6
THE LIKENESS OF JESUS
The argument of this book has been that modern Christianity, sometimes reduced to an intellectual state of mind or volition, can be described in terms of visual practices that unfold on, outside of, and within the body. For instance, we saw a picture of Saint Francis in chapter 1 conforming the gesture of his body to that of the crucified Jesus (see figure 3); in chapter 3, images that the faithful exchange and display; and in chapter 5, images that nurture a concept of the nation as a religious dispensation that joins a people in a common purpose. In this chapter we will consider images that join the imagination to physical images, as people envision the appearance of Jesus. Viewers imagine the Jesus they know even though they have never seen the man himself.
Judging from the endless number and variation of devotional portraits of Jesus, one of the most familiar acts of imagination among Christians over the last two centuries has been to picture the appearance of their savior. Images such as figure 44 are so ordinary in the age of mass-production and the ubiquitous format of the portrait that it seems unremarkable to see Jesus pictured in this way. But it is worth estranging the practice in order to recover how extraordinary it is. Jesus, it is safe to say, never sat for a portrait. And no one within nearly two hundred and fifty years of his lifetime ever seems to have presumed to draw or paint his actual likeness. Not even a literary description of him survives, although there is a late medieval tradition still in circulation that offers a contemporary literary account of the appearance of Jesus; figure 45 is a late nineteenth-century French example. The text purports to be a description of Jesus’s face by an eyewitness, one Publius Lentulus, governor of Judea, writing to the Roman Senate.1 Although there is no record of such a man and the letter itself dates to the fourteenth-century, when portraits of Jesus had become part of European visual piety, the artifact remains fascinating for putting into circulation a description that matches the preceding tradition of portraits of Jesus.2 In Figure 45 we see an artist’s rendition of the description. The French text actually departs from the older tradition of the letter by stating “I send you this portrait . . .” But which portrait? The textual description or the image of Jesus floating above the text? The reader is not told, which allows word and image to intermingle in a powerful act of mutual validation. And this is how the letter had long been visualized—as text and image in tandem. The text must be true because it describes the image; the image must be true because it resembles the text.
FIGURE 44
Warner Sallman, Head of Christ, 1940, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Warner Press.
In fact, of course, we have no idea what Jesus looked like. Yet there is no shortage of images that millions of people instantly recognize. Why do Figures 44 and 45 look like Jesus? We might easily set beside them dozens of other images made in very different times and places, put to use among people who believed dramatically different things about the identity and purpose of Jesus of Nazareth, yet we would find that many viewers, Christian or not, American or European or not, would recognize the person as Jesus. How is that so? There must be some mental operation, some process of imagination, at work that relies on imagery both mental and material to cue recognition.
FIGURE 45
Unknown, True Portrait of Our Lord Jesus Christ, late nineteenth century, lithograph (Paris: Lordereau, Rue St. Jacques). Photo by author.
A historical approach to the problem seems in order, since one answer to the question of how people “recognize” Jesus is that they have seen his picture before. There is in fact a bulging archive of such images, stretching back many centuries and forming a long chain of portraiture. In some sense, of course, what else could recognition imply? The question then becomes, what are people recognizing—Jesus or a long lineage of portraits of him? We may begin with a simple but relevant fact: images of Jesus tend strongly to bear a family resemblance. Since no one who ever saw him recorded his likeness, it must be the case that images of Jesus share what has come over time to be regarded as his features. In other words, a set of characteristics—a long face, large eyes, somber expression, shoulder-length hair parted in the center, short, slightly forked beard, and a broad, uncovered forehead—have congealed into an abiding formula for representing the face of Jesus.
Yet this explanation is not entirely satisfactory. Many other people have become recognizable in enduring iconography—Saints Peter and Paul, for example, or Saint Francis—but these images do not sustain the exuberance and passion of likeness that people insist on in the case of Jesus. Fidelity to an established formula seems to matter in a distinctive way when it comes to the likeness of some cultural figures. For Americans, for instance, the portrayal of figures such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln has undergone a broad cultural vetting that settled on characteristic costume, hairstyle, body gesture, and facial appearance. Departing from the standard invites a negative response, or mere confusion regarding identity. Every schoolchild knows what George Washington looked like. The image that fails to deliver the canonical type will not be recognized or, if it is recognized, will meet with objection and possibly dissatisfaction. Such likenesses belong to cultural literacies and national imaginaries. For this reason they are able to operate as popular icons in mass communication, socialization, and entertainment. Understanding more about this will help us grasp how religious believers distinguish between what really looks like Jesus and what is no more than an artist’s conception of his appearance—and why they won’t hesitate to assert with confidence that an image fails to resemble him. This confidence is remarkable. In such images, people see a face that is more than a face. It is Jesus, someone they have never seen yet feel they know intimately. They see someone whom they believe, trust, adore. They see their salvation, they see their comfort, they see the face that launched two thousand years of faith. They see the man they have always known and loved, because they see the face of the soul that spoke the wisdom that they believe, the person who felt and experienced the moral genius that has guided their lives. Clearly something is at work in their vision that is about more than eyes. The visibility of Jesus—his appearance, his recognition, the gravity, allure, and power of his face—depends fundamentally on history, on sociality, and on the intricacies of visuality, which includes imagination as well as images and visual practices.
One way to think of imagination is as the mental invention of images that are purely fantasized. But imagination as a faculty of daily use is not sealed off from sensory experience. It is a form of mental activity that works very closely with sensation. While the province of neuroscience is to probe the circuitry and operation of brain transmissions and electro-biochemical interactions among neurons, the historian and scholar of visual culture may contribute to the understanding of visuality by scrutinizing the subtle relations that physical images enter into with internal imagery as it occurs in visualization and memory. For it is well known that people intermingle the two domains of imagery, substituting photographs for memories they could not otherwise possibly possess, or seeing in a vision the very picture of Jesus that they have hanging on their bedroom wall. Physical imagery may be a kind of scaffolding over which people drape and form mental images, and mental images may be a shorthand that comes to stand in the place of the actual images that people seek to remember. The two domains bear a symbiotic relationship with one another. Neither is fully autonomous, neither complete without the other. We do not live inside of our heads, but in a constant colloquy among feeling, memory, and cognition, on the one hand, and the world of objects, other people, and environments, on the other. Whereas cultures, especially religious cultures like Christianity, might wish to interiorize consciousness, sealing the human person off from the outer world as if within a cloistered, fortified inner world, the biological and social reality is that human flesh is a porous boundary that does as much to coordinate and integrate “inner” and “outer” as to segregate the two. One of the powerful things that a religion does is to configure the fleshly delineation of the two domains, coding emotion, sensation, feeling, fantasy, imagination, intuition, intellection, and bodily functions and behavior (defecation, eating, bathing, sexuality) in such a way that they reinforce integration or segregation, as the case may be.
