#bible

The story behind it is a man asleep on a rock dreaming of a ladder with angels going up and down it. Most painters put the whole ladder in, from what I've read — there's barely a hint of it here, which I think is the better call.

This is the Bible story where Abigail rushes to meet David's men with food, trying to stop them attacking her household after her husband snubbed them. It doesn't end there — Nabal dies soon after, and Abigail ends up marrying David instead.

This is meant to be an Old Testament prophet mourning Jerusalem's fall to Babylon — the city's still burning in the corner, and those gold objects are supposedly temple treasure he saved. Apparently this is from very early in his career, well before the more famous group portraits.

This is the Bible story of Daniel thrown into a den of lions for refusing to stop praying to his own god — and coming out fine. Apparently Rubens painted the lions true to life-size, which is part of why the scene lands so hard.

According to the Book of Esther, walking in on the king without being summoned could get you executed on the spot — which is apparently the tension the whole scene is built around.

This is where the phrase about the writing on the wall comes from — a king throws a feast using treasure taken from a temple, and a hand turns up mid-party to spell out how it ends for him. The Hebrew, according to Wikipedia, came from a learned neighbour in Amsterdam, and it's laid out in columns rather than the usual direction, which people have been arguing about ever since.

This one actually hangs in a church in Rome, from what I can find — Sant'Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso — despite popping up in art databases like a museum piece.

The name it goes by comes from money — the story is that a copy once changed hands for a sum that was outrageous for a print, and it stuck. It isn't one moment either: from what I've read he packed several separate things from the same chapter of the Bible into a single scene, so people are being healed, argued with and turned away all at once.