Faces of Jesus: Rembrandt and the incarnation
Two faces fascinated Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) over the course of his long and singular career—his own face and the face of Jesus.
More than 90 self-portraits, spanning almost the entire length of the artist's career, are a visual memoir that is as searching and comprehensive, in its own way, as Augustine's Confessions. Rembrandt's visual meditations on the face of Jesus reflect momentous changes not only in Rembrandt's faith but in how people of his time envisioned Jesus. "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus," at the Detroit Institute of Arts until February 12, 2012 (previous stops were at the Louvre and the Philadelphia Museum of Art), traces those changes by gathering together 64 Rembrandt paintings, etches and drawings that portray Jesus.
In the two centuries before Rembrandt, depictions of Jesus in northern European art followed established understandings of how Jesus should be portrayed. Two of the models for this visual canon, the Veil of Veronica and the Mandylion of Edessa, were supposed to have been miraculously imprinted with the face of Jesus when they were pressed to his face. A third source is the so-called Lentulus letter that, according to legend, was sent by a certain Publius Lentulus to the Roman senate during Jesus' lifetime. The description of Jesus contained in the letter was considered authoritative:
