Christians because it established Christ as the fulfillment of the prophecies recorded in the Scriptures (Dillenberger 31).
The manner in which these analogies were presented could vary considerably. In some cases they could be used to solve the difficult problem of representing abstract concepts in visual form. Dillenberger offers the example of a painting of the crucifixion on the wall of a room in which the announcement of the coming birth of Jesus is made to His mother. Jesus's human future is depicted prior to His even being born. In this way the artist can express the doctrine that "all time lies within the hand of God and the time of eternity is not the time we experience in our chronological progress" through life (Dillenberger 43). In this symbolic approach pictures or vases of flowers with symbolic meanings were "made so a part of the total environment that they can be understood either as a still life, or interpreted in their symbolic function in pointing beyond themselves to a meaning known to the Christian believer" (Dillenberger 133). A good example of this kind of "naturalized symbol" is the appearance of the scene of David slaying Goliath on a floor tile in Jan van Eyck's Annunciation. The angel is announcing Jesus's impending birth and the room is filled with symbols that reflect on the miracle of the immaculate conception of Christ and on His earthly fate. In this setting David's defeat of Goliath is "a prefiguration of Christ's victory over Satan" (Dillenberger 133). The symbols in the Annunciation by van Eyck are not disguised but they are placed in a way that requires some effort on the viewer's part to read them -- the viewer must, therefore, engage in a dialogue with the work of art that is conducive to contemplation of the meanings of the sacred events that are depicted.
In other cases the intended meanings of the Old Testament figures are more immediately apparent. When the figure of Jonah is ...