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    Stories of saints, biblical events, angels, and sacred places.

    Caravaggio's Crowning with Thorns, showing two soldiers pressing a thorn crown onto Christ's head while a third watches.
    The Crown of Thorns in Christian Art: A Symbol of Mockery and Majesty
    How painters from the early Church to Caravaggio turned a Roman soldier's cruel joke into one of Christianity's most recognizable symbols of suffering and kingship.
    El Greco's Burial of the Count of Orgaz, showing an earthly funeral scene below and a heavenly vision of saints and angels above.
    El Greco's Burial of the Count of Orgaz: Heaven Meets Toledo
    How El Greco split one enormous canvas in half, painting an earthly funeral below and an ecstatic vision of heaven above, uniting them in a single miracle.
    Fra Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child with Two Angels, showing the Virgin Mary in profile gazing tenderly at the infant Christ.
    Fra Filippo Lippi's Madonnas: A Monk Who Painted Real Women
    How a runaway friar with a scandalous personal life became one of the Renaissance's most tender painters of the Virgin Mary, giving her an unmistakably human face.
    Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross, showing ten mourning figures crowded around the body of Christ in a shallow gilded space.
    Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross: Grief in a Golden Box
    How a Flemish master compressed ten mourning figures into a shallow, gilded stage to make the deposition of Christ feel unbearably close, human, and immediate.
    Early Christian fresco of the Good Shepherd, a beardless young man carrying a lamb on his shoulders, from the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome.
    The Good Shepherd: Christianity's First Image of Christ
    Long before the crucifix, Christians painted Christ as a beardless young shepherd carrying a lamb — the most common image of Jesus in the Church's first centuries.
    Domenico Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Shepherds, showing shepherds kneeling before the infant Christ in a classical-inspired stable setting.
    The Nativity in Renaissance Art: Reinventing the Manger
    How Renaissance painters transformed the birth of Christ from a stiff, symbolic scene into an intimate human moment set in real light, landscape, and architecture.
    Paolo Veronese's Wedding at Cana, a vast banquet scene crowded with over a hundred figures, musicians, and Venetian architecture.
    Veronese's Wedding at Cana: A Miracle Disguised as a Party
    How Paolo Veronese turned Christ's first miracle into a vast Venetian banquet crowded with 130 figures, nearly burying the miracle itself in spectacle.
    An ornate interlaced cross carpet page from an early medieval English illuminated Gospel manuscript, filled with geometric knotwork in red, gold, and blue.
    Anglo-Saxon Saints of England
    A guided survey of the bishops, abbesses, and local patrons of Anglo-Saxon England, from Augustine of Canterbury's 597 mission through the Viking age.
    A dark, candlelit painting of an angel gently cradling a swooning, robed figure in a nighttime landscape, evoking a mystic's vision or ecstasy.
    Christian Mystics, Visions, and the Interior Life
    A guided survey of Christian mystics across the centuries — from desert Egypt to medieval Germany to Counter-Reformation Spain — and their reported visions of God.
    A 19th-century painting of Christian martyrs kneeling in prayer in a Roman arena as a lion approaches and figures hang on crosses in the background.
    Early Popes and Martyrs of Rome
    A guided survey of Rome's earliest popes, deacons, and lay martyrs — the men and women who led and died for the Church before Christianity was ever legal.
    An 18th-century painting of a quiet convent cloister in Paris, with stone arches and columns surrounding an open courtyard garden.
    Founders of Catholic Religious Orders
    A survey of the priests, laypeople, and widows who founded major Catholic teaching, missionary, and charitable religious orders between the 1500s and 1800s.
    Emperor Otto III enthroned in majesty, flanked by clergy holding books and armed nobles, from an Ottonian illuminated Gospel manuscript.
    Medieval Missionary Bishops of the Carolingian and Ottonian Empire
    A guided survey of missionary bishop-saints who built and Christianized the Carolingian and Ottonian empire, from the Rhineland to the Slavic and Baltic frontier.
    Portrait of Benedict Joseph Labre as a gaunt, ragged pilgrim with long dark hair, a rosary, and a threadbare cloak, gazing upward.
    Saint Benedict Joseph Labre
    A homeless beggar rejected by monastery after monastery died on a Roman street in 1783, and within a day the city's own children were calling him a saint.
    Historical painting showing a religious procession and fleet embarking, associated with devotional imagery connected to Catherine de Ricci.
    Saint Catherine de Ricci
    A Florentine nun relived Christ's Passion in visible ecstasy every week for twelve years, and the crowds who came to watch eventually included a future pope.
    Portrait photograph-style image of Catherine Laboure in the habit and white cornette of the Daughters of Charity.
    Saint Catherine Laboure
    A farm girl saw the Virgin Mary in a Paris convent chapel one night in 1830, and the medal she was told to strike has since been minted over a billion times.
    Devotional painting of Clare of Montefalco in a dark Augustinian habit, hands folded, with a serene expression.
    Saint Clare of Montefalco
    After an Augustinian abbess died in 1308, the nuns who prepared her body for burial found what they described as symbols of Christ's Passion inside her own heart.
    Engraved portrait of Edmund Campion in clerical dress, head turned slightly, with a Latin inscription beneath.
    Saint Edmund Campion
    A star Oxford scholar who could have had any career he wanted under Elizabeth I chose the secret priesthood instead, and paid for it at Tyburn in 1581.
    Painting of Saint Hyacinth of Poland in a white Dominican habit and black cloak, gazing upward in prayer.
    Saint Hyacinth of Poland
    A Polish nobleman met Saint Dominic in Rome, joined his brand-new order on the spot, and then walked home to found it across an entire region of Europe.
    Portrait of Jeanne Jugan in the dark habit and white bonnet of the Little Sisters of the Poor, with a calm, weathered expression.
    Saint Jeanne Jugan
    A poor Breton servant carried a blind, elderly widow up the stairs to her own bed and slept in the attic instead, launching a worldwide order almost by accident.
    Devotional portrait of Louise de Marillac in a widow's headdress and dark dress, hands folded in prayer.
    Saint Louise de Marillac
    A widow with no religious training co-founded a community for poor girls who had nowhere else to go, and it grew into one of the largest orders serving the poor.