A subject
The Binding of Isaac
Genesis 22:1-191492–175432 hands
The Akedah. Nineteen verses that painters have returned to for six hundred years, almost always at the same instant — the knife raised, the angel arriving — which is the tenth verse and not the first. Where the picture stops is itself an argument about the passage.
And he put forth his hand and took the sword, to sacrifice his son.
Genesis 22:10
An editor has read 32 pictures against this passage and confirmed them.
1492Andrea Mantegna
1511Raphael
1511Mariotto Albertinelli
1525Antonio di Donnino di Domenico del Mazziere
1525Brunswick Monogrammist
1527Andrea del Sarto
1527Andrea del Sarto
1528Andrea del Sarto
1530Lucas Cranach the Elder
1531Lucas Cranach the Elder
1540Master of the Augsburg Ecce Homo
1540Herri met de Bles
1542Titian
1549Unknown
1585Paolo Veronese
1588Paolo Veronese
1590Caravaggio
1599Annibale Carracci
1599Jan Brueghel the Elder
1603Caravaggio
1607Cigoli
1607Abraham Govaerts
1612Pieter Lastman
1612Peter Paul Rubens
1616Pedro Orrente
1616Pieter Lastman
1635Rembrandt
1645Rembrandt van Rijn
1685Giovanni Antonio Burrini
1750Unknown
1750Jean Jacques Spoede
1754Francesco Guardi32 hands, 1492 to 1754
The hands
32Andrea Mantegna1492Sacrifice of IsaacKunsthistorisches Museum, GG_1842, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0Painted in grisaille to imitate carved stone — the episode treated as a relief, which is how the Renaissance most often argued a scene was ancient. Raphael1511Sacrifice of IsaacVatican Museums, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0A Vatican Loggia ceiling panel, part of the sequence that came to be called Raphael’s Bible. Mariotto Albertinelli1511The Sacrifice of IsaacYale University Art Gallery, 1959.15.13b, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Antonio di Donnino di Domenico del Mazziere1525The Sacrifice of IsaacFogg Museum, 1977.177, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Brunswick Monogrammist1525The Sacrifice of IsaacDepartment of Paintings of the Louvre, INV 1980, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Andrea del Sarto1527The Sacrifice of IsaacStaatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gal.-Nr. 77, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Andrea del Sarto1527The Sacrifice of IsaacCleveland Museum of Art, 1937.577, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Andrea del Sarto1528The Sacrifice of IsaacMuseo del Prado, P000336, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Lucas Cranach the Elder1530Sacrifice of IsaacBavarian State Painting Collections, 4557, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0Cranach sets it dry and frontal, the boy kneeling and bound on a low pyre. Lucas Cranach the Elder1531The sacrifice of Abraham: An angel restraints Abraham from sacrifycing Isaac; the servants wait at the foot of the mountain (Genesis 22:10-12)Liechtenstein Museum, GE 739, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Master of the Augsburg Ecce Homo1540The sacrifice of AbrahamGermanisches Nationalmuseum, 5393, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Herri met de Bles1540Landscape with the Offering of IsaacCincinnati Art Museum, 1944.44, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Titian1542Sacrifice of IsaacSanta Maria della Salute, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0Painted for the ceiling of Santo Spirito in Isola and seen from below — Abraham above the boy, the knife coming down out of a steep foreshortening. Verse 10 read as a thing happening over the viewer. Unknown1549Abrahams offeringAmsterdam Museum, SA 2066, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Paolo Veronese1585The Sacrifice of IsaacMuseo del Prado, P000500, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Paolo Veronese1588The Sacrifice of IsaacKunsthistorisches Museum, GG_3825, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Caravaggio1590Sacrifice of IsaacPrinceton University, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0The Princeton picture, an earlier and disputed treatment of the subject. Annibale Carracci1599Abraham's SacrificeDepartment of Paintings of the Louvre, MR 130, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Jan Brueghel the Elder1599Wooded Landscape with Abraham and IsaacNational Museum of Western Art, P.2002-0001, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Caravaggio1603Sacrifice of IsaacUffizi Gallery, 4659, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0The Uffizi version: the angel takes Abraham by the wrist and Isaac screams into the altar with his cheek against the stone. The ram is already there at the right, so verses 10 through 13 are one instant. Cigoli1607Sacrifice of