New DIA exhibit explores Rembrandt's unconventional approach

If you were an artist in northern Europe in the middle of the 17th Century and wanted to paint a picture of Jesus, what would he look like?

You likely would have given him light-brown hair, perhaps with blond highlights, a high forehead, pink-tinged cheeks, a long, thin nose, narrow lips and a faraway look in his eyes. These traits were drawn from standard images rooted in Byzantine sources and the apocryphal "Lentulus letter" that detailed Jesus' appearance in such phrases as "hair the color of a ripe hazelnut," "no wrinkles or marks on his face," "the most beautiful of all mortals."

What you would not have done is what Rembrandt van Rijn almost certainly did in the 1640s, which was to find a young Sephardic man in the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam where the artist lived and paint his portrait based on real life. Rembrandt created a naturalistic Jesus, with dark hair and dark complexion, a lower forehead, wider face and brow and gentle eyes that meet a viewer's gaze.

This radical redefinition of Jesus in Western art -- its origins, development and meaning -- stands at the center of "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus," an astonishing, often breathtaking exhibition opening today at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Rembrandt transforms the image of Christ from a figure of godly measure and heroic suffering into a more human-scaled embodiment of divine spirituality.

Organized by the DIA with the Louvre Museum in Paris and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus" includes 64 paintings, drawings and prints, 52 of them by Rembrandt and his immediate circle. While the show is not large compared to the DIA's previous blockbusters devoted to Van Gogh or Degas, it packs an intense wallop borne of its tight focus, meticulous scholarship and, not least of all, because it delivers a number of masterpieces that rarely travel, among them the landmark "The Supper at Emmaus" lent by the Louvre.

The Dutch-born Rembrandt belongs on the shortlist of the greatest artists in the canon, and the DIA chronicles his flowering genius as expressed through the singularly potent subject of his depiction of Jesus.

As the show reveals -- and DIA curator emeritus of European paintings George Keyes and Philadelphia's then curator Lloyd DeWitt emphasize in their trenchant individual essays in the hefty, first-rate exhibition catalog -- more conventional portrayals of Jesus echo through Rembrandt's earlier works: Jesus raises his hand emphatically in the 1632 engraving and etching "The Raising of Lazarus" and he appears light-haired and shallow-featured in the major painting "Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery" (1644) from the National Gallery of London.

But in the seven remarkable small oil sketches of the heads of Christ that Rembrandt and his studio began producing around 1648 -- and which form the nucleus of the exhibition -- a new vision emerges. Here is a realistic Jesus wearing a contemplative expression evoking goodness, compassion and a richly textured inner life.

He is both the picture of a man meditating on quotidian existence and an object for a viewer's own quiet meditation. He appears to not be providing answers but, like us, seeking them. On the deepest frequencies, Rembrandt's Jesus is the embodiment of the Dutch master's search for the meaning of Christ in a language as mysterious and profound as religion itself -- the language of art.

The Louvre's serene "The Supper at Emmaus," one of several works illustrating the post-resurrection moment in which Christ is recognized by two of his disciples, immediately before he disappears in a flash of light, crystallizes the transformation. The painting is displayed next to the DIA's "Head of Christ," attributed to Rembrandt, whose tilted head and visage have long been recognized as a study for the Louvre's painting.

As Keyes writes in his essay, the painting culminated Rembrandt's "increasing sense of quietude" in depicting religious subjects. Christ's subtle radiance marries with the restrained reaction of his disciples and the simple architectural setting to create a scene of striking tranquility. What a contrast to the anguished suffering portrayed in the paintings by Rembrandt's contemporaries Guido Reni and Valentin de Doulogne shown in the opening gallery as examples of the Catholic house style.

The Louvre's "Supper" is far from the only stunner, and while the paintings are the flashiest pieces, the pleasures of the works on paper are often just as rewarding. Take your time, look closely. The seminal "The Hundred Guilder Print" ("Christ Preaching"), seen in an extraordinarily fine impression from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogs all of Rembrandt's gifts -- virtuoso draftsmanship, masterful storytelling, innovative use of light and shade, compositional subtleties and the ability to wring maximum emotion with a minimum of fuss.

Like all of the DIA's special exhibitions these days, "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus" is aggressively installed and interpreted. It's organized thematically and offers a full battalion of silent video projections, photo screens, a sprawling tabletop relief map of the Amsterdam in which the artist lived and generous, generally smart labeling that offers a deep dive into individual pieces of art, Rembrandt's sources and influences, his innovations and several broad cultural narratives.

Still, there are times when the bells and whistles overwhelm the sublimity of the art, and it's a relief that the key central gallery boasting the seven heads of Christ and the Louvre's "Supper" unfolds with greater restraint and intimacy, which intensifies their knee-buckling beauty and drama.

Given that the DIA recently devoted an exhibition to exploring issues of authenticity in the museum world, it's a little surprising that the current show ignores the fact that there is no consensus on whether Rembrandt or his students were primarily responsible for the heads of Christ. The catalog essays, by contrast, include a summary of heroic forensic work by a team from Philadelphia and make a strong case that at least some of these heads, including Detroit's, are Rembrandt autographs.

The exhibition is particularly strong on placing Rembrandt in the social context of Dutch society -- the wealthiest, most mercantile and cosmopolitan and the most religiously tolerant in Europe at the time. Jews were not restricted to ghettos and were allowed to worship freely.