The 15 Most Famous Paintings of Jesus, from Giotto to Dalí

Ask ten people to picture Jesus and most of them will describe a painting. Maybe Leonardo's long table in Milan, maybe the soft, side-lit portrait that hung in a grandmother's hallway. The famous paintings of Jesus are the images that fixed his face for most of the world, and they were made over roughly 650 years by painters who never saw him and rarely agreed on what he looked like.

This list runs in date order, from a chapel wall in Padua to a canvas in Glasgow. I chose 15 works by one test: would someone with no interest in art history still recognize the picture, or at least feel what it changed? Several of them turn up again and again among the paintings of Christ that people have copied by hand. A few are here because the story around them is too good to leave out.

The famous paintings of Jesus, in date order

When Christ became a body

1. Giotto, Lamentation (1303–1305)

Start here, because almost everything after it borrows from it. Enrico degli Scrovegni hired Giotto to cover his family chapel in Padua with the lives of the Virgin and Christ, and the frescoes went up between 1303 and 1305. In the Lamentation, the dead Christ lies low across the scene. His mother brings her face close to his. The women hold his hands, Mary Magdalene gathers his feet, and overhead the angels are grieving too.

Before Giotto, you prayed to an icon. After him, you stood in a crowd of people having the worst afternoon of their lives.

2. Andrea Mantegna, Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1483)

Mantegna put you at the soles of Christ's feet. The body lies on the stone where it was prepared for burial, pushed toward you in such steep foreshortening that the wounds in the feet come first and the face comes last. It's a small canvas, 68 by 81 cm, and it never left his studio while he lived. His son Ludovico sold it after his death, and it reached the Brera in Milan in 1824. Look at the stiff limbs and the hard folds of the sheet. There's no comfort offered anywhere in the picture.

The Renaissance sets the pattern

3. Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper (1494–1498)

The Dominican friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie wanted a Last Supper for the wall of their dining hall. Leonardo spent from 1494 into early 1498 on it, and he refused to paint true fresco, which has to be finished while the plaster is wet. He worked on dry plaster instead so he could go slowly and change his mind. That choice gave us the most copied meal in history, 460 by 880 cm, and it also started the flaking that conservators still fight today.

The moment is the one right after Jesus tells the twelve that one of them will betray him. Every apostle reacts differently. Jesus alone is still, the calm center of a table in uproar.

4. Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi (c. 1500)

Here's the odd one. Leonardo's Christ as savior of the world, one hand raised in blessing, was billed as the last Leonardo left in private hands when Christie's put it up in New York in November 2017. The estimate was around $100 million. Three phone bidders fought it out, the hammer fell at $400 million, and with fees the total came to $450,312,500, the highest price anyone had ever paid for a painting at auction. Scholars still argue over how much of it Leonardo painted himself, which is part of why everybody knows it.

5. Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–1516)

The Antonite monks at Isenheim ran a hospital for victims of Saint Anthony's fire, a disease caused by ergot, a fungus that got into rye bread. It drove people mad and rotted their limbs with gangrene. Their preceptor, Guy Guers, commissioned an altarpiece for the chapel, and between 1512 and 1516 Grünewald painted the panels while Niclaus of Haguenau carved the sculpture. The Crucifixion Grünewald gave those patients is the most punishing in European art: a heavy, torn body, fingers clawing at the air. The usual reading is that the sick were meant to see their own suffering in his. The whole thing has been at the museum in Colmar since 1852.

6. Raphael, The Transfiguration (1516–1520)

Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, later Pope Clement VII, ordered this panel for his cathedral at Narbonne in France. It never went there. Raphael died in 1520 with his last altarpiece finished, and the cardinal kept it. The top half shows Christ lifted into light on the mountain; the bottom half shows the apostles below, failing to heal a possessed boy. Two stories, one painting, 410 by 279 cm.

Napoleon's agents carried it to Paris in 1797, and it came back to Rome in 1816. Giorgio Vasari called it "the most celebrated, the most beautiful and the most divine" of Raphael's works. You can read the Vatican's own notes on the panel, which hangs in the Pinacoteca.

7. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–1522)

A long, low panel with a corpse in it. Nothing else. Holbein painted the dead Christ as a dead man, the body already starting to decompose, with no angel and no mourner anywhere. In August 1867 Fyodor Dostoevsky and his wife Anna stopped in Basel to see it. She remembered him climbing onto a chair to look closer, and he insisted on coming back before they left. The painting went straight into The Idiot, where Prince Myshkin sees a copy and cries, "Why, a man's faith might be ruined by looking at that picture!" Basel's exhibition on the two men tells the whole visit.

