Christ Crowned with Thorns

Guido Reni painted this oval head of Christ on copper in Bologna, probably between 1617 and 1620, and some 15 years later he painted it again. That second version, from the early 1630s, belongs to the Detroit Institute of Arts and is almost exactly the same size. Side by side, the two show how his hand changed. Here the modelling is firm and the contrasts of light are strong, which is why Italian cataloguers count this among his younger works. The Detroit head is painted with a looser, quicker brush. Christ wears the crown of thorns and turns his eyes upward, and the museum reads that gaze as suffering and, at the same moment, an appeal to God the Father. The Detroit copper reached America in 1889, when the newspaper publisher James E. Scripps bought it at Christie's in London.