IsaacGalleria Palatina, 95, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Abraham Govaerts1607Wooded landscape with the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22)Bavarian State Painting Collections, 4818, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Pieter Lastman1612The sacrifice of AbrahamRijksmuseum, B1670, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0Lastman taught Rembrandt, and the debt is legible: the same crowded foreground and the same instinct to catch the angel mid-arrival. Peter Paul Rubens1612The Sacrifice of IsaacThe Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 66-3, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0Rubens takes the interruption as a physical collision: the angel comes in from the left with enough force to turn the old man’s whole body. Pedro Orrente1616The Sacrifice of IsaacBilbao Fine Arts Museum, 82/3, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Pieter Lastman1616The Angel of the Lord Preventing Abraham from Sacrificing his Son IsaacDepartment of Paintings of the Louvre, RF 920, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0The title is the verse — the angel preventing, which is verse 12 and not verse 10. Rembrandt1635Abraham's SacrificeHermitage Museum, ГЭ-727, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0The Hermitage canvas. Abraham does not lower the knife — the angel seizes his arm and the blade is caught in mid-fall, while his other hand covers the whole of his son’s face. Verse 11 arriving a half-second after verse 10. Rembrandt van Rijn1645Abraham and IsaacThe Art Institute of Chicago, John H. Wrenn Memorial Collection, 1924.614. CC0.. CC0-1.0Rembrandt's 1645 etching is not the knife and not the angel: it is the walk to Moriah, the conversation of verses 7 and 8. Isaac carries the bundle of wood and asks where the victim is; Abraham gestures upward as he answers that God will provide one. The picture stops before anything happens, which is the reading — the father already knows what he is walking toward and the son is still asking. Giovanni Antonio Burrini1685Abraham Preparing to Sacrifice IsaacDepartment of Paintings of the Louvre, RF 1983 51, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Unknown1750Sacrifice of IsaacMedobčinski muzej Kamnik, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Jean Jacques Spoede1750The Sacrifice of Isaacvia Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0 Francesco Guardi1754The Sacrifice of IsaacCleveland Museum of Art, 1952.235.1, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. PDM-1.0Eighteenth-century Venice looking back at the subject, loosely and at speed.
The passage
19 verses1After these things, God tempted Abraham, and said to him: Abraham, Abraham. And he answered: Here I am.
2He said to him: Take thy only begotten son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and go into the land of vision: and there thou shalt offer him for an holocaust upon one of the mountains which I will show thee.
3So Abraham rising up in the night, saddled his ass: and took with him two young men, and Isaac his son: and when he had cut wood for the holocaust he went his way to the place which God had commanded him.
4And on the third day, lifting up his eyes, he saw the place afar off.
5And he said to his young men: Stay you here with the ass: I and the boy will go with speed as far as yonder, and after we have worshipped, will return to you.
6And he took the wood for the holocaust, and laid it upon Isaac his son: and he himself carried in his hands fire and a sword. And as they two went on together,
7Isaac said to his father: My father. And he answered: What wilt thou, son? Behold, saith he, fire and wood: where is the victim for the holocaust?
8And Abraham said: God will provide himself a victim for an holocaust, my son. So they went on together.
9And they came to the place which God had shown him, where he built an altar, and laid the wood in order upon it: and when he had bound Isaac his son, he laid him on the altar upon the pile of wood.
10And he put forth his hand and took the sword, to sacrifice his son.
11And behold an angel of the Lord from heaven called to him, saying: Abraham, Abraham. And he answered: Here I am.
12And he said to him: Lay not thy hand upon the boy, neither do thou any thing to him: now I know that thou fearest God, and hast not spared thy only begotten son for my sake.
13Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw behind his back a ram amongst the briers sticking fast by the horns, which he took and offered for a holocaust instead of his son.
14And he called the name of that place, The Lord seeth. Whereupon even to this day it is said: In the mountain the Lord will see.
