Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus

Rembrandt’s life story is one of genius and struggle. Born the ninth of ten or more children in 1606, his personal life was as marred by tragedy as his artistic life was of triumph. He suffered significant losses, including his beloved wife Saskia Van Uylenburgh, who died, probably of tuberculosis, in 1642. A drawn out affair with Geertje Dircx resulted in a legal battle in 1649-1650 followed by her ultimate committal to an asylum. Of the artist’s five children, three did not survive childhood and his remaining son Titus pre-deceased him by one year. Rembrandt’s 1656 bankruptcy also separated the artist from his own home and his personal art collection.

Biblical Themes and the Heads of Christ

Though his life was often fraught with woe, Rembrandt was long fascinated by biblical themes, and judging from his existing oeuvre, Jesus was his favorite protagonist. He took a distinctive approach to religious narrative, however, and making innovative images of Christ had been a focus of his ambition from early in his career. He often combined different moments from the Bible into a single image, and sometimes distilled a holy figure into a portrait-like representation. This particular, personalized imagery emerges most succinctly in the artist’s powerful depictions of the adult Jesus on his mission, based on Rembrandt’s careful reading of the Gospels.

Following the path of his master, the Amsterdam artist Pieter Lastman, Rembrandt had built an astonishingly broad repertoire of biblical subjects, as well as a formidable reputation as a history painter, the most honored rank in the hierarchy of specializations. In addition to his dramatic, groundbreaking early Supper at Emmaus of about 1629, with Christ shown entirely in silhouette, and his theatrical Raising of Lazarus of about 1630, Rembrandt had also painted a Passion of Christ series (1633–39) for Frederik Hendrik, the stadtholder of the United Provinces. The face of Christ in a key work connected to the development of that series, Christ on the Cross of 1631, already shows Rembrandt seeking to break from tradition. The face, with its coarse features and defiant expression, bears no small resemblance to Rembrandt’s 1630 print Self-Portrait with Open Mouth. A slightly later drawing of the Entombment shows the face of the dead Christ with the kind of graphic realism for which Rembrandt was known.

It is in the sketches of the late 1640s, however, that we really see the most radical shift in Rembrandt's oeuvre. 1648, the year that marked the end of eight decades of war between the Netherlands and Spain (and the latter’s unprecedented recognition of the United Provinces, as the fledgling Dutch Republic was then known), also saw Rembrandt begin a different version of Supper at Emmaus. Around this time a modest but closely related project was also started in his studio: a series of small oil sketches on oak panels of a young man in a white tunic and simple brown cloak, in different poses and expressions and under different lighting conditions. His long hair is parted in the center, and he has a short beard; several panels also include his folded hands. Although the figure lacks other identifying attributes or symbols, it was clear to Rembrandt’s contemporaries that these sketches were intended as depictions of Christ, with attitudes and expressions varying to show aspects of Christ’s character: his humility, his mildness, his vulnerability, and his inner preoccupations. Probably begun as models for Supper at Emmaus, the heads of Christ stand out as the largest such group among his many small oil sketches, suggesting that the project to develop a new model of Jesus "after life" expanded once underway.

Living in Amsterdam amid a growing Jewish community that included large numbers of Sephardic Jews who found asylum from the Spanish inquisition, followed by Ashkenazi refugees from eastern Europe, Rembrandt took an enormous interest in Jewish history to inform his art. He owned the 1574 German translations of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish Wars illustrated by Tobias Stimmer, which he likely consulted for the appearance of Herod’s temple in his 1659 etching Peter and Paul at the Temple Gate, as well as for the temple and details of dress in his earlier print Triumph of Mordecai of about 1641.

