Jesus in the visual arts

Iconoclasm

Given the dominating place the figure of Jesus has had in Western art, it is perhaps surprising that the pictorial portrayal of Jesus was a matter of considerable debate within the Christian church during its early centuries. Thus, whereas 2nd-century theologians such as St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, and Clement of Alexandria repudiated the notion that the divine could be captured in pictorial representations, Pope Gregory I in the 6th century observed that images were the Bible of the illiterate. Theologically, the issue was how to represent the fullness of Jesus’ divine and human natures in any artistic representation of him. Depicting Jesus’ human nature risked endorsing the Nestorian heresy, which held that Jesus’ divine and human natures were separate. Likewise, depicting Jesus’ divine nature risked endorsing the heretical doctrine of monophysitism, which stressed Jesus’ divinity at the apparent expense of his humanity. Along with those concerns, there was a strong tendency within early Christianity to view any representation of the divine as idolatry or paganism, and opponents of the use of images noted the biblical prohibition against them. Another issue was the possibility that pictures of Jesus would encourage certain abuses, such as the mixing of paint from such pictures with the bread and wine of the Eucharist to make magic potions.

The first episcopal synod to provide strong support for pictorial representations of Jesus was the Quinisext Council (692), which asserted that such representations were spiritually helpful for the faithful, declaring that “henceforth Christ our God must be represented in his human form.” The emperor Justinian II promptly had a portrait of Jesus placed on imperial gold coins, though his successors restored the traditional emperor’s portrait. The 8th-century emperors Leo III the Isaurian and Constantine V went farther by inaugurating a policy of iconoclasm, believing that it was improper to attempt to portray the divine. The intense disagreement between those who advocated and those who rejected pictorial images, known as the Iconoclastic Controversy, was temporarily resolved in 787 when the seventh ecumenical council of the church, the second Council of Nicaea, affirmed the legitimacy of images (an additional council in 843 provided permanent resolution after a second wave of imperial iconoclasm). Thus, after 787, both parts of Christianity embraced the theological legitimacy of portraits of Jesus, and what followed was the artistic unfolding of this affirmation.

The Middle Ages through the 19th century

Jesus has evoked a rich artistic tradition in Western culture, one that has spread to other cultures with the global expansion of Christianity in the 19th and 20th centuries. A stunning array of representations of Jesus characterizes the history of European art from the Middle Ages onward. Indeed, religious art, with a particular focus on Jesus, may be said to have dominated European artistic endeavour and aspiration. Although that dominance was traditionally regarded as an indication of the piety of previous centuries, contemporary scholars prefer a different explanation: the Christian church was by far the largest patron of the arts, and the building and decoration of churches throughout Christianized Europe called for the engagement of massive numbers of artists.

In sculpture, Jesus was portrayed primarily in two ways: on the cross and on his judgment seat. His depiction on the cross gave rise to the crucifix (a representation of the figure of Jesus on the cross), which became the pivotal iconographic use of Jesus in the Roman Catholic Church. (Protestant churches, in contrast, have preferred the simple cross.) Portrayals of Jesus presiding over the Last Judgment became a characteristic of the western (main) portals of Christian churches, particularly those constructed during the Middle Ages. Notable examples are the Romanesque cathedral of Vézelay and the Gothic cathedral in Chartres. At the same time, the iconographic portrayal of Jesus as an infant or small boy in the arms of Mary must not be underestimated, nor, for that matter, should the portrayal of the dead Jesus in the arms of his mother, known as the Pietà, be neglected.

Portrayals of Jesus in painting have tended to follow the artistic conventions of the time or to reflect contemporary theological developments. Indeed, one controversial thesis holds that the portrayal of the baby Jesus in the late 15th century—whether in Nativity scenes, on Mary’s lap, or at the Crucifixion—reflects an emphasis on the centrality of the Incarnation in Christian theology. Three themes in painting were particularly important: Jesus’ birth, his death, and his mother. The depictions of the Nativity have a uniform iconographic pattern, including a very young Mary and an aged Joseph, the latter to dispel visually any question regarding his ability to have fathered the child. The Three Wise Men, or Magi, who adored the infant Jesus as the king of the Jews, likewise are shown iconographically to represent three different ages and races of humankind. Other themes in painting were the Annunciation, the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, and scenes from Jesus’ public ministry, such as his healing of the blind man, his raising of Lazarus, his driving the traders from the Temple, the Last Supper, and the women at the Holy Sepulchre.

Those themes have been depicted in various ways. Mary, for example, is generally shown holding the infant Jesus, as in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1513). Paintings of the Crucifixion, however, are much less sentimental. One notable example is Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1515), which depicts Jesus’ body ravaged by crucifixion yet evokes pointedly the Christian message of Jesus’ horrible suffering; originally intended for a hospital, the altar painting may have been designed to provide comfort and solace to the sick. Pieter Bruegel’s Flight into Egypt (1563), and even more so his complex The Way to Calvary (1564), are illustrative of the late medieval and early modern tendency to depict scenes from the life of Jesus in a contemporary idiom. In the latter painting, the centre of the scene, traditionally occupied by Jesus and the cross, contains a huge throng of people apparently going about their daily business. In the painting’s foreground, however, the large figures of grieving women reveal the tragedy unfolding behind them. Radical in its iconography of Jesus is Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1533–41), in the Sistine Chapel, the world’s largest painting, in which a giant beardless and virtually nude Jesus appears to use his muscular body to hurl the damned like an athlete. Other examples include Rembrandt’s Face of Christ (c. 1650); El Greco’s striking The Disrobing of Christ (1577–79), dominated by Jesus’ brilliant red robe; and Peter Paul Rubens’s The Deposition (1612).

Since the 17th century, Christian themes in painting and sculpture have been less prominent than they were in earlier centuries. A number of explanations have been offered for that trend, including the increasing secularization of European society and the emergence in the nobility and the bourgeoisie of a new class of art patrons interested in themes and motifs other than Jesus and Christianity. A related reason may be that, from the 18th century on, few churches were built in continental Europe; thus, the demand for new religious paintings and sculptures declined.

Despite the relative decrease in the production of Christian art, a significant proportion of the painting of the 19th and 20th centuries was concerned with portrayals of Jesus. Camille Corot and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, for example, produced works of thoughtful piety and artistic brilliance. In the mid-19th century the Pre-Raphaelites—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Holman Hunt, together with the French painter James Tissot—painted remarkable canvasses depicting scenes of Jesus’ life. Those romantically idealized works were usually laden with heavy and unnecessary symbolism, as in Millais’s Jesus in the House of His Parents (1850), Hunt’s The Light of the World (1851–53), and Tissot’s more than 300 watercolours of Gospel stories; another example is Fritz von Uhde’s On the Way to Bethlehem (1890). Whereas Tissot sought to place Jesus into his 1st-century Jewish setting, Uhde had the opposite goal—namely, to express the timelessness of Jesus’ story by depicting him in contemporary settings. In his Come, Lord Jesus, Be Our Guest (1884), an iconographic Jesus with a slight halo approaches the dinner table of a Bavarian farmhouse. Uhde’s approach was adopted by his contemporaries Jean Beraud, Odette Pauvret, and Christian Skredsvig as well as by later artists such as Édouard Manet and Paul Gauguin.