PAINTALE

Collection

Religion & Mythology in Renaissance & Baroque painting

86 paintings exploring the theme of religion & mythology, from artists including Andrea Sacchi, Anna Maria Carew, Annibale Carracci, Anonymous, 17th century and across institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago.

Why religion & mythology dominated Renaissance and Baroque art

The theme of religion & mythology returns again and again across two centuries of European painting. Renaissance and Baroque artists were working inside a culture where this subject carried specific weight: religious, civic, moral, erotic, political. The paintings collected here are not a random group — they are a record of how that subject was handled, contested, and reinvented by the painters who shaped Western art.

Each painting page on Paintale opens with the story of the work, then drills into the symbols a contemporary viewer would have read, the techniques the painter used to make those symbols feel inevitable, and the provenance trail that brought the painting from its first patron to its current museum wall.