"Supper at Emmaus" is among the works being shown in "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus.
Posted on 09/04/2011 8:42:12 AM PDT by bronxville
"Supper at Emmaus" is among the works being shown in "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus.
Rembrandt and The Face of Jesus
For as long as I’ve been visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art there has been a small painting called “Head of Christ” (image above, top) in the museum’s John G. Johnson collection of European Art (larger but somewhat oversaturated version here).
It is a small but strikingly beautiful painting, 14 x 12 inches (36 x 31 cm) showing a head and upper torso of a plainly garbed figure, clothing almost fading into the unadorned background, but focusing on a face, obviously that of a real person and not constructed from imagination, painted with exquisite skill.
For a long time the painting was not featured prominently, often tucked away in the corner of a gallery in a modest frame, presumably because its attribution was somewhat in question — at times to “Studio of Rembrandt”, later “Attributed to Rembrandt”. It’s only recently (and I’m not sure how recently) that the attribution has changed to “Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn”, making it the only painting directly attributed to Rembrandt in the museum’s collection.
Even when the attribution was in question, many visitors, myself included, just loved this painting. If it isn’t a Rembrandt, my thought was, it’s the next best thing, a work painted with such skill as to be considered for attribution to the master, and one with an extraordinary subtlety, economy and painterly finesse. The fact that it was often tucked away in an unassuming corner just made it seem that much more of a hidden gem.
Though I haven’t heard it confirmed, it’s my guess that it was the change in attribution that led the museum, in cooperation with the Musée du Louve in Paris and the Detroit Institute of Arts, to mount a new exhibition now on display here in Philadelphia titled Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus.
The exhibition is essentially built around a core display of this painting and six other similar bust-length portraits of comparable size and composition, some attributed directly to Rembrandt, others to the “Studio of”, but all shedding light on and enriching the experience of appreciating the others (images above, third, fourth and fifth down, with detail 6th down).
These have been borrowed from museums in Europe and the US, but the Philadelphia painting is the centerpiece, and the most striking of the group. I was also particularly impressed with this one (image above fourth and fifth down).
Expanding out from there, the exhibition is filled out with paintings, etchings and drawings, both by the master, his students and other artists who painted related portraits of Jesus, into an exhibition of 40 some works. It explores the changing interpretation by Rembrandt and others of the way Jesus was portrayed, something that had been bound by certain conventions, many of which Rembrandt broke by using live models and portraying Jesus as a real individual instead of an idealized icon.
The exhibit highlights this with some earlier examples by other artists but quickly moves into Rembrandt’s own groundbreaking interpretations. Though the exhibition is focused on this theme, and is far from a Rembrandt retrospective, it contains several striking works.
The Louvre contributes its wonderful painting of the the Supper at Emmaus (above, bottom two images). The tablecloth alone in this work struck me as a capsule defense of Rembrandt as one of history’s greatest painters. The reproduction from the Louvre feature on the exhibit, though not bad, still doesn’t to it justice.
http://canandanann.blogspot.com/2011/09/rembrandt-and-face-of-jesus.html
I found the above pictures here...
Um, no:
(earliest extent icon of Christ Pantocrator, sixth century at latest)
And one from Spain from the Romanesque period:
From Hagia Sopha:
And for good measure, one from Sicily:
All pre-Rembrandt.
Rembrandt’s Jesus has a shorter, broader face than the one on the Shroud of Turin. Just sayin’.
Interesting. A priest I once knew in Texas sent my husband searching museums and galleries in England and Scotland for a print of the Supper at Emmaus. We could not find it, and our friend is now deceased. Now, you say that it is at the Louvre. But the picture here meets Fr. Hall’s description of the painting that had moved him so much when he was a Seminarian.
Agree, Davids posting of pre-Rembrandt portrayals are a lot closer.
That’s a wonderful story. I only got to watch a minute but will finish when I get back from Mass.
That one looks like Rod Stewart with brown hair.
Indeed. Modern man just cannot conceive that the Christian civilization did not start sometime in 15c.
This story ties into Akiane's painting of Jesus.
"I just finished reading “Heaven is for Real.” I am thinking that the Akiane Prince of Peace is very similar to the man in the Turin Shroud. STURP and now the Shroud Science Group with all its scientific books and journals cannot begin to match the power of this story. Four-year-old Colton Burpo left the hospital operating room and went [to] heaven where he saw Jesus. Later, he confirmed that Jesus looked like the Akiane Jesus. The Akiane Jesus looks like the Turin Shroud."
Akiane’s Jesus, Heaven is for Real and the Man in the Turin Shroud
“Heaven is For Real” The little boy who went to Heaven was always being shown pictures of Christ. And he’d find something that wasn’t right. The painting you posted was the only one that struck the little boy as Christ, his eyes and his image.
Amazing thing is what a young girl, 12ish, painted this portrait.
There’s a crucifix in Lucca, I think, that’s at least this old and the image is similar. The eyes bulge a little, and the face is much closer than anything Rembrandt did.
Yes, that’s the tie-in. Didn’t she paint the portrait of Jesus at the age of eight?
Local legend has it that this crucifix was carved at the time of the Crucifixion by Nicodemus and that it arrived in Lucca miraculously in 782. (Source, also see Holy_Face of Lucca)
The St. Catherine monastery's Savior, however, is considered the oldest image that survived the Iconoclasm:
The oldest known surviving example of the icon of Christ Pantocrator was painted in encaustic on panel in the sixth or seventh century, and survived the period of destruction of images during the Iconoclastic disputes that twice racked the Eastern church, 726 to 787 and 814 to 842, by being preserved in the remote desert of the Sinai, in Saint Catherine's Monastery.[6] The gessoed panel, finely painted using a wax medium on a wooden panel, had been coarsely overpainted around the face and hands at some time around the thirteenth century. It was only when the overpainting was cleaned in 1962 that the ancient image was revealed to be a very high quality icon, probably produced in Constantinople
Yes, that’s it. Thank you.
Even more amazing if she was only eight as it is an excellent painting.
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