I would like to define imagination generally as the mental and bodily practice of thinking and feeling in sensations such as imagery, sound, or touch, in order to grasp or envision what one literally may not behold. Imagination uses sensation to transcend it, to fill in the gaps, to provide what is missing or is not otherwise accessible, to glimpse what one fears or desires, or to envision what is only partially, or not at all, visible. The sensations put to use are coderivative, coming from outside the body as well as from within it. As a manipulation of images, imagination is therefore an integration of mental and physical imagery that allows us to see what is unknown, unseen, past, absent, or never directly experienced. But I want to stress that I do not limit imagination to images and vision. Obviously, musicians who compose scores hear tones in their minds. Dancers feel their bodies move within their minds. Moreover, embodiment is a process in which all forms of sensation intermingle. We rely on seeing the person who is speaking to us because it strengthens our ability to hear by confirming additional information, namely, that the individual is speaking to me, that he is, or is not, angry, frustrated, happy, accusative et cetera. Human communication and understanding rely on the integration of sensations. This means that seeing, hearing, and smelling are not absolute forms of sensation, operating in isolation, but are enfolded in one another as well as in other aspects of human embodiment such as posture, gesture, dress, or gender ideals. Yet for the purpose of this study, it is important to say that my interest lies in the visual operations of imagination.
THE NATURE OF LIKENESS
Several years ago an anthropologist friend and I stopped by the visitors center of the LDS (Mormon) temple in Westwood, California. We were welcomed by a full-size reproduction of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s monumental 1838 statue of Jesus, situated within a sunset panorama. The statue was a replica in resin of the Danish sculptor’s marble Christus, which stands above the central altar of the Church of Our Lady (Vor Frue Kirke) in Copenhagen (figure 46). A recorded voice in the visitor’s center was activated as we approached. It was impossible not to recognize the figure. His face bore the physiognomic formula to which I have already referred: a solemn expression, a slender, symmetrical face, broad forehead, short, forked beard, shoulder-length hair split in the middle. And if that weren’t enough, the figure spoke in a majestic voice in response to our presence. The monumental size of the sculpture was surprising, and its placement within a cloudy apse unfamiliar. And his amplified voice was something we’d never encountered. But these features could not overcome the greater weight of the recognizable appearance. There was no doubt who this was. Likeness is always a compelling ratio between conformity to expectation and divergence from it. There was enough strangeness in the ensemble to make it a little weird and quite memorable, but not so much that we were stumped as to the figure’s identity.
FIGURE 46
Replica of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s Christus, 1821–33, in the visitors center, Los Angeles California LDS Temple. Courtesy of COR / Intellectual Property, Church of the Latter-Day Saints. Photo by Allen Roberts.
We were then met by a young woman who warmly welcomed us and promptly commenced a tour. We took the opportunity to ask her many questions, especially as we approached a large reproduction of a painting of Jesus by Del Parson, a much-loved Mormon artist famous among members of the Church for this picture in particular. “This,” our guide told us, “is the famous portrait of Jesus.” My friend and I were intrigued and asked her why, in view of the countless images of Jesus produced over the ages, the church embraced this one so fondly. She thought about it for a moment and then replied to our surprise that it showed what Jesus really looked like. When we asked her how Mormons could be sure of the likeness, she told us that the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a “prophet, priest, and revelator,” and that in this office he had been privileged to speak with Jesus face-to-face on many occasions, which meant that he was able to describe to the artist what Jesus looked like.3
FIGURE 47
James Tissot, The Holy Face, 1886–94, opaque watercolor over graphite on paper. Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.
Hearing this, I thought of the long history of stories that have anchored images of Jesus to eyewitness accounts (such as the letter of Publius Lentulus, see figure 45), of the tradition of Saint Luke as artist (see plate 1), and of miraculous events that produced images such as the sacred xerography that issued in the Mandylion of Abgar (see figure 1), the Veil of Veronica (figure 47), and the Shroud of Turin. Our guide was giving us a modern version of a very old story in which a human portrayal of Jesus is corrected by someone who knows from firsthand experience what Jesus looked like. Many images of Jesus, such as those linked to Abgar, Luke, and Veronica, involved angelic intervention as a supernatural agency certifying the authenticity of the image. Parson’s picture bore the testimony of a prophetic human eyewitness. In this view of likeness, the image looks like Jesus because of an authorizing account of its origin. It looks like him because it was miraculously fashioned from his very face. One sees in the image the repetition of the original.
Whether it’s the authoritative nudge of an angel’s hand, the informed report of a man who talked face-to-face with Jesus, the letter of a contemporary describing the face he saw, or a piece of cloth that served as matrix to record the imprint of that face, the history of belief concerning the appearance of Jesus seems to be about likeness to the real thing. What does that mean? In the visual traditions of devotion to Jesus, likeness consists of at least three modes, which may work individually or sometimes together.
LIKENESS AS REPETITION
First, the resemblance between an image and a prototype may be based on features they share. The image is an ontological echo of the original, consisting of contour and shape lifted from the prototype and deposited in the image. James Tissot’s painting The Holy Face (see figure 47) displays an instance of this: the cloth, viewers understand, was handed to Jesus as he approached Calvary, his face bloodied by the ordeal. Tissot shows the imprint of the face on one side of the cloth, and even the reversed images of Jesus’s handprints, pressed on the cloth’s opposite side as he held the fabric to his face. The resulting image is a direct copy of his face and hands. In the visual piety of such likeness, repetition is not the loss of being, as Plato maintained, but a registration that maintains a substantial connection to its source. Yet the image is not its original, but a trace of it. As John of Damascus put it, “An image is a likeness depicting an archetype, but having some difference from it; the image is not like the archetype in every way.”4 This is why he could argue that the veneration of Jesus’s image was not idolatrous worship of the material support of the image, but worship of Jesus himself. Painting was not a mindless aping of surfaces, but an ontological operation of transposition.5 Thus the honor given to an image passes to its archetype, since the image shared in the being of the archetype without fully instantiating it.6
The idea is clearly expressed in the Chludov Psalter’s well-known illumination of Psalm 69, showing an iconoclast about to plunge an icon of Jesus into an urn of whitewash (figure 48). We see that the medallion-portrait exactly echoes the image of Jesus on the cross, just above it. This parallel clearly suggests that abuse of his image was the same as abuse to him, and the Psalm calls down divine punishment on both those who abuse the figure whom Christians understood to be Jesus, and on latter-day abusers of his icon, according to Orthodox iconodules. The handle by which the iconoclast grasps the icon imitates the spears used to taunt the crucified figure. Even the urn is repeated by another at the foot of the cross. The visual argument is the same one that John of Damascus had asserted in the previous century: the icon is a repetition of the original that leaves something of it behind while carrying something of it. This ontological ratio of likeness is clearly at work in the story told by Pliny the Elder of the Corinthian maid who traced her lover’s profile: in the morning he was gone, but he had left something of his being behind in the contour on her wall.7 This mode of likeness always wants to become more, to morph into the thing it replaces. The Corinthian maiden may stroke and kiss the contour just as an Orthodox Christian cherishes an icon of Our Lady or of Jesus. In figure 1, for example, the face of Jesus floats like a shimmering medallion before the creased cloth held by angels, suggesting that the face as material presence is not continuous with the cloth, but hovering before it. Tissot’s image reveals the tendency for the image to become its original: we note that the artist has included the suggestion of Christ’s pupils in the image’s eyes, a detail that could not possibly have resulted from his pressing the fabric to his face. But the image conforms to the desire that motivates it, pushing beyond itself as a copy, yearning for identity with its prototype. Yet defenders of sacred images might argue that this very yearning is what allows the image to convey the devotee’s veneration to the saint or to the savior himself.
