The Sacrifice of Isaac

Description

Rome in 1603 was dangerous ground for Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, a painter whose temper matched his talent and whose patrons kept him close regardless. For the banker and collector Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII, he turned to the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac and painted one of the sharpest moments of terror and mercy in the whole of Baroque art. This Sacrifice of Isaac reproduction brings that instant back to the wall of a room rather than leaving it on a gallery label.

About Sacrifice of Isaac Reproduction

The subject is a father stopped mid act. Abraham has already pinned his son down and raised the knife when an angel grips his wrist and points to the ram that will take the place of the boy. Isaac, bound and twisted beneath his weight, turns his face away in a cry that Caravaggio paints with unflinching directness, the mouth open, the eyes wide. The four figures and the animal crowd close to the front of the canvas, almost within reach, while behind them a hill town sits under a pale sky, one of the few true landscapes the artist ever attempted.

Light falls hard on the face and shoulder of the angel and leaves Abraham furrowed and half lost in shadow, the tenebrism that made Caravaggio the figure every young painter in Rome wanted to imitate. The angel and Isaac share a tilt of the head and a set of the brow that reads almost as kinship, binding rescuer and victim together across the canvas. The paint is laid on thick where the flesh catches light and thinned to near nothing in the recesses of the cloth and the dark ground, a contrast built from pigment rather than drawing.

Painters working for ByMuseum reproduce this composition entirely by hand, building up the same deep blacks and warm flesh tones stroke by stroke on artist-grade canvas rather than printing them. Each oil on canvas reproduction is checked against the original palette so the spotlight on the angel and the shadow across Abraham keep their original weight, and the raised ridges of oil paint hold the same sculptural modelling found in the source work. Buyers who want the surface and depth of real pigment, not a flat printed sheet, are the ones this kind of oil painting reproduction is made for.

The hand-painted reproduction

A scene this charged suits a collector drawn to biblical narrative painting, or a room that can hold a dramatic composition without competing with it, a study, a stairwell, a space meant for one strong picture rather than several quiet ones.

• Hand-painted in oil on artist-grade canvas
• Available in a range of sizes to suit the wall
• Gallery-ready presentation, framed or unframed
• Certificate of authenticity included
• Painted to order in 2 to 3 weeks, then delivered in 5 to 7 days