15And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven, saying:
16By my own self have I sworn, saith the Lord: because thou hast done this thing, and hast not spared thy only begotten son for my sake:
17I will bless thee, and I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sand that is by the sea shore: thy seed shall possess the gates of their enemies.
18And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because thou hast obeyed my voice.
19Abraham returned to his young men, and they went to Bersabee together, and he dwelt there.
In the stacks
Not yet checked6Suggested by an AI model from books the library holds but has not yet set as editions. A passage here is a place to read, not a citation.
Religious art in France, 13 century
1 Jerome, Epist. ad Vigilant, Ixi. ; Patrol, xxii., 2 Confess., lib. V., cap. iv. col. 603. RELIGIOUS ART IN FRANCE without it you will build in the air. Abraham really lived and he really had a son by Sarah his wife. . . . But God made of these men heralds of His Son who was to come. This is why in all that they said, in all that they did, the Christ may be sought and the Christ may be found. All that the Scriptures say of Abraham
0.78Religious art in France, 13 century
3 Only one important piece of sculpture of this P. Cahier (Curiosites myster., p. 91 sq.), the Annal. kind remains, the statues in the interior of the Archeokg., vol. xviii. (Etude sur la Croix de Saint- cathedral of Reims (doorway, to the left on entering). Berlin), and the Guide de Part chretien" G. de It is true that the symbols only are there (Abraham Saint-Laurent, vol. iv. p. 59 sq. See also Zeitschrift and Isaac, Moses and the serpent, the Israelites fiir cbristliche Kunst, 1893, p. 82 sq. 140 OF
0.77Sacred and legendary art, volume 1 (of 2)
The Hebrews being carried away captive into the land of Assyria, Daniel prayed that they might be permitted to return when the seventy years of captivity were over: but the Angel of Persia opposed himself on this occasion to the angels Michael and Gabriel. He wished to retain the Jews in captivity, because he was glad to have, within the bounds of his jurisdiction, a people who served the true God, and because he hoped that in time the captive Jews would convert to the truth the Assyrians and Persians
0.76Problems of mysticism and its symbolism
312 PROBLEMS OF MYSTICISM contain the worth of the hundred." The skin was lifted and he that opened it saw the forehead of a child and said to Elphin, " See the beaming fore- head." " Beaming forehead, Taliesin, be his name," replied the prince, who took the child in his arms and because of his own misfortune, pitied it. He put it behind him on his charger. Immediately the child composed a song for the consolation and praise of Elphin, and at the same time prophesied to him his
0.76Sacred and legendary art, volume 1 (of 2)
In the representation of these subjects, I do not know a single instance in which the usual angelic form has not been adhered to. In the sacrifice of Isaac, ‘the angel of the Lord calls to Abraham out of heaven.’ This subject, as the received type of the sacrifice of the Son of God, was one of the earliest in Christian Art. We find it on the sarcophagi of the third and fourth centuries; but in one of the latest only have I seen a personage introduced as staying the
0.75Christian iconography
Such is the virtue of the cross, that a mere allusion to that sacred sign, made even in the Old Testament, and long before the existence of the cross, saved the youthful Isaac from death, redeemed from destruction an entire people whose houses were marked by that symbol, healed the envenomed bites of those who looked at the serpent raised in the form of a " tau " upon a pole.f It called back the soul into the dead body of the son of that poor widow who had given
0.74
How this subject was made
This subject is editorial: no notation opened it. An editor named the passage and anchored each picture to it by reading.
12 pictures Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
3 pictures Andrea del Sarto worked this composition three times and the versions are scattered — Dresden, Cleveland and the Prado each hold one. Seeing them together is the point of a panel.
3 pictures The Netherlandish landscape tradition takes Genesis 22 as its nominal subject and then gives almost the whole panel to trees and weather. Where the sacrifice sits in the picture — small, far off, easy to miss — is itself a reading of it.
2 pictures Veronese returned to the subject more than once; both versions keep the angel’s arrival as a diagonal across the top of the picture.