FIGURE 48
Crucifixion of Jesus, Psalm 69, Chludov Psalter, ninth century. Photo courtesy of WikiCommons
LIKENESS AS EMULATION
The second form of likeness results from a powerful drive to emulate an archetype, that is, to become like the prototype. This reverses the order of the first mode of likeness, in which the image derives from its exemplar. In the second case the image seeks to liken itself to the model. This is familiar to anyone who has watched a child behave like her parent, mimicking demeanor, posture, dress, or forms of expression. The child wants to be like the parent, and is encouraged to do so in many ways by her parents. Gender roles seek to imprint behaviors and self-imagery, but emulation is also widely observable in birds and higher mammals. Whether human or otherwise, the young, the novice, the immigrant, and the underling are drawn to emulate the behavior of those with higher status or authority as a way of becoming like them, being included with them, learning how to receive recognition and approbation. Membership in the social body of the group requires emulation.
The same quest for likeness occurs in various ways in religious life. Children and novices are taught to embody suitable gestures and utterances, rhythms and dress in religious practices and ceremonies. The discipline of the group is embedded in the body, shaping flesh and bone to the social body of belief such that one behaves religiously under certain circumstances, often without thinking about it. Emulation is also a powerful way of imaging self as other, and thereby joining the holy or sacred to one’s body. In late medieval and baroque Christian asceticism, for example, some sought to pattern themselves somatically after the image of Jesus. In paintings of the stigmatization of Saint Catherine of Siena, the crucifix imprints the wounds of Jesus into the saint’s flesh, in a constellation of rays streaming from image to body. The same occurs in Giotto’s portrayal of the stigmatization of Saint Francis, conforming the mortal to the prototype and enabling the human devotee to participate in the sufferings of Jesus (figure 49). In every case, the drive for likeness is the desire for self as other as self. This intimate intermingling of selves in an embodied imaging produced an experience of presence that was pivotal for centuries of monastic devotional life.
FIGURE 49
Giotto di Bondone, Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, circa 1295–1300, tempera on panel. Courtesy of Scala / Art Resource, NY.
LIKENESS AS AFFINITY
The final type of likeness is especially important for Protestant visual piety. For many Christians, the likeness of Jesus presents not so much how he looked but what he was like. In this regard, likeness is the recognition of an affinity between Jesus’s appearance and what believers know, feel, or see within themselves about him. This aspect of likeness is the perception of an intimate connection that devout viewers feel between Jesus and themselves, but that connection is affinity, not identification, as in the previous forms of likeness. This mode of likeness turns on Jesus’s ethnic, gendered, or affective resemblance to those who look at him. The difference between emulation and affinity becomes evident when we discern that, in the first case, many believers are drawn to become like Jesus in kindness, obedience, or suffering; in the second, others seek such visual features as race or masculinity that make him like me or my kind, but not identical to me. In this latter sense of likeness, the case of affinity, devotees are drawn to an imagined meeting point, driven by the desire for access to the Jesus they want. That access to knowledge of his character is coded in his appearance: his look signals his likeness, or what he is like, by indicating the basis for the viewer’s connection to him. Likeness by affinity means sharing a social body with Jesus, a collective look—a masculine body, a white body, a black body, a Catholic body, a Protestant one.
The quest for likeness in its various guises may recall for some David Hume’s characterization of religion as inherently idolatrous, expressing what Hume considered “an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.”8 No doubt Hume is correct that human beings widely engage in anthropomorphism. Yet it also seems true that imaging Jesus as a member of one’s own ethnic or social group is not necessarily an idolatrous reduction. By seeking to know what Jesus looked like, the viewer may be asking what he was like as a person, since knowing what he was like reveals his accessibility and his attitude toward the viewer. The meeting point in this important mode of likeness may turn on sectarian identity, on personality type, or on ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality—anything that announces how Jesus is to be approached and what the likelihood of his response will be. Some African Americans, for example, may want to know if he shared their features, since a Black Christ will reward their sympathies; whites may gravitate toward the European conception of a Jesus who bears their physiognomy; while Asians may be strongly inclined to envision a Jesus who looks like them, as the Chinese artist Tsui Hung-I did in his image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd (figure 50). The artist has drawn on the visual vocabulary of classical Chinese techniques of ink-on-silk painting, recalling, for instance, in the faint silhouette of the sharply descending mountain slope the work of Song Dynasty landscape painters. Jesus is a mountain recluse who cares for his flock. He is unmistakably Chinese, a kind of Taoist sage with a halo. A Western commentator pointed to the painting’s “soft shades characteristic of Chinese work,” but also felt constrained to acknowledge that “the artist was probably not very well acquainted with sheep. He has drawn the fat-tailed ones of Mongolia, even so one goat would seem to have strayed among them.”9 The writer reveals the balance of sameness and difference that makes up the dynamic of recognition. To Chinese viewers, Tsui Hung-I offered a portrayal of an originally non-Asian deity in a familiar style, costume, and setting, enhanced by using Mongolian sheep. Yet non-Chinese could recognize the image, too, by virtue of the theme and the characteristic likeness signaled by the long hair, beard, and demeanor of the gentle shepherd.
FIGURE 50
Tsui Hung-I, Christ the Good Shepherd, before 1939, ink on silk. Photo by author.
