God the Father in Western art

Gradually, portrayals of the head and later the whole figure were depicted, and by the time of the Renaissance artistic representations of God the Father were freely used in the Western Church.

It was therefore usual to have depictions of Jesus as Logos taking the place of the Father and creating the world alone, or commanding Noah to construct the ark or speaking to Moses from the Burning bush.

A variant is Enguerrand Quarton's contract for the Coronation of the Virgin requiring him to represent the Father and Son of the Holy Trinity as identical figures.

[7] One scholar has suggested that the enthroned figure in the centre of the apse mosaic of Santa Pudenziana in Rome of 390-420, normally regarded as Christ, in fact represents God the Father.

For instance, while the eighty-second canon of the Council of Trullo in 692 did not specifically condemn images of The Father, it suggested that icons of Christ were preferred over Old Testament shadows and figures.

To the Western Church, images were just objects made by craftsmen, to be utilized for stimulating the senses of the faithful, and to be respected for the sake of the subject represented, not in themselves.

For as through the language of the words contained in this book all can reach salvation, so, due to the action which these images exercise by their colors, all wise and simple alike, can derive profit from them.

[citation needed] Prior to the 10th century no attempt was made to represent a separate depiction as a full human figure of God the Father in Western art.

[18] By the 12th century depictions of God the Father had started to appear in French illuminated manuscripts, which as a less public form could often be more adventurous in their iconography, and in stained glass church windows in England.

In an early Venetian school Coronation of the Virgin by Giovanni d'Alemagna and Antonio Vivarini, (c. 1443) (see gallery below) the Father is shown in the representation consistently used by other artists later, namely as a patriarch, with benign, yet powerful countenance and with long white hair and a beard, a depiction largely derived from, and justified by, the description of the Ancient of Days in the Old Testament, the nearest approach to a physical description of God in the Old Testament:[20].

(Daniel 7:9) In the Annunciation by Benvenuto di Giovanni in 1470, God the Father is portrayed in the red robe and a hat that resembles that of a Cardinal.

[22] The orb, or the globe of the world, is rarely shown with the other two persons of the Trinity and is almost exclusively restricted to God the Father, but is not a definite indicator since it is sometimes used in depictions of Christ.

In the Western Church, the pressure to restrain religious imagery resulted in the highly influential decrees of the final session of the Council of Trent in 1563.

God the Father is depicted as a powerful figure, floating in the clouds in Titian's Assumption of the Virgin (see gallery below) in the Frari of Venice, long admired as a masterpiece of High Renaissance art.

In some of these paintings the Trinity is still alluded to in terms of three angels, but Giovanni Battista Fiammeri also depicted God the Father riding on a cloud, above the scenes.

[26] In both the Last Judgment and the Coronation of the Virgin paintings by Rubens (see gallery below) he depicted God the Father in the form that by then had become widely accepted, as a bearded patriarchal figure above the fray.

In the 17th century, the two Spanish artists Velázquez (whose father-in-law Francisco Pacheco was in charge of the approval of new images for the Inquisition) and Murillo both depicted God the Father as a patriarchal figure with a white beard (see gallery below) in a purple robe.

In 1632 most members of the Star Chamber court in England (except the Archbishop of York) condemned the use of the images of the Trinity in church windows, and some considered them illegal.

[27] Later in the 17th century Sir Thomas Browne wrote that he considered the depiction of God the Father as an old man "a dangerous act" that might lead to Egyptian symbolism.