"Rembrandt and Jesus' at the Art Museum (3rd review)

Two of the three great monotheistic faiths maintain an absolute prohibition on attempts to depict the deity. Jews may not represent God, nor Muslims Allah. Only Christianity attempts to depict divinity, and of its three major branches only Catholicism has consistently upheld the tradition.

The violent episodes of iconoclasm of Eighth-Century Greek Orthodoxy and 16th-Century Protestantism reflect deep-seated suspicions that any attempt to render the divine personality smacks of paganism or worse, and inevitably leads to idolatry. Orthodoxy did reinstate such depictions, but only on the condition that images be confined to the incarnate divinity of Christ or Christ as Pantocrator, and that these representations be static and, as far as possible, unchanging.

In medieval Western Christianity, images tended to be stereotypic as well. Only the Renaissance, in its fascination with individual personality, encouraged highly diverse images of Christ, as well as representations of the paternal deity himself. The inevitable backlash produced Reformed iconoclasm, with its thorough purging of all direct representations of divinity.

What gave room in Christianity for images was, of course, the notion of divine incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ. If God had taken the form of man, lived a life among men and died a man's death on the cross, then curiosity was inevitable about what he might have looked like.

Miraculous photograph

The Veil of Veronica, which might be regarded as the first (albeit miraculous) photograph, allegedly took the imprint of the Savior's face as a sympathetic witness wiped it on his way to the cross. It's still venerated in the Catholic Church, and for a long time was regarded as the authoritative image of Jesus. As such, the Veil was the basis of early Renaissance depictions, since the idea that one could simply invent the face of God remained scandalous.

Gradually, this restriction was loosened. By the early 16th Century, Italian Renaissance artists thought nothing of using country girls as models for depictions of the Virgin Mary. It was only a matter of time before Jesus was "humanized" in similar fashion.

Of course, medieval mystery plays had already accustomed audiences to observing sacred personalities onstage. But only with Rembrandt, excepting Rouault perhaps the last great Christian painter, was an attempt made to square the ultimate circle: to depict a fully human Jesus in the flesh, with features and personality that, although suggestive of an otherworldly presence, were still those of someone you might meet on the street.

Jewish neighbors

That attempt, and its results, are on display in "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus," the current exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Not all examples of this portraiture could be collected for the show, and not all of Rembrandt's representations of Jesus focus on facial delineation, particularly in the drawings and etchings that depict Jesus among crowds.

Nor did Rembrandt ever settle on one absolutely definitive image. His conception of Jesus evolved— partly based, it seems, on his familiarity with his neighbors in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. He painted a number of them, penetrating their humanity as was his wont, and it's reasonable to conjecture that he connected— and perhaps even used— them as models for his Jesus.

It's worth pondering this point, and Rembrandt's own very personal humanism. Only in 17th-Century Amsterdam could a Gentile have lived in a Jewish quarter that, far from being ghettoized, was part of a thriving, cosmopolitan community.

Savage caricature

Only in such an atmosphere, perhaps, could even someone so sensitive as Rembrandt have seen the Jew without hostility and suspicion— a trifle exotic in dress and customs, but as fully human as himself. And only under such circumstances was it possible to recall what a millennium and a half of Christianity had done its best to erase: namely, the Jewishness of Jesus himself.

One has only to recall the savage caricature of Jews in Flemish depictions of the crucifixion a century earlier to appreciate the distance any artist would have traveled to depict Jews as Rembrandt did, and to see in them not the eternal antagonists of Jesus but his racial brethren. It's likely that Rembrandt had no single model for Jesus; no doubt that would have seemed, if not blasphemous, at least insufficient.

Nor, even though a recognizable depiction emerges in the portraits of Jesus done in the late 1640s and early 1650s— dark-haired and bearded and with a long, aquiline nose— would Rembrandt have felt the need to settle on a single image. He did seek a fully humanized Jesus, yes, but not a merely human one. Jesus, after all, was a man who was beyond humanity as well as immersed in it, and whose nature necessarily transcended whatever human features could express.

Unexpected dinner guest

Rembrandt shows Jesus in three distinct postures: as a man among men, preaching the Gospel as in the celebrated Hundred Guilder Print or exposed to them as in Ecce Homo; as a portrait subject, pensively expressing the burdens of his destiny against a neutral pictorial background; and as the resurrected Christ of Rembrandt's various depictions of the Supper at Emmaus, where Jesus appears to share bread with his disciples and vanishes as soon as they have fully recognized him.

The most remarkable of these latter is the large 1648 Supper at Emmaus from the Louvre, in which Jesus sits between his still uncomprehending disciples, radiating an unearthly light in his face and person that suffuses the dark arch and niche behind him with blended colors of the utmost ethereality and magnificence. This is not the dark Jesus of the portraits, but one whose reddish hair is more reminiscent of his earlier representations from the 1630s, and whose features bear a deep remoteness on which the stamp of suffering is still visible. He is breaking bread that he will share, though he has no further need of nourishment— a divine gesture that is at the same time an utterly human one.

One that got away

One of the last depictions of the Emmaus theme comes not from Rembrandt himself but one Arnold Houbraken, who made a print in 1718 after a now-lost work of the master. In this version the disciples have finally recognized Jesus, and they stand frightened and astonished before the chair from which he has just vanished. One would give a lot to see how Rembrandt actually rendered that, how the chair itself and the light around it reflected the Deus absconditus, and the disciples themselves the experience of miracle.

It may stand, perhaps, as his final comment on the paradox of attempting to depict the ineffable. In our happily secular age, one simply dials up central casting for Jesus— a Jeffrey Hunter, a Willem Dafoe, a Jim Caviezel. And why not, if even George Burns can play God?♦


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.