THE ETHICS OF LIKENESS
Is it inescapably racist—or ethnocentric, sexist, or simply narcissistic—for people to seek a Jesus who resembles them? The answer must be yes when the point is to exclude others or to enforce a hierarchy of access. If Jesus must be white (or black) because God prefers the white (or black) race as his chosen people, or tasks them with the mission of saving the world, it is difficult not to see the resemblance as serving to privilege one group over others. Race easily becomes the principal imaginative category for envisioning divine presence and work in history and the world.10 Nationhood, as we saw in the last chapter, is another category for installing divine preference in social affairs and political ideology. When the sacred comes packaged in race, gender, nation, or ethnicity, the prospects for bigotry and social hierarchy are perhaps inevitable. Yet these are among the most pervasive forms in which human beings sort themselves into the social groups that bestow on them their collective identities. Religion, nationhood, political ideologies, language, social hierarchies, and castes as well as historical narratives contribute to maintaining group formation. The wispy neural imagery that forms the mechanics of imagination can become Blake’s “mind-forged manacles.”
But a white Jesus or a black one, an Asian Jesus or a Jewish one is not necessarily racist or ethnocentric. Human beings sort themselves into various social bodies based on elective affinity, which certainly includes but is not limited to practices of oppression and privilege. Blacks tend to associate with blacks more than with whites, Protestants more with Protestants, Jews more likely with Jews. Women likely have more female friends. Gays frequent gay bars more than straights do. Does that mean they hate straights or are insensitive to them? Is someone born and raised in a racially homogeneous setting justly accused of bigotry for displaying an image of a Jesus that reflects her upbringing? These are uncomfortable questions to ask because unconsciousness of race, gender ideals, and ethnicity so readily feeds prejudice and discrimination. And any act of self-representation can be easily transformed from an emblem of group pride into an expression of hauteur. A hair’s breadth can separate distinction and superiority.
By the same token, images exert a formative influence, and can affirm hierarchy and difference by promoting group identity in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, and creed. Seeing Jesus as a white man reinforces the collective imagination of him as white, which for white people means “like us.” The imaging of Jesus reminds us that the pervasive drive evident in visual piety is to enhance the intimacy of the connection with one’s kind, since religion is a social pattern, a visceral relation to kin, tribe, people, nation. It is crucial to grasp that the connection to Jesus always involves a strong aspect of sociality, the quest for affinity, rather than being purely personal, as many Evangelicals, on the one hand, and mystics are the other, are apt to assert. The Christian mystical tradition has long prized a union that stresses the loss of the self in the countenance of the divine, whereas Evangelicals seek what they call a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” It seems quite likely that all three modes of likeness delineated here are often intimately interwoven in Christian experience, making it very difficult to discern where love for tribe ends and love for savior begins. We must bear this complexity in mind if we are to understand the visuality of Jesus’s collective appeal.
The personal and the collective can even be identical. The modern ethos boasts an ideal of individualism, giving importance to civil liberties, individual choice, personal style, and the desire to be different, to resist the tendency of joining the crowd. But the myth of individualism becomes apparent when one looks at popular media like television or social media like Facebook. These settings reveal a strong disposition to place oneself in affinity groups, generational cohorts, and consumer trends. Life in mass culture seems to thrive on seeking out one’s place within shared subcultures of style—seeing the same movies, watching the same YouTube videos, listening to the same music, wearing the same style of clothing, driving the same models of cars, even naming one’s children the same names as those among whom we imagine ourselves to belong. People like to think of themselves as individuals, but what that word tends to delineate is not the idiosyncrasies of a particular individual as much as the difference between one’s cohort and another. For example, it is still common for art world denizens to wear black. Recognition of group membership requires some form of uniform, insignia, or signage. To be seen as a member of the group is more important than trying to signify one’s distinction within the group in a large social milieu like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, since all that most people know about the art world is that it is an exotic domain of people who dress the same, go to galleries, live in lofts, and cultivate the collective look of an alternative style. Clothing, hairstyle, piercings, tattoos—all of these or whatever may be their equivalents today or tomorrow announce: “I am not like you, I am not conventional, I am not bourgeois. I am different.” Put another way, this signage says that “I belong to a different tribe, so don’t confuse me with your people.” Likeness very commonly means likeness with the people to whom I belong, or aspire to belong.
If artists have a look at any given moment, so do businesspeople, suburban parents, Iowa farmers, retired people, college professors, and so on. We signal the social body to which we belong by virtue of the look we share with its other members. Attending to this keeps our status current. I am persuaded that something of collective style applies to the history of imaging Jesus because likeness is a social construction of shared features that mark off social bodies—the groups that actually do more to define human features than the modern ideology of individuality can ever claim to do. Differences within group are much less pronounced than differences from nonmembers. Indeed, often one must be an insider to discern the subtle distinctions that separate the status of one member from another.
But how does this apply to Jesus? It suggests that the matter of his likeness pertains as much to viewers as it does to him. Some Catholics prize the Sacred Heart as speaking from and to their tradition (see figure 20). Many Protestants recognize Sallman’s Head of Christ as a seal of authentic Protestant faith (see figure 44). Some Catholics and Protestants distributed the image in the 1940s and 1950s as part of an effort to identify America as a Christian land in opposition to godless Communism. One Indiana businessman who handed out free copies of a pocket-sized reproduction of Sallman’s picture of Jesus declared that card-carrying Communists needed to be met by “card-carrying Christians.”11 The American Legion also publically displayed the image, suggesting that the social body to which recognition of this Jesus belonged was patriotic Christian America. The likeness of Jesus was his likeness to white Americans, and his whiteness may have mattered a good deal to many. Mormons also knew what their Jesus looked like. When the leadership of the Latter-day Saints wanted the church to be seen as Christian by non-Mormons, they began to display reproductions of Thorvaldsen’s statue of Jesus (see figure 46), and perceptions of the faith had indeed have moderated over time. Moreover, the Mormon imaginary itself has accommodated to Thorvaldsen’s image of Jesus. One Mormon scholar studying the appropriation of Thorvaldsen’s statue among Mormons—copies of it appear in nearly a dozen visitor centers in the United States and abroad—has pointed out that familiarity with the statue among the faithful is so great that when Mormon tourists visit Copenhagen and see the “original” they often wonder why the Danes have a Mormon Jesus looming above the altar of a Lutheran church.12
As obvious as the social function of Jesus’s likeness may appear in these remarks, it is important to note that this dimension is readily masked in devotional practice, where the strong tendency among both Catholics and Protestants is to cultivate a private or personal connection to Jesus. Protestants, in particular, concentrate into Jesus the many possibilities at work in Catholic devotional relations to Mary and the saints. In both cases, devotees long for a tender figure who is accessible and affirming. If Catholics feel that is not available from Jesus, they find it in Mary, Francis, or another saint. Protestants, for their part, want to know that Jesus was the sort of person whom they can feel encouraged to approach and trust. What he looks like must comport with his personality. For the Protestant Christology of friendship, in which devotional life rides on the intimacy of a personal relationship, it is not difficult to recognize the importance of this mode of likeness. This is what many admirers of Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ told me in letters that they found so moving about the image’s portrayal of Jesus.13
But the issue of likeness for social creatures such as human beings is always already social. Each of the three forms of likeness we have examined is triggered by images, by seeing in the likeness of Jesus a compelling connection to the viewer’s person and body, but also to those of other viewers, and to a shared history of seeing. The three varieties of likeness—the repetition of the prototype, the drive to emulate the model, the quest for affinity—bring the image of Jesus to life not only for the individual, but also for the group. Recognition is a social operation no less than a personal one. Thus, for example, Tissot’s image of the Holy Face poses Veronica holding the image before her own face (see figure 47). This is just how the image is still used today during Holy Week celebrations from Brazil to Italy, where hand-made versions of the Veronica are unfurled before the faithful as the person performing the role of Veronica sings her famous song, concealing herself behind the image she unrolls, as the audience beholds the revelation of the Holy Face.14 Tissot presented the image, in other words, in the liturgical setting of a popular devotion, lending the image a likeness that is not only recorded in the image, but staged in the event of its devotional use.
