Prometheus made man by dabbling in mud; Auguste Rodin, aged five, found his own raw ingredients in the kitchen. He saw his mother dropping thin twists of dough into hot oil and extracting crisp pastries; discerning human shapes in the contorted batter, he asked her if he could fry some men. Practising to be a sculptor, he kneaded dough into shapes that were almost too big for the pan. He was delighted when the heat animated his sticky prototypes: the spitting oil caused them to writhe, violently quickening them into life.

The business of making also intrigued the young Leonard Bernstein. At the age of four, he discovered that man had been formed from dust, and decided to repeat the experiment. He collected the coagulating drifts of fluff from under his bed, then soaked them in the bathroom hand-basin to make them gel.

But he left the water running, the drain-pipe clogged, and the apartment beneath was deluged by the overflow. God did not have to bother about neighbours downstairs.

Every form of art has its own myth of nativity, and its own version of the originating deity. For Ruskin, Genesis identified God as a sculptor. Goethe, in the theory of colour he published in 1810, celebrates an invisible creator who is a painter – or who at least encourages men to paint so they can register the luminous array of creation.

His Faust, basking in the sun beside a waterfall, admires the rainbow that shimmers in the spray, and says that it symbolises life’s hazy play of multi-coloured allurements. After Noah’s flood, that arc may have signified God’s forgiving covenant with man. But for Goethe, it is not God who stretches the iridescent bow across the sky; it is sparked by the meeting of sunlight and water vapour, and exists only in the eye that sees it.

Turner put it more brazenly when he said, “The sun is God.” He made the remark, according to Ruskin, shortly before his death. It was his admission of his vocation’s hubris: the painter, staring at the sun, daringly looks God in the eye.