Marc Chagall was one of the fundamental painters of the 20th century. Picasso said of him: «After Matisse, he is the only painter who truly understands what color is». Chagall—which in Russian means "walk! march!"—was also a wandering Jew. Avoiding hunger, cold, wars, pogroms, in 1923, in the midst of a climate that anticipated the horror of World War II, he managed to move from his native Russia to Paris. There, he began in 1931 the monumental work of illustrating the Old Testament passages of the Bible. This work —unpublished in Spanish to date— has twenty-two previous, preparatory sketches and the definitive gouaches of this great work, which is a masterful artistic display of the mastery of color and, likewise, the way in which Chagall reconnected, from exile, with the historical, artistic and cultural marks of their land. Indeed, Chagall, who at one point in his life only painted with the color violet —and who in his first years in Paris received a visit from his former teacher, Bakst, who dedicated these last words to him: «now his colors sing» —, created his Bible paintings during a period marked by anti-Semitism and the threat of war, political circumstances that are reflected in his iconography.

Chagall managed to paint the autobiography of his childhood and early youth in a kind of family tree of multiple iridescent fruits, through a poetic reading of sacred texts. He stated: “May God help me to shed real tears on my canvases. In them my wrinkles will remain, my pale complexion, in them my fluid soul will be marked forever. This fabulous edition is completed by three essays that study and unravel the relationship of Chagall's painting with classical icons and with the symbolism of Russian painting.