THE ARCHIVE AND THE MECHANICS OF RECOGNITION
Tissot’s picture helps to explain how people experience the likeness of Jesus in one or more of the ways I’ve outlined without any hope of securing the prototype image. The legend of Veronica and others like it notwithstanding, it is worth repeating that no one actually recorded Jesus’s appearance, although in the dense history of his likeness, believers have honored as authoritative a large variety of images.15 How is it that a likeness without an original can exist and operate so compellingly? The three modes I have sketched go some distance toward answering this question, suggesting that people find in each image what they want to find there, be it repetition, emulation, or affinity. But there is something important to learn in the visual procedure that helps construct a likeness without an original. Historical, legendary, and mythological figures who are venerated through cult imagery usually enjoy large archives of images that devotees have produced and used over time. A process of nomination repeats itself from generation to generation in order to cull from this archive the features that comprise the figure’s appearance. We can see this at work in the history of images of Jesus, where a physiognomic formula was established early and reiterated over time. The result is an archive of images that draw on and refer to one another and in doing so construct an archetype, an ideal image that is a collective representation of the whole. The power of the visual archive, subtle and intuitive, consists of its operation as a selective database, acting very much like a canon, a regulated body, or a list that exerts authority. The archive is at work often in a very tacit way when viewers react negatively to an image of Jesus that does not comport with the archive’s intuited rules: a fat Jesus, an ugly Jesus, an erotic or excessively effeminate Jesus, a Jesus whose ethnic or racial features depart substantially from the norm or rule. The repulsion people feel is a visceral reminder of the archive’s normative impact.
The history of images of Jesus is not, of course, of one mind. Images produced from the third to the sixth centuries in Rome and Ravenna shows us that Jesus has been visualized in very different ways, as a beardless young man, for example.16 In spite of this early plurality, before the end of the first millennium a general formula had emerged and come to shape artistic practice and devotional preference such that Jesus tended strongly to be remembered in a way that renewed itself by virtue of iteration. Thus, most images of Jesus occupy a vast web of interpictorial allusions and emulations. We see this very clearly down to the present. I began with the case of Del Parson’s 1983 image, which I saw in the visitor’s center at the Los Angeles LDS temple. The claim that the artist consulted with the president of the church body for first-hand corrections to his image is urban legend.17 The actual source of the image is evident when we compare Parson’s picture with one painted in the 1920s by Charles Bosseron Chambers (1883–1964), Head of Christ.18 The urban legend, still widely repeated among Mormon faithful who admire the portrait, serves to conceal the fact that the artist clearly looked to the archive of images for his source. Popular visual piety is full of such reworkings. Another example is the well-known picture of Jesus by Warner Sallman (see figure 44), who also drew on a particular model to create his image, in this case a late nineteenth-century French painting that had made its way to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (figure 51). Such appropriations are driven less by theology than by piety and perceived suitability. Mormons, for example, may deliberately harvest images from the Christian archive that broadly assert their reliance on the tradition as a way of affirming their Christianity. Chambers was a Catholic artist and Thorvaldsen a Lutheran.
FIGURE 51
Léon Lhermitte, The Friend of the Humble, 1892, oil on canvas. Gift of J. Randolph Collidge, courtesy of Museum of Fine Art, Boston.
THE MODERN TURN: REMBRANDT’S PORTRAIT TYPE
Beyond the matter of the particular features of Jesus’s face is the equally important question of the format of modern likenesses of Jesus. Images of Jesus in the modern era, whether paintings, film stills, or lithographs, typically assume the head-and-shoulders format. This convention owes a good deal to the history of devotional icons of Jesus and of the saints, to the influence of such icons on late medieval European devotional painting, and to the history of portraiture, from oil painting to commercial photography.19 The portrait format became synonymous in the twentieth century with personal identity—in the form of passport and driver license photographs, but also in wanted posters, glamour stills of Hollywood stars, and high school and college class annuals.20 We can add to this the tradition of commemorative busts as a genre tasked with monumentalizing a salient aspect of the sitter’s character or personality. But for the study of the portrait image of Jesus in the modern era, the source most responsible for the format may have been Rembrandt and his studio, who marked a crucial departure from tradition, fashioning a new approach to the quest to represent what Jesus was like (plate 9). A remarkable series of images by Rembrandt and members of his studio from 1648 to 1656 engaged in the search for the human personality of the sitter, not his divinity. This is a modern quest, and Rembrandt was in its vanguard. The art historical claim for the Jewish identity of the model of some of these images of Jesus goes back at least to Erwin Panofksy in a lecture of 1920 and has continued to be confidently asserted.21 Others followed Panofksy in making the observation, but there is very little documentary evidence to bear it out, though there is enough to demonstrate that possibly Rembrandt and certainly some of his contemporaries had conceived of the idea of portraying Jesus by using a Jewish model.22 In pictorial terms, Rembrandt and his studio turned away from a long tradition of images showing Christ’s majesty, authority, redemptive work, origin, and nature, all of which depended on symbolic devices to convey their abstract meanings. Portrayals of Jesus traditionally relied on iconography (halo, cross, banner, book, instruments of his passion, or other references to biblical narratives or events, or to devotional practices associated with the Via Dolorosa) in order to identify him and to signal his power, redemptive significance, and the particular way in which viewers might approach him.