Connections
Painted
- Sacrifice of Isaac1492Painted in grisaille to imitate carved stone — the episode treated as a relief, which is how the Renaissance most often argued a scene was ancient.
- Sacrifice of Isaac1511A Vatican Loggia ceiling panel, part of the sequence that came to be called Raphael’s Bible.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1511Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1525Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1525Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1527Andrea del Sarto worked this composition three times and the versions are scattered — Dresden, Cleveland and the Prado each hold one. Seeing them together is the point of a panel.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1527Andrea del Sarto worked this composition three times and the versions are scattered — Dresden, Cleveland and the Prado each hold one. Seeing them together is the point of a panel.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1528Andrea del Sarto worked this composition three times and the versions are scattered — Dresden, Cleveland and the Prado each hold one. Seeing them together is the point of a panel.
- Sacrifice of Isaac1530Cranach sets it dry and frontal, the boy kneeling and bound on a low pyre.
- The sacrifice of Abraham: An angel restraints Abraham from sacrifycing Isaac; the servants wait at the foot of the mountain (Genesis 22:10-12)1531Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- Landscape with the Offering of Isaac1540The Netherlandish landscape tradition takes Genesis 22 as its nominal subject and then gives almost the whole panel to trees and weather. Where the sacrifice sits in the picture — small, far off, easy to miss — is itself a reading of it.
- The sacrifice of Abraham1540Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- Sacrifice of Isaac1542Painted for the ceiling of Santo Spirito in Isola and seen from below — Abraham above the boy, the knife coming down out of a steep foreshortening. Verse 10 read as a thing happening over the viewer.
- Abrahams offering1549Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1585Veronese returned to the subject more than once; both versions keep the angel’s arrival as a diagonal across the top of the picture.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1588Veronese returned to the subject more than once; both versions keep the angel’s arrival as a diagonal across the top of the picture.
- Sacrifice of Isaac1590The Princeton picture, an earlier and disputed treatment of the subject.
- Abraham's Sacrifice1599Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- Wooded Landscape with Abraham and Isaac1599The Netherlandish landscape tradition takes Genesis 22 as its nominal subject and then gives almost the whole panel to trees and weather. Where the sacrifice sits in the picture — small, far off, easy to miss — is itself a reading of it.
- Sacrifice of Isaac1603The Uffizi version: the angel takes Abraham by the wrist and Isaac screams into the altar with his cheek against the stone. The ram is already there at the right, so verses 10 through 13 are one instant.
- Sacrifice of Isaac1607Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- Wooded landscape with the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22)1607The Netherlandish landscape tradition takes Genesis 22 as its nominal subject and then gives almost the whole panel to trees and weather. Where the sacrifice sits in the picture — small, far off, easy to miss — is itself a reading of it.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1612Rubens takes the interruption as a physical collision: the angel comes in from the left with enough force to turn the old man’s whole body.
- The sacrifice of Abraham1612Lastman taught Rembrandt, and the debt is legible: the same crowded foreground and the same instinct to catch the angel mid-arrival.
- The Angel of the Lord Preventing Abraham from Sacrificing his Son Isaac1616The title is the verse — the angel preventing, which is verse 12 and not verse 10.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1616Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- Abraham's Sacrifice1635The Hermitage canvas. Abraham does not lower the knife — the angel seizes his arm and the blade is caught in mid-fall, while his other hand covers the whole of his son’s face. Verse 11 arriving a half-second after verse 10.
- Abraham and Isaac1645Rembrandt's 1645 etching is not the knife and not the angel: it is the walk to Moriah, the conversation of verses 7 and 8. Isaac carries the bundle of wood and asks where the victim is; Abraham gestures upward as he answers that God will provide one. The picture stops before anything happens, which is the reading — the father already knows what he is walking toward and the son is still asking.
- Abraham Preparing to Sacrifice Isaac1685Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- Sacrifice of Isaac1750Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1750Confirmed on the record rather than on connoisseurship: the holding institution catalogues it under this subject and the notation agrees. Which verse it stops at has not been checked against the picture.
- The Sacrifice of Isaac1754Eighteenth-century Venice looking back at the subject, loosely and at speed.