August 11, 2011

During a brief visit to Paris last month, I encountered the exquisite dilemma shared by droves of tourists: I have one day to "see the Louvre." I entered the Pyramid-topped central complex ready to beeline toward a wing I had never visited and commence the absorption process. My mission halted abruptly along with my steps in front of a surprising traveling exhibit: "Rembrandt and the Faces of Jesus." At the art Mecca of the City of Lights, so dubbed in honor of a legacy of Enlightenment religion rejecters, the last thing I expected to see as the current headliner was the face of Christ. I could almost hear Voltaire and Rousseau turning in their graves.

Across Europe, most cathedrals function as architecture and stained glass showcases instead of devotional settings. In France, faith is largely sidelined and disdained. Yet, in the heart of Paris, visitors flocked to Rembrandt's visual meditation on the humanity of Christ; though I cannot offer proof, I submit that Rembrandt's work catalyzes unexpected responses in people, religious and non-religious alike. Culture wars and secularization aside, Christ still fascinates us.

The first wall inside the Rembrandt exhibit introduced the unique collection with a scene at the 50-year-old featured artist's home: "Reduced to bankruptcy in his house in Amsterdam in 1656, Rembrandt watched clerks draw up an inventory of his belongings. Counted among the possessions are pictures depicting Christ." In his preface to the exhibition's corresponding book, Rembrandt and the Faces of Jesus, Seymour Slive writes of the most intriguing, revealing, and mysterious items named among the insolvent genius's belongings:

Among the paintings in the room identified as "behind the parlor," which was his bedroom, were two by our artist of heads of Christ. Included in the list of works in his small studio is an unattributed "Head of Christ, done from life."

The Dutch phrase "nae 't leven," meaning "after life" or "from nature" has vexed art dealers and historians since this discovery. What could Rembrandt mean by this notion of painting Christ from life? We can find a clue in Rembrandt's objectives and style, and his sharp departure from the backdrop of tradition behind him.

Informed by scriptural truth, Rembrandt longed to render a true-to-life Jesus who might abolish idealized templates that had come to symbolize Christ for centuries. Throwing off statuesque, graceful, and clichéd patterns, he sought embodied hints toward a plausible God-man depiction. Rembrandt produced his Christ "from life," studying and painting the faces of his Jewish neighbors in Amsterdam.

A stroll through the Louvre's galleries, decked with works by Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Titian, and the like, offers a clarifying contrast to Rembrandt's Christ and heightens the impact of Rembrandt's revolutionary project.

Exhibit 1: Botticelli's 15th century "Madonna and Child with St. John" lullabies Western sensibilities into an ephemeral religious daydream of sorts. Golden locks cascade gracefully over the porcelain foreheads of mother and child, surrounded by ethereal halos. Elegant garments drape over luxuriously rounded bodies.

Exhibit 2: Titian's "Supper at Emmaus," a version of one of Rembrandt's favorite subjects, makes no attempt to represent the Biblical scene feasibly. The piece's archetypal Christ sits with companions before a white-cloth-topped table reminiscent of Da Vinci's "Last Supper." Set with Italian decorations fashionable during the artist's time and Eucharistic elements implying centuries of established church tradition, the table pays no mind to the story's setting in first-century Emmaus.

Around 1629, Rembrandt painted his now-famous "Supper at Emmaus." Christ, the focal point on the right side of the intimate scene appears as a dark profile – a silhouette against the warm light of an out-of-view candle. Christ is at once dark and bright, inscrutable yet starkly outlined.

According to his custom of highlighting Christ's impact on those around him, Rembrandt sheds the most direct light on the ordinary human being who has drawn near to Christ the disciple seated across from Jesus at the rugged dinner table. The stunned fellow leans away with saucer eyes, and hands helplessly held up in front of his chest, mid-gesture. He recoils with palpable shock. Utterly disoriented, exposed, and stripped of all comfortable assumptions, he draws the viewer into his up-close glimpse of the mysteriously revealed Christ.

Rembrandt's unique depiction, according to George S. Keyes in his essay "Perception and Belief The Image of Christ and the Meditative Turn in Rembrandt's Religious Art," focuses the narrative on the beholder's response to the presence of Christ, and means to trigger wonderment and meditation as the "human mind and soul behold" the miraculous before their eyes, in present human affairs—in this case, in the midst of a simple dinner.

The scene presents Christ in the midst of the disciples' time-space-bound maze of everyday life, one that acknowledges the press of immediate reality, down to the imperfections in the wall next to the table. The painting suggests that Jesus' being, apart from heroism or dramatic demonstration, "compels reverence by his very existence in the mind and the imagination of the beholder," writes Keyes. The embodied savior's presence here in earthy reality is "an affirmation of goodness" in the deepest and most basic ways. This is the kind of Christ who doesn't just live in the painting—he's the kind of Christ who stays with you when you go for a baguette sandwich in the café, re-enter the bustling Seine bank, and board a plane back to America. Rembrandt's Christ, a pointer to the living Christ, didn't leave Paris the way he found it and he's only begun his world tour.

Now, those of us stateside get a turn to see Rembrandt's work closer to home. The exhibit has migrated from the City of Lights to the City of Brotherly Love. It opened August 3 for a two-month stay at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; a stop in Detroit will follow in November.