The work of Rembrandt’s studio suggests a dramatic shift from this tradition. Some of the images have been firmly attributed to Rembrandt, so I’d like to suggest that it was Rembrandt himself who selected a format that focused on the face as the site of a person. These images of Jesus operate as portraits. They convey a personality, a man whose character is meek, inward, feeling, accessible, humble, and pure. The images invite the viewer’s careful inspection, and they consistently do this by addressing the viewer at eye level. They are not large images (all are roughly 10 by 8 inches), and they vary from one another in terms of angle of vision. Taken together, they compose a group whose purpose we do not know, other than to say they show a searching investigation of the subject of Jesus’s face and bearing, on a very intimate scale. The result is an intimacy and directness that has continued to appeal, both in these images themselves and in a massive number of modern images of Jesus that make use of the same format. Viewers do not look up to Jesus in this series, but straight at him, creating a proximity that also suggests familiarity. And yet, if these images of Jesus recognize the fact that he was Jewish, and therefore unlike his Christian viewers, Rembrandt was thereby all the more innovative in conceiving of his subject’s particularity. This difference takes the historicity of Jesus seriously, endowing him with a new kind of concreteness or reality. It favors the third form of likeness, affinity; it fulfills the desire to know what he was like, stopping short of the empathetic identification so important in late medieval Catholicism, and authorizing instead a Protestant sensibility of Jesus as historical personality. His Jewishness is what made him historically particular, and shorn of the traditional accouterments of doctrine and devotion, the images from Rembrandt’s studio push the ratio of likeness in a new direction.
Yet if Rembrandt was forward-looking in this respect, he had to keep his audience with him, so innovation had to accommodate the inertia of tradition. As we already noted with Tsui Hung-I’s painting of Jesus (see figure 50), likeness is always a balancing act between the unique and the familiar. If Jesus looked too unique, no one would recognize him. So Rembrandt was careful not stray too far from the rule of the archive: it is evident that his portraits rely on the canonical conventions of Jesus’s physiognomy worked out in the history of images. His Jesus looks like the one described in the letter of Publius Lentulus (see figure 45). Rembrandt appropriated a contemporary trend in showing Christ in an emotionally engaging close-up, head-and-shoulders format, with his eyes addressing the viewer.23 This type of portrait deployed the same physiognomic tradition as sacred art since the fifth century CE, but also relied on the late medieval devotion to Christ’s passion, as evident in pictures of the Veronica and the Ecce Homo. This iconography was designed to show the suffering, humiliated Christ, scourged and victimized for humanity’s sins, and intended to inspire both emulation and empathy. By eliminating that most traditional indication of Jesus’s divinity, the trinimbus, or three-pronged halo, Rembrandt set aside the most familiar way of recognizing Jesus. The halo had come to symbolize the aura or countenance of divine presence. People looking at these images knew that Jesus was different from others by the sense of presence he commanded—and by his halo. But without the halo, how were viewers to recognize Jesus? Rembrandt relied on his physical features alone, as promulgated by visual tradition. As a result, the portrait quality became the registration of Jesus’s personality. Rembrandt could be said to have psychologized the traditional image type, infusing the face with the human person rather than relying on the symbols of deity to imbue Jesus with presence. He took the face of Jesus from the liturgical setting of the Veronica and the Via Dolorosa and relocated it before the viewer as a contemporary person. This invested in Jesus a new form of presence, making a man who occupied the same psychic space as his viewers.
VISUAL QUESTS FOR THE AUTHENTIC JESUS
Rembrandt and his studio contributed to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century preference for portraying Christ in a head-and-shoulders portrait format that highlighted direct engagement of the personality instead of the use of traditional devices to convey theological meaning. The impact on latter-day portrayals is unmistakable. The most commercially successful images of Jesus in the last century have been those, such as Sallman’s portrait (see figure 44), that eliminate symbolism and doctrinal allusions for the sake of foregrounding what is to many pious viewers a “likeable” looking fellow. People respond very personally to these images, seeing in them the person they like, with whom they feel deep affinity, but not identity. In these images they also report encountering a likeness that is, at least for them, in their own words, “photographic,” that is, authentic, the real thing.24
The quest for authenticity drew on psychological effects, but also often on claims to historicity, an impulse that arose in the course of the nineteenth century when modern biblical scholarship was joined by archaeology in initiating a search for the historical Jesus. Many artists in the nineteenth century made the effort of visiting Palestine to observe geography, botany, meteorology, archaeology, costume, and people first hand. The French artist James Tissot was one of these. He produced a large number of watercolors and pencil studies while in Jerusalem and in the countryside as far north as Galilee. Tissot, a Roman Catholic who underwent a revival of his religious faith, assembled hundreds of images to illustrate his own two-volume edition of the life of Jesus. He intended his project as an intervention in the Western artistic tradition, which had produced a sacred art that indulged artistic style and individual fancy at the expense of religious authenticity. “For a long time,” he explained in the preface of his book project, “the imagination of the Christian world has been led astray by the fancies of artists; there is a whole army of delusions to be overturned, before any ideas can be entertained.” To do so, he insisted that study on site had allowed him “to trace back from . . . modern representatives through successive generations the original types of the races of Palestine, and the various constituencies which go to make up what is called antiquity.”25 When we examine the Jesus that Tissot created, as in the picture reproduced here, Jesus Teaches in the Synagogues (figure 52), we find a mixture of new and familiar, unconventional and conventional. On the one hand, Tissot strongly affirmed Jesus’s Jewishness by showing him in a synagogue, reading Torah, wearing the prayer shawl, surrounded by the accessories and details of Jewish ritual life. On the other hand, the slender profile of Jesus’s face in this picture does nothing to suggest a physiognomy that departs from the European Christian tradition. The many images of Jesus in Tissot’s book confirm the white, European identity of Tissot’s Jesus. He has blue eyes, reddish hair, and presents the physiognomic formula that we have noted: long face, large, deeply set eyes, somber demeanor, shoulder-length hair parted in the center to display a broad forehead, beard parted in the center.
Orientalist painting in the nineteenth century had already established the “authenticity” of exotic clothing, Near Eastern architecture, and indigenous models. The work of Gustave Doré, published in Bibles and religious books since the 1860s, had accustomed European and North American viewers to the visual vocabulary of Orientalism, which contemporaries associated with the world of Jesus. But the quest for what we might call biblical verité did not extend to the desire to capture the likeness of Jesus. Nearly all of Tissot’s portrayals of Jesus show him in a narrative mis-en-scene, in scenarios described in the Gospels and imbued with the drama of Jesus’s ministry, trial, and execution. Tissot’s Jesus took his place within a painted version of the lantern slide or stereographic essay, a kind of multipaneled panorama of the exotic world of ancient Palestine. But what contemporaries wanted in portraits of Jesus, in the head-and-shoulders close-up, was the man they knew, not the ancient Jewish teacher who had lived in a culture and society dramatically different from their own. Tissot offered them this Jesus of faith in the face he portrayed, but not in the ethnographic scenography that he compiled during his trips to Palestine. Archeological authenticity was not the same as psychological and ideological authenticity.
