God the Father in Western art

For about a thousand years, in obedience to interpretations of specific Bible passages, pictorial depictions of God in Western Christianity had been avoided by Christian artists. At first only the Hand of God, often emerging from a cloud, was portrayed. Gradually, portrayals of the head and later the whole figure were depicted, and by the time of the Renaissance artistic representations of God the Father were freely used in the Western Church.^[2]

God the Father can be seen in some late Byzantine Cretan School icons, and ones from the borders of the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, under Western influence, but after the Russian Orthodox Church came down firmly against depicting him in 1667, he can hardly be seen in Russian art. Protestants generally disapprove of the depiction of God the Father, and originally did so strongly.