Abraham Offering Isaac
Virgil Solis, 1565 · Genesis 22:1
The passage
And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.
Genesis 22:1
About this woodcut
Isaac kneels on top of the wood, which is stacked like a log pile rather than laid on an altar. Abraham stands over him in contemporary dress with a sword. The angel is in the cloud above with one arm out, and the ram is at the right, caught by its horns in the scrub.
Everything in the picture is already in place: the fire, the wood, the son, the knife, and the ram. Solis puts the answer in the same frame as the question, at the far right, where Abraham cannot see it. The composition does what the story does, which is make you look at the two of them and know something they do not.
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