FIGURE 52
James Tissot, Jesus Teaches in the Synagogues, 1886–96, watercolor over graphite on paper, Brooklyn Museum 00.159.81. Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.
In the age of photography, what Jesus looked like gripped the popular imagination with a new urgency.26 Critical studies like those by David Friedrich Strauss and Ernest Renan, which pointed out the many contradictions and frequent unreliability of biblical texts, had launched a quest for the historical Jesus. But this was of less relevance to many Christians than securing a compelling image of the savior, that is, one that spoke to the present in a powerful way. The matter of his appearance meant more about how he would relate to the present world than what he looked like two thousand years ago. For those who lamented that fewer boys and men were interested in churchgoing and religious matters than women, a key feature of Christ’s desired appearance was a manifest masculinity. For others, Jesus ought to bear maternal qualities; still others looked for a mystical and spiritualized Christ, one who could transcend the materialistic obsessions of the “Gilded Age” of the late nineteenth century. American Protestants were genuinely conflicted about the issue of Christ’s appearance. There was no shortage of imagery—the last decades of the century saw dozens of volumes on sacred art appear as well as many engraved and lithographed portraits in popular circulation. At the same time, however, one finds prominent figures such as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher dismissing the possibility of a satisfactory portrait of Jesus.27 Moderns behold Jesus, Beecher claimed, through the lens of history and reputation. The historical Jesus was not accessible.
The reasons keeping a compelling modern portrayal of Jesus out of reach were legion, according to contemporaries. In 1899, the Christian periodical The Outlook (formerly Christian Union), under the editorship of the Reverend Lyman Abbott, published the results of a survey of leading clergy in New York City. Several Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish clergy were asked if the face of Christ in ancient and modern art realized “your idea of a strong face.” That the very question skewed response is evident in most answers. For example, Reverend John Chadwick, pastor of the Second Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, answered with a summary “no,” then added acerbically: “The majority of the paintings (and I have seen hundreds in the European galleries) suggest a personality almost as lackadaisical and gelatinous as the literary Christ in General Wallace’s ‘Ben-Hur.’”28 Chadwick went on to dismiss the work of Tissot and the Hungarian painter Mihaly Munkácsy, two of the most recent and widely celebrated purveyors of historical theatricality in portraying the Passion of Christ. According to Chadwick, both well-known artists failed to “break with the conventional type.”29 In spite of Chadwick’s dismissal of the painter’s work, Munkácsy’s large canvas Christ Before Pilate had garnered widespread affirmation from Christian clergy during its public display in Manhattan in 1886–87 and the acquisition of Tissot’s biblical imagery by the Brooklyn Museum met with acclaim from the public and from Christian clergy in 1900.30
Others, such as the Reverend Dr. Charles Cuthbert Hall, president of Union Theological Seminary, echoed Beecher’s point that the God-man could not be adequately represented.31 Rabbi Gustav Gottheil, of Temple Emmanuel-El, said he had never seen “a picture of the being called Saviour of the world in which strength was a marked feature, or even indicated.” But this was only natural, he pointed out, since that Savior “was not a man of flesh and blood, but the creation of theological fancy and dogmatic construction.” Rabbi Gottheil noted a further problem: an image of Jesus “must of necessity be the portrait of a Jew with his racial characteristics deeply sunk in his face; and would not this be a shock to Christian sensibilities?”32 Henry Ward Beecher had focused on the passage of time as preventing modern Christians from understanding the ancient figure of Jesus in historically visual terms.33 The rabbi’s observation suggests that the inability to find an adequate image of Jesus may have arisen because to do so would mean gazing upon a Jewish face.
The Reverend Brockholst Morgan, of the Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society, first objected to what he called “the mistake of all painters, ancient and modern, [which] is the effeminacy of feature and untrueness to the race to which Christ as a man, belonged.” But if he began by asserting the manliness of Jesus’s Jewishness, Morgan turned in the next instant to long for an image of Christ that transcended race in the manner of contemporary composite photographs: “Were it possible to conceive what has never been painted, it would be a composite face belonging to no special race nor country, for Christ is the ‘Son of man’—that is, of all humanity—not Jew, not Roman, not Italian nor German, but enfolded in all races and all conditions in his one humanity.”34 A Unitarian clergyman expressed the very opposite view of such composite imagination, rejecting most images as portraying someone “weak and unmanly.” “If we know anything at all about him, it is that he was a Jew, but the pictures generally might be those of a person of any nationality, or no nationality at all.”35
It appears that a genuinely historical Jesus, a Middle Eastern, Jewish, and ancient figure, was something that many nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christians avoided or preferred not to imagine because such a visual conception did not speak personally to them as modern, ethnically European believers. This suggests that modern American Protestant visual culture pivoted on a mirroring operation: what believers sought when they looked at Jesus was not a man rooted in a time and place far away, but someone who resembled them; a savior whose ethnicity and race were shared with devout viewers and whose conception of strength, moral ideals, and beauty registered their connection with him. The likeness they looked for, in other words, was a likeness of Christ to themselves. But it is important to note that this likeness was not simply a mirror-image, not mere narcissism. The result was a visual negotiation between viewer and representation, between present and past, familiarity and difference. The portrait of Jesus facilitated this negotiation much better than the full-blown historical picture, which mounted an epic theatre of spectacle and picturesque detail, but in doing so forfeited the personal immediacy and totemic command with which viewers experienced the head-and-shoulders portrait.
