When Rembrandt looked into the face of his savior, says Dan Neil, he saw his own:
Did Christ really have awesome abs? Western art has frequently stumbled over the contradiction between the ascetic figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the iconography of Christ inspired by the heroic, Hellenistic ideal: Christ as beautiful, tall and broad-shouldered, God’s wide receiver; blue-eyed, fair-haired, a straight aquiline nose, Christ as European prince.
Rembrandt van Rijn, in a career rich with artistic innovation, begged to differ. A new exhibition at Paris’s Louvre museum—and coming to Philadelphia and Detroit later this year—shows in dozens of oils, charcoal sketches and oak-panel studies how the 17th-century Dutch painter virtually reinvented the depiction of Jesus and arrived at a more realistic portrait.
(Via: TitusOneNine)
May 11th, 2011 | 12:19 pm
I dearly love Titian’s Entombment. But it does look like it could be called The Death of Hercules.
I think the article overstates and simplifies the case a bit. For instance,Velasquez’s Christ on the Cross (1632) is not so far from what Rembrandt was doing. I could think of many other examples. Maybe I’m thinking of the contrast between Neo-Platonic idealism and post-Caravaggio realism, but perhaps the point of the exhibit is that Rembrandt goes further, deeper, and greater.
The blond soft Jesus of mid-20th c. Sunday school literature has now been replaced by cartoon Jesus–sort of Garfield style, without the draftsmanship.
May 12th, 2011 | 12:25 am
Any basis for assuming that Jesus was small and thin ?
May 12th, 2011 | 10:17 am
Any basis for assuming that Jesus was small and thin ?
I actually find this question extremely distracting. We imagine Jesus to be not only small and thin, but also to have a particular skin tone, a particular hair style and color, and so on.
And I get caught by the question, “Did he really look like that? What did he really look like?”
And then, from there, “Does it matter? Why does it matter?”
May 13th, 2011 | 9:09 am
[...] Rembrandt re-invention of Western iconography of Christ. [...]
May 13th, 2011 | 9:09 am
[...] Rembrandt re-invention of Western iconography of Christ. [...]
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