8. Paolo Veronese, The Wedding Feast at Cana (1562–1563)

From the smallest room in this list to the biggest canvas. The Benedictines of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice commissioned it for their refectory, and Veronese turned the miracle of water into wine into a Venetian party: musicians, servants, dogs, silks, and Christ at the center of the table looking straight out at you. Napoleon's troops seized it in 1797 and it reached the Louvre in 1798. At 6.77 by 9.94 meters, the banquet Veronese packed with guests hangs in the same room as the Mona Lisa,. Check its catalog entry in Paris for the full history.

Light, shadow and ordinary people

9. Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600)

Caravaggio was nearly 30 and this was his first major public commission, for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, where it still hangs. A tax collector sits counting money with a few men in feathered hats. A shaft of light comes in behind Jesus, who stands half hidden at the right and points. Christ's pointing hand in the tax office borrows from Michelangelo's Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and the canvas is huge, 323 by 343 cm. Nobody in the room is holy-looking. That was the point.

10. Caravaggio, The Supper at Emmaus (1601)

Two disciples have walked all day with a stranger. At supper he breaks the bread and they suddenly know him. Caravaggio painted the second of recognition: one man about to leap from his chair, his elbow jutting at you, the other flinging his arms wide. Christ here is young and beardless, which still surprises people. A basket of fruit teeters on the table edge, about to fall into your lap. The innkeeper stands in shadow and doesn't get it at all. It hangs in Room 32 in London, 141 by 196.2 cm.

11. Rembrandt, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633)

Rembrandt's only known seascape shows the disciples' boat heeling into a wave while Jesus sits calm in the stern. Nobody has seen it in public since the early hours of March 18, 1990, when two men dressed as Boston police officers got into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and left with 13 works. Isabella Gardner's will kept the collection exactly as she arranged it, so the empty frame still hangs. The museum once doubled its reward for information to $10 million. Of all the paintings here, this is the only one you can't go and see.

The modern Christ

12. William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1853)

Christ at dawn, lantern in hand, knocking at a door grown over with ivy. The door has no handle on the outside, because in Hunt's reading the soul can only be opened from within. The lantern stands for conscience; the light around his head for salvation. Underneath runs a line from Revelation 3: "Behold I stand at the door and knock." Martha Combe and her husband gave the original to Oxford, and it's in the side chapel at Keble, where a button on the wall lights it for you. A larger replica is in St Paul's Cathedral in London.

13. Paul Gauguin, The Yellow Christ (1889)

Gauguin was living in Pont-Aven, in Brittany, when he painted this. The Christ comes from a 17th-century painted wooden crucifix in the nearby Trémalo Chapel, turned a flat, startling yellow. Breton women in regional dress kneel at the foot of the cross in an autumn field. It's a peasant devotion painted by a man who didn't share it, and the tension between those two things is what makes it work.

A museum in Buffalo bought it in 1946. It measures 92.1 by 73.3 cm, smaller than most people expect.

14. Warner Sallman, Head of Christ (1940)

If you grew up in an American church, you've seen this one, probably many times. Sallman first drew the head as a sketch in 1924 for the Covenant Companion magazine, then painted the oil in 1940. It went on to sell some 500 million copies. During the Second World War the YMCA and the Salvation Army handed out millions of pocket-size cards of it, and soldiers carried them to Europe and Asia. Art historians have mostly ignored it. For a huge number of Americans, this is simply what Jesus looks like. Anderson University in Indiana holds Sallman's collected works.

15. Salvador Dalí, Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951)

The cross floats in a dark sky, seen from high above, and you never see Christ's face. Dalí built the view from a small drawing by the 16th-century mystic Saint John of the Cross and said the image came to him in dreams. Glasgow bought it in 1952 for £8,200, and the city bought the copyright with it. In 2005 it was voted Scotland's favorite painting. In July 2026 it moved to its own ground-floor gallery at Kelvingrove.

What 650 years changed

Put Giotto next to Dalí and the difference is where they put you. Giotto set you among the mourners. Mantegna laid you at the feet. Caravaggio sat you at the table, close enough to catch the fruit. Dalí floats you above the cross, looking down like God. The face of Jesus changed too, from bearded to beardless and back, from Italian to Breton, and then to the soft features Sallman put into millions of pockets. None of these painters knew what he looked like. Every one of them painted the Christ their own viewers needed.

A copy for your own wall

If one of these has stayed with you, Art & See paints oil reproductions of museum works by hand, on canvas. You can browse every painting of Christ the studio offers in one place, or wander through the paintings people recognize from across a room, where Raphael, Caravaggio and Veronese sit beside Van Gogh and Vermeer.

Sources

• Cappella degli Scrovegni, the chapel
• Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano, The Last Supper
• Musée Unterlinden, Isenheim Altarpiece
• Musei Vaticani, Trasfigurazione
• Louvre collections, Les Noces de Cana
• National Gallery, The Supper at Emmaus
• The Art Newspaper, Salvator Mundi sale
• Glasgow Life, Christ of St John of the Cross