Building the Picture | Sassetta | Saint Francis renounces his Earthly Father | The National Gallery, London

For The Four Holy Gospels project, to narrow my focus on this rather ambitious work, I chose to use the “pinhole” of John 11:35, the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” If God is self-sufficient, and Jesus was God’s only Son, then Jesus did not need us, nor did he need to weep over us. Jesus’s love extends beyond a utilitarian need to surviv

For Renaissance artists, painting was perhaps an instrument of knowledge but it was also an instrument of possession, and we must not forget when we are dealing with Renaissance painting, that it was only possible because of the immense fortunes which were being amassed in Florence and elsewhere, and that rich Italian merchants looked upon painters

It’s like looking at, say, a depiction of a medieval rustic scene by the painter Jan Brueghel the Elder, with many figures in it. A cart is rolling down a track, a horse carrying a rider clops along a lane, and someone is digging in a field—yet all are part of one painting.

The image of Jesus that emerges from the Gospel of John is hieratic and transcendent, moving always in the divine sphere.

The Adoration was commissioned in March 1481, when Leonardo was twenty-nine, by the monastery of San Donato, which was just outside the walls of Florence. Once again his father helped. Piero da Vinci was a notary for the monks and bought his firewood from them.