The level of sympathy the artist exhibited for his Jewish neighbors has been the subject of considerable debate in the last century. As scholar Michael Zell notes, sources closer to Rembrandt’s time confirm that he indeed sketched the Jews on his street, and details of clothing distinguish some of his subjects as Jewish. Even the beggars and cripples in his etchings are often thought to be based on sketches of impoverished Ashkenazi refugees. Furthermore, Rembrandt’s portrayals of Jews evolved over the course of his career from the caricatures common in Netherlandish iconography to more humanized depictions based on his own sketches from life. Two etchings of Christ before Pontius Pilate (Ecce Homo) illustrate this point. Rembrandt’s etching of 1636 held to the tradition of portraying the members of the crowd mocking Jesus with stereotypical “Jewish” features. This changed considerably in his 1655 etching of the theme, in which the same figures seem to be sympathetic characters drawn from life.

Amsterdam’s Jewish community provided Rembrandt not only with subjects but also with patrons, who commissioned him to produce portraits and book illustrations. His work for the Portuguese-born rabbi and scholar Menasseh ben Israel is well known. In 1655 Rembrandt etched four biblical episodes as illustrations for Menasseh’s book Piedra Gloriosa: the colossus in the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, Jacob’s dream, David slaying Goliath, and Daniel’s vision of the four beasts (in which Rembrandt includes an anthropomorphic figure of God!). Through his connection to Menasseh, Rembrandt was closely connected to an extraordinary project of Jewish-Christian rapprochement taking place in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, one that finds an echo in the heads of Christ.

Depicting the face of Christ had always been a contentious practice in Christian art, as from the beginning the Second Commandment prohibition against idolatry clashed with the image-loving culture of the ancient Roman world. The legality of religious art was a core issue of the Protestant Reformation, and portraying Christ would remain a fraught practice in Rembrandt’s time and beyond.

The early Church Fathers Justin, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria all nevertheless had speculated about Christ’s physical appearance, but concluded that he was probably unremarkable in this regard. Not until the third century, according to Hans Belting, did a Gnostic-influenced idea begin to prevail in which Jesus was ascribed a measure of youthful beauty and bodily perfection (even at birth) more appropriate to his divine status. This youthful type persisted until it was displaced by that of the philosopher with beard, parted hair, and averted gaze found on the earliest surviving portable icons, such as those at Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai in Egypt.

Complicating the representation of Christ was the fact that, since nearly all Christians confess the divinity of Jesus, the very practice of depicting him was seen as conflicting with the Law of Moses, which forbids making images of God. Two early portraits of Jesus, however, were purported to have been produced by the body of Christ itself. These were the Sudarium, or Veil of Veronica, familiar in the Latin West (Roman Catholic) world, and the Mandylion of Edessa--a likeness miraculously imprinted on a cloth that Jesus held to his face, and which he sent to Edessa, in present-day Turkey, to heal its king, Abgar--which was well known in the Byzantine East (Orthodox) world. Like the Shroud of Turin, these portraits were thus considered acheiropoieta (sacred icons made without human hands) and not idols or man-made works of art.

These icons became the most authoritative and influential portraits of Jesus and were the models most often used in early Netherlandish painting. Even as Flemish painters in the fifteenth century became obsessed with illusionism and employed ever more microscopic levels of detail in their oil paintings, their depictions of the face of the mature Jesus largely remained faithful to such Byzantine models. The Christ of artists such as Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin, for instance, features light-brown hair, shallow features, thin lips, and especially a distinctly large, high, round forehead and elongated nose.

The Lentulus Letter
The authority of the Byzantine image of Jesus in northern Europe was further propagated through an apocryphal written source called the "Lentulus letter," a description of the physical appearance of Jesus that, according to legend, was sent by a certain Publius Lentulus to the Roman senate during Christ’s lifetime. The letter observed the following about Jesus: His hair is the color of a ripe hazelnut, parted on top in the manner of the Nazirites [Hebrew ascetics], and falling straight to the ears but curling further below, with blonde highlights and fanning off his shoulders. He has a fair forehead and no wrinkles or marks on his face, his cheeks are tinged with pink, . . . his beard is large and full but not long, and parted in the middle. His glance shows simplicity adorned with maturity, his eyes are clear and commanding, never apt to laugh, but sooner inclined to cry; he has straight hands and his arms are very pleasing. He speaks sparingly and is very polite to all. In sum, he is the most beautiful of all mortals.

