EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus

America’s a religious and largely Christian country so an exhibition titled Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus, currently in Philadelphia and soon to travel to Detroit, ought to be a popular hit. It caught my interest because – face it – you know why. As I expected, buried in a mountain of statistics, artspeak and technical analysis, is a jewel of a fact: Rembrandt painted himself as Christ on the Cross! Only once, it seems, but that’s all that’s needed. The writers of the catalogue, of course, are flummoxed, quite unable to explain it. They mention it; illustrate it; and then move on. They fit into two sentences what should take a book. This is what they have to say:

“The face of Christ in a key work connected to the development of that series, Christ on the Cross of 1631, already shows Rembrandt seeking to break from tradition. The face, with its coarse features and defiant expression, bears no small resemblance to Rembrandt’s 1630 print Self-portrait with Open Mouth.”

That’s it. Nothing more. It’s difficult to believe that the organizers of an exhibition about the face of Jesus could reveal such a fact with so little interest but they do.

Now if you know that every painter paints himself and that poetic artists follow the Inner Tradition and not Church dogma, you will not be surprised. Indeed you will have expected it. Still, I’m grateful for their discovery and will expand on their two sentences in the near future.