While the blockbuster remains beloved of the general public and finance departments, it is simply too expensive to mount given rising insurance and shipping and the ever-growing reluctance of lenders. (It is worth noting that the huge DeKooning retrospective that just opened at MOMA occupies an entire floor, consists of nearly 200 works, and was described in the opening paragraphs of two reviews in the NY Times as being "exhaustively comprehensive, exhaustingly large and predictably awe inspiring" and "...[including]more than $4 billion worth of art: an enormously costly group of works to transport and insure, making it perhaps the most expensive exhibition in the institution’s history.")
The Philadelphia exhibition is far more modest in every respect but the one that counts: it is an illuminating reexamination of an icon nearly everyone thought he already fully understood.
Prior to Rembrandt, the traditional ways of understanding the face, indeed the whole figure, of Christ were based on officially approved sources, which included two holy relics that were considered miraculous "true" images of Jesus not made by human hands: the face on Veronica's Veil and the Mandylion (a cloth that Christ was believed to have pressed to his face).
A third reference used by artists was the Lentulus Letter believed to have been written by a fictional person, Lentulus, a governor of Judea before Pontius Pilate. In it, he described Jesus as "...a man of medium size (statura procerus, mediocris et spectabilis); he has a venerable aspect, and his beholders can both fear and love him. His hair is of the colour of the ripe hazel-nut, straight down to the ears, but below the ears wavy and curled, with a bluish and bright reflection, flowing over his shoulders. It is parted in two on the top of the head, after the pattern of the Nazarenes. His brow is smooth and very cheerful with a face without wrinkle or spot, embellished by a slightly reddish complexion. His nose and mouth are faultless. His beard is abundant, of the colour of his hair, not long, but divided at the chin. His aspect is simple and mature, his eyes are changeable and bright. He is terrible in his reprimands, sweet and amiable in his admonitions, cheerful without loss of gravity. He was never known to laugh, but often to weep. His stature is straight, his hands and arms beautiful to behold. His conversation is grave, infrequent, and modest. He is the most beautiful among the children of men."
That image had long been defined by the Mandylion of Edessa, a piece of fabric thought to contain a direct impression of Jesus’ face. Northern European painters like van Eyck took their cues from this Byzantine icon, and from apocryphal sources like the Lentulus letter: “His hair is the color of a ripe hazelnut, parted on top in the manner of the Nazirites, and falling straight to the ears but curling further below, with blonde highlights and fanning off his shoulders.”
It is thought Rembrandt was among the first to see Jesus as a Middle Eastern or Semitic face, possibly taking as his model a young man from the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam. where the artist lived. The idea of setting biblical figures and stories in local, familiar surroundings was not new. Northern European artists from the Gothic to late Renaissance had frequently painted biblical scenes using local costume and landscape.
It is thought these conventions owed less to a lack of familiarity with historical examples or worldly travel than to the impetus to make their subjects more relevant to local audiences. Surely many of these artists and their successors including Rembrandt knew of classical references from paintings and sculpture they'd seen. And even if all art were local, which it was not, artists adhered strictly to the canons when rendering the face of Jesus. Why, then, did Rembrandt break rather dramatically with these conventions?
Rembrandt never made the sojourn to Italy that many Northern European artists did. Indeed, he never left Holland. Living in Amsterdam at precisely the moment when it became the mercantile center of the globe, he let the world come to him. As such, artistic trends and worldly goods were deposited at his doorstop non-stop. The world came to Amsterdam's doorstep in all its worldly forms.
Having delighted in a cornucopia of goods being unloaded on the wharves of Amsterdam -- rugs from Asia and Asia Minor, ceramics from China, exotic maps from newly surveyed lands -- how much of a leap was it for Rembrandt to notice the young men of the immigrant Jewish population of this international city?
Above all it was the obviousness of Rembrandt's choice of a local Jewish model for his face of Jesus that stands out in this exhibition. Why wouldn't this artist who was used to, indeed collected, the exotic and quotidian of the the wide world in the shops of his adopted city look to his neighbors for models? Wasn't the Hundred Guilders Print the group expression of such a process?