Iconoclasm
During the sixteenth century, Dutch Protestants became increasingly wary of the veneration of saints and the propriety, not just of Christ images, but of any statues and paintings purported to work miracles or otherwise deemed to take on the characteristics of idols. Beginning in the summer of 1566, these tensions finally exploded in episodes of iconoclasm, resulting in the destruction of a staggering number of religious paintings and sculpture in the Netherlands.

Rembrandt worked less than a century after iconoclasts had removed religious images from churches throughout the Netherlands and triggered the political revolt that led to the independence of the United Provinces. These events forever changed the Dutch art market, especially for religious art. In the post-Reformation Dutch Republic, most artists worked in secular genres such as portraiture, still life, and landscape, all of which blossomed to fill the demands of a nation of burgeoning wealth and growing taste for luxury goods. During this period, known as Holland’s Golden Age, which roughly spanned the seventeenth century, religious painting became a marginal aspect of art production, both because the Church had ceased to function as major patron and because the predominantly Protestant population remained averse to even the perception of idolatry. Nevertheless, the image of Jesus continued to be the subject of much debate in Rembrandt’s time.

The decisive break that the heads of Christ produced in Rembrandt's studio represents in the iconography of Jesus becomes all the more clear in light of the work of the artist's predecessors. Not only did Rembrandt clearly abandon traditional sources, but as many scholars have persuasively proposed, and visual and circumstantial evidence consistently supports, he used as his model a young Sephardic Jew from the neighborhood in which he lived and worked.

While the genesis of Rembrandt’s project of finding a new means to depict Jesus is unclear, two drawings he made around 1648 of a young man seated on a chair with his hat in his hand may offer us a glimpse of its inception. Out of all the known drawings attributed to Rembrandt, only these two seem to show the same model as the sketches of Christ. The long hair, short beard, and nose all correspond to the sketches, as do the shape of the eyebrows and high cheekbones. The modern dress of the figure in the drawings--particularly his flat collar and coat, and possibly the hat on his lap--does not correspond to the more ancient garments in the oil sketches, but his pose is quite similar, down to the hands folded over his hat. This was typical of Rembrandt’s process of refining the pose and expression of his subject over successive sketches, suggesting that these drawings represent an initial stage in the development of this model into the sketches for Christ.

Several technical features of the heads of Christ indicate that they too were taken from life, particularly their sketch-like quality, mainly wet-in-wet paint handling, and consistent level of immediacy with the subject. The vignette-like dropping-off of finish toward the edges makes sense if the panels were indeed studies of facial expression and pose, and the tonal palette typical of Rembrandt’s mature work enhances the refinements in chiaroscuro so critical to their function as studies. The heads of Christ lack the archaic halo or radiance that Rembrandt revived as a distinctive marker of the risen Christ. This difference is another sign that these works were intended to look like sketches based on an anonymous model from life, rather than an identifiable figure taken from the artist’s imagination.

While on one level, the oil sketches of Jesus resemble the canonical models in that they draw their affective power partly from the religious understanding of the believer, the lack of symbols, attributes, or narrative context makes these refined studies of emotion and expression seem like disembodied types, even as they make Jesus more human than previous imagery did. The body of Christ the studies portrayed was believed to have been the same body that was resurrected from the dead, glorified, and ascended into heaven in order to appear again on the Last Day in triumph and judgment. Yet the sketches differ dramatically from the acheiropoieta, which, because they supposedly had touched Christ’s body, reference the miracle of incarnation, in which God takes the form of a man. Rembrandt, on the other hand, gave a graphically human character to his Christ by referring to Jesus’s earthly Jewish parentage, his realistic and specific appearance, and his very human emotions. In further contrast to stylized iconic images such as The Holy Face of Laon, in the oil sketches the artist’s hand is evident also in the loose execution, scratches with tools, and unfinished quality. The project dictated, and Rembrandt and his studio produced, a series of specific poses and expressions that corresponded to their use in his narrative art.