The project
Bezalel puts art beside the biblical text. You pick a book, and each passage appears together with the works that depicted that scene — so that reading is not only following the story, but also seeing what painters found in it.
Start with a book
Much of what you see in a biblical painting is written nowhere: it came from tradition, from sermons, from books left out of the Bible, or from the habits of a painter’s workshop. The apple Eve picks — the text only ever says “fruit” —, the stable at Bethlehem, the lily in Gabriel’s hand, the name Magdalene. Where that difference is worth telling, the work comes with a note beside it.
About this sceneThe genealogy has no scene: it is forty-two names. What the tradition placed at the opening of Matthew was the portrait of the evangelist writing, nearly always with the angel that is his attribute dictating or holding the inkwell. Unlike Luke's prologue, the text here says nothing about the act of writing — the link is to the book being opened, not to the verse.
Matthew 1:1-17 · Read the passage
About this sceneThe prologue is not a scene: it is a letter of dedication, and there is nothing in it to depict. What these works show is Luke himself writing — the act the text describes when it says “it seemed good to me also… to write to you in order.” The ox beside him does not come from Luke 1, but from an old reading of the four creatures of Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4: Jerome assigned the ox to Luke because this gospel opens in the temple, with the priest Zechariah before the altar — the scene that follows immediately after.
Luke 1:1-4 · Read the passageThe Bible was not depicted evenly. Some scenes were painted many times over; others not once — lists of names, speeches and stretches of teaching rarely became pictures. Where that happens the site leaves the space empty, rather than filling it with an image that belongs to another passage.
An automatic first pass gathers the candidate works for each scene. Which one opens the passage is decided by looking at the image beside the text, one scene at a time — and that work is still under way. The numbers page shows how much of the collection has been through it.
