retations that vary from one authority to another.
The events of David's life occupy parts of 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, and 1 Kings, and make up one of the richest, most detailed biographical account in the Old Testament. A large number of stories from his life were very well known and David was one of the most frequent Biblical subjects in Medieval and Renaissance art. The use of such subjects was largely typological. That is, people and episodes in the Old Testament had "corresponding images or incident-types in the New Testament" (Dillenberger 31). Events in David's life, for instance, were believed to prefigure many episodes from the life of Christ. But this typological association, which occurred in literature and theology as well as the visual arts, was more than a mere iconographic convention. The writers of the Gospels and early Christians were anxious to demonstrate the continuity between the two Testaments in order to support the claim that Jesus was, in fact, the Messiah who had come to fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament. Thus the Gospel accounts of Christ's life begin with his genealogy and, in the first verse of the first gospel, Matthew describes him as "Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham" (Matt. 1:1). The human ancestry of Christ, therefore, was shown to include Abraham, the first priest of the people of Israel, and the first king of their united kingdom -- David -- who had founded the line that produced Mary, the mother of Jesus.
On this basis David's life was regarded as having prefigured Christ's arrival on earth. Unlike many Biblical personages whose iconographic meanings were fairly limited, however, David's detailed life provided material for a great variety of symbolic (and prophetic) associations. Briefly, he killed the Philistines' gigantic champion Goliath as a boy, had a deep love for Jonathan, the son of Saul, who saved him from his father's wrath, became king at the age of...