Exhibit of the week: Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Through Oct. 30

For centuries, depictions of Jesus Christ looked decidedly non-Sephardic, said A.D. Amorosi in the Philadelphia City Paper. “Regal, lean, and blue-eyed, with gently conditioned, shiny hair and an ever-present nobility,” this Westernized image was the standard until Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69) finally imported “an edge of realness” into Christian iconography. With this intriguing exhibit, the Philadelphia Museum of Art makes a compelling case that Rembrandt was a pioneer in depicting Jesus not just as a real human but as an ethnic Jew. “The painter’s smaller, olive-toned Christ looks sullen and beatific, thick-lidded, alert and strong, stoop-shouldered and muscular like the carpenter he was.” Curator Lloyd De Witt goes so far as to suggest that Rembrandt, who lived in Amsterdam’s bustling Jewish quarter, used a neighbor as his primary model.

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As you might expect, said Stephan Salisbury in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “the new Jesus did not sit well with many people at the time.” Jews were seen as heathens, and depicting Christ as a heathen was blasphemous. Even Rembrandt’s students were loath to rock the boat, and some reverted quickly to the “sheaves of sandy hair,” the thin lips, and the “capacious round brow” that Byzantine icons had made de rigueur. This show, which began its world tour earlier this year at the Louvre, represents the world’s first opportunity to view all of Rembrandt’s known images of Jesus together since the 1650s, when the artist declared bankruptcy and “many of his precious possessions were sold to satisfy creditors.” To support the notion that Rembrandt purposefully depicted the founder of Christianity as ethnically Jewish, the exhibit displays his Jesus paintings and prints alongside other portraits he created that have been thought to depict Jews.

Too bad there’s not a shred of hard evidence that Rembrandt truly did use a Jewish model for his Jesus portraits, said Robin Cembalest in TabletMag.org. For some reason, art historians have long sentimentalized Rembrandt’s supposed pro-Semitic tendencies. Tome after scholarly tome has obsessively parsed the artist’s ethnic lineage, his reasons for moving to a Jewish neighborhood, his relationship with Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel—“whose book Rembrandt might have illustrated, whose portrait he may or may not have painted, and who possibly helped with the Aramaic inscription in the artist’s famous Belshazzar’s Feast.” Reading every “soulful, bearded” man in a Rembrandt painting as “crypto-Jewish” propaganda does the Dutch master a disservice. Maybe—just maybe—they’re simply naturalistic depictions of soulful, bearded men.