The Christian Sacred History – with the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ at its core – constitutes a central foundation of western culture, and of western art. Countless artworks were dedicated to the portrayal of the life of Christ, as well as to the life of the Madonna and the different saints. In there turn, the iconographic traditions developed for the portrayal of these subjects became a central source of reference for artists depicting other subjects – not necessarily related to Christian Sacred History.    

This class wishes to study the pictorial and iconographical traditions developed for the portrayal of central chapters of the Christian narrative, and investigate the complex relations between the textual sources – among them the Old and New Testaments, Apocrypha and the writings of the fathers of the church and of Christian Exegetics – and the visual representations of these fundamental Christian episodes. All these will be studied using different methods, including iconography, narratology, and semiotics.