God the Father

== In Western art ==
{{Main|God the Father in Western art}}
[[File:Jacob Herreyns I - God the Father.jpg|thumb|[[Jacob Herreyns the Elder]] - God the Father.]]
[[File:GodInvitingChristDetail.jpg|thumb|left|Depiction of God the Father (detail), [[Pieter de Grebber]], 1654]]
For about a thousand years, no attempt was made to portray God the Father in human form, because early Christians believed that the words of Exodus 33:20 "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see Me and live" and of the [[Gospel of John]] 1:18: "No man hath seen God at any time" were meant to apply not only to the Father, but to all attempts at the depiction of the Father.<ref name=Cornwell2>James Cornwell, 2009 ''Saints, Signs, and Symbols: The Symbolic Language of Christian Art'' {{ISBN|081922345X}} p. 2</ref> Typically only a small part of the body of Father would be represented, usually the hand, or sometimes the face, but rarely the whole person, and in many images, the figure of the Son supplants the Father, so a smaller portion of the person of the Father is depicted.<ref>Adolphe Napoléon Didron, 2003 ''Christian iconography: or The history of Christian art in the middle ages'' {{ISBN|076614075X}} p. 169</ref>

In the early medieval period God was often represented by Christ as the ''[[Logos (Christianity)|Logos]]'', which continued to be very common even after the separate figure of God the Father appeared.  Western art eventually required some way to illustrate the presence of the Father, so through successive representations a set of artistic styles for the depiction of the Father in human form gradually emerged around the tenth century AD.

By the twelfth century depictions of a figure of God the Father, essentially based on the [[Ancient of Days]] in the [[Book of Daniel]] had started to appear in French manuscripts and in stained glass church windows in England. In the 14th century the illustrated [[Naples Bible]] had a depiction of God the Father in the [[Burning bush]]. By the 15th century, the [[Rohan Book of Hours]] included depictions of God the Father in human form or [[anthropomorphic]] imagery.  The depiction remains rare and often controversial in [[Eastern Orthodox]] art, and by the time of the [[Renaissance]] artistic representations of God the Father were freely used in the Western Church.<ref>George Ferguson, 1996 ''Signs & symbols in Christian art'' {{ISBN|0195014324}} p. 92</ref>