Christ Blessing

This Christ looks out at you like a sitter in a portrait, and that was the idea. In Memling's day texts were going round that claimed to record what Jesus had actually looked like, the best known a letter credited to a Roman official named Lentulus, which describes long hair parted in the middle and a full beard forked at the chin. The museum in Boston traces the portrait-like conception of this panel to a description of that kind. Memling had painted the same half-length Christ three years earlier, in a panel now in Pasadena, and here he made him thinner, with more hollow cheeks. The left hand rests on the lower edge of the frame, as if Christ were leaning on a windowsill into our space. That frame is the original one, a rare survival for a painting of this age, and the date 1481 is painted on it at the top in imitation gilt numerals. Scholars think the dark background was once a bluish green.