not argument. The teaching and the parables are left without a work, and the site shows that rather than filling the space with an image of some other scene. A reading page is worth more honest than full.
The biblical branch of Iconclass supplies the scenes and their chapter:verse references; Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons supply the works with a free image.
Reading boundaries follow the narrative, not a cataloguing taxonomy. The build checks full coverage of the text: a gap or an overlap fails before anything is published.
The automatic pass ranks the candidates by relevance; choosing which work opens each passage is review, one scene at a time. Every chapter says in its footer how much has not been through it yet.
A fully prerendered site, no server. The content never crosses to the client: this page carries a handful of works over the wire, not the whole gospel.
43 of the 128 pericopes go on without an image. The empty ones are the teaching and the parables: Western art painted narrative, not argument. That is a trait of the collection, not a failure of the pipeline.
The selection is a first automatic pass: 473 of the 473 works have not been reviewed by a human yet. Every chapter says so in its footer, instead of letting it look like settled curation.
Luke 1: the prologue to Theophilus, the announcement to Zechariah, the annunciation to Mary.
Read Luke 1
