Halo (religious Iconography) - Gallery - Christian Art

Christian Art

• The Emperor Justinian (and the Empress Theodora) are haloed in mosaics at the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, 548. See here for earlier and here for later examples.

• Tetraevangelia of Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria, c. 1350; the whole royal family have haloes.

• Giotto Scrovegni Chapel, 1305, with flat perspectival haloes; the view from behind causes difficulties, and John's halo has to be reduced in size.

• The risen Christ appearing to the Eleven (Luke 24,36-49) from Duccio's Maestà. Christ has a plain halo; the Apostles only have them where they will not seriously interfere with the composition.

• Netherlandish, before 1430. A religious scene where objects in a realistic domestic setting contain symbolism. A wicker firescreen serves as a halo.

• Mary above has a large aureole, St Anthony has a disk halo in perspective, but this would spoil the appearance of St George's hat. Pisanello, 1430s

• Fra Angelico 1450, Mary's halo is in perspective, Joseph's is not. Jesus still has a cruciform halo.

• The Lutheran Hans Leonhard Schäufelein shows only Christ with a halo in this Supper (painted in 1515).

• In Simon Ushakov's icon of the The Last Supper (1685) eleven of the twelve apostles have haloes: only Judas Iscariot does not.

• Salvator Mundi, 1570, by Titian. From the late Renaissance a more "naturalistic" form of halo was often preferred.

• William Blake uses the hats of the two girls to suggest haloes in the frontispiece to Mary Wollstonecraft's "Original Stories from Real Life", 1791.

• Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld was a member of the Nazarene movement that looked back to medieval art. However, in The Three Marys at the Tomb, 1835, only the angel has a halo.