This approach to the likeness of Christ has remained characteristic of modern visual piety. As we have seen, Warner Sallman’s portrait of Jesus (see figure 44) took the likeness of Jesus from a French tableau depicting the Supper at Emmaus (see figure 51), and reconstructed it as a head-and-shoulders portrait that looks more like contemporary photographic portraiture in college or high school annuals than traditional devotional imagery. The result was a portrait in the very modern sense that viewers admired for its intimate presentation of the man they knew. They frequently expressed their fondness for the way in which Sallman painted the image—the soft, radiant glow, the highlights in his hair and around his head, and particularly in his face. People have seen there what they want to find, as one informant wrote to me in a letter:
There is something more about Warner Sallman’s pictures that makes me feel . . . when I see them that this artist had felt Christ’s presence when he made the images . . . and you can feel Christ’s presence . . . conveyed . . . to you through his images. From the image of the head of Christ I see righteousness, strength, power, reverence, respect, fairness, faithfulness, love, compassion. From the way the hair in the image is highlighted in the back and [the] highlights around the front of the head and face there seems to be a Holy radiance emitted from the image, depicting the qualities mentioned above.36
The image was reproduced hundreds of millions of times over the decades following its appearance in 1940. The USO distributed pocket-sized versions to American GIs going to Europe and the Pacific during World War II. The publishers offered it in numerous forms, from buttons and cards to clocks, lamps, illustrated bible covers, and devotional literature, and most widely as framed, inexpensive pictures to hang in bedrooms, living rooms, and Sunday School rooms, and to place on desks. Missionaries took this image of Jesus with them to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. For over two decades, it reigned as the unrivaled image of Jesus in the commercial marketplace in the United States until new images arrived showing a more youthful Jesus, such as Richard Hook’s 1964 head-and-shoulders portrait of a hunky Jesus with a rough beard, fetching grin, and shaggy head of hair. During the 1960s and 1970s. Hook’s image came to appeal more to young people, who began to see Sallman’s picture as belonging to the generation of their parents, or worse, grandparents.
SKEWING THE RATIO: WHEN LIKENESS IS DIFFERENCE
But the second half of the twentieth century eventually witnessed a challenge even to the portrait mode itself. Viewers and artists alike searched for portraits that pushed beyond the prevailing racial, ethnic, and gender assumptions of Christ’s likeness to find new paradigms, although they largely kept with the established format of the head-and-shoulders portrait. In 1999, the National Catholic Reporter ended its international competition for a Jesus of the new millennium by selecting as winner a painting entitled Jesus of the People, by Janet McKenzie (figure 53). The image clearly departs from the tradition of depicting Jesus, so much so that many viewers may not recognize him. The indeterminate gender, dark skin and African features, the robes (which appear more like liturgical vestments than biblical garb), and the yin/yang symbol and black eagle feather all limn a different Jesus and conform little to the conventional expectations about Christ’s appearance. These choices were made deliberately, in part because the artist herself has lamented that she “realized that my nephew, a mixed race African-American of 9 or 10 living in Los Angeles, would never be able to recognize himself in my work,” which had consisted largely of white women.37 This lack of connection is what she wanted to change. But it did not end with race. McKenzie stated that she used a female model for the image in order “to incorporate, once and for all, women, who had been so neglected and left out, into this image of Jesus.” And the Asian and Native American devices were intended to extend traditional Christian themes to broader spiritual values. The National Catholic Reporter reported that “the yin/yang symbol McKenzie said, represents perfect harmony, while the feather connotes transcendent knowledge and also pays homage to Native Americans. The pink in the background, McKenzie said, is both a feminine reference as well as being the color of blood—hinting at both suffering and redemption.”38 The spiritual also included the ecological. A professor of theology saw in the image a celebration that Jesus “existed in a network of relationships extending through the biological community of Earth to the whole physical universe.” Beyond the affirmation of women and people of color, McKenzie’s Jesus “also honors the natural world in which all people are embedded, from which they cannot be separated, and for which they are responsible.”39
FIGURE 53
Janet McKenzie, Jesus of the People, 1999. Copyright Janet McKenzie, www.janetmckenzie.com. Courtesy of the artist.
No less bracing was a visualization of Jesus that appeared a year later in a 2001 television documentary called Jesus: The Complete Story, coproduced by British and American television channels. At the end of the film, an image created by a British medical artist, Richard Neave, appeared.40 It was a striking image that handily subverted expectations, and quickly spread through media. In 2002, Popular Mechanics featured the image in a story about the role that forensics might play in the reconstruction of the face of Jesus.41 Neave, who had taught forensic anthropology at the University of Manchester, modeled the image from three skulls of Palestinian Jewish men from the time of Jesus. Using digital technology to reconstruct soft tissue thickness on the face, Neave applied clay to a cast of one skull, then relied on images from archeological ruins to provide information about the length and style of hair and facial hair. Neave felt encouraged to create an image with shorter hair than the artistic tradition supplies because Saint Paul asserted that nature itself taught that “for a man to wear long hair is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her pride” (1 Cor. 11:14–15).
This gendering in the twenty-first-century forensic artist’s choice about hair recalls the history of gendering that shaped debates over the appearance of Jesus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bruce Barton opened his 1924 best seller, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus, with his memories of the humiliation of Sunday school art, where Jesus appeared in a “sissified” manner. Barton determined to find the manly Jesus that popular pious imagery had denied him. What he claims to have found was something altogether different: “A physical weakling! Where did they get that idea? Jesus pushed a plan and swung an adze; he was a successful carpenter. He slept outdoors and spent his days walking around his favorite lake. His muscles were so strong that when he drove the money-changers out, nobody dared to oppose him!”42 Barton went on to envision a masculine Jesus who was a businessman and civic leader, the sort of character that modern boys and men would find sympathetic and inspiring.
As dubious as this sort of cultural projection may be, it creeps into even the most “scientific” endeavor, such as Neave’s project to find “the real face of Jesus.” The Popular Mechanics article indicates that “the average build of a Semite male at the time of Jesus was 5 ft. 1 in., with an average weight of about 110 pounds.” This is significantly smaller than the average American or British male today. Apparently the difference caused some anxiety because the face that Neave produced was made to reflect a larger man. Further, the writers argued that, “since Jesus worked outdoors as a carpenter until he was about 30 years old, it is reasonable to assume he was more muscular and physically fit than westernized portraits suggest.”43 The replication of critique of the artistic tradition and appeal to the masculine activities of Jesus as registered in his appearance shows the persistence of the social psychology of likeness.
The role of artistic interpretation was not limited to Neave’s conclusions about Jesus’s physique. Another anthropologist questioned the entire project’s accuracy, pointing out that there is great room for artistic discretion in the rendition of soft facial tissue. The result is often that any given work by a forensic artist may exhibit “more resemblance with the other work of the same artist” than to the individuality of the subject.44 In other words, the forensic artist draws on or projects the archive of his own imagery, just as Christian artists draw on and project the archive of previous portrayals of Jesus. But Neave might justifiably reply that he did not intend to produce a portrait of Jesus, but to establish a frame of reference different from traditional artistic models by portraying a male contemporary of Jesus. By envisioning the Jesus he does, Neave offers viewers a visceral reminder of Jesus’s difference and poignant evidence of the sweeping visual assumptions they make about his appearance and what it means.