Head of Christ

Early in 1897 Sargent was in Sicily, looking at the mosaics that Byzantine craftsmen had laid in the 12th century in the churches of its Norman kings. He was preparing the next part of his murals for the Boston Public Library, and he copied what he saw. This canvas follows one of those great mosaic images of Christ, with the gold ground, the cross set inside the halo and the open book held at his side, all done in oil. He brought one more thing home from the island. In the library's Dogma of the Redemption, installed in 1903, Sargent used a Latin inscription that runs round the apse mosaic of Christ in Cefalù Cathedral, and he changed a single word. At Cefalù the words have Christ, the maker of man who became a man, judge bodies and hearts. In Boston he redeems them. The canvas came to the museum in 1925, the year Sargent died, a gift from Edward Jackson Holmes, a Boston collector who went on to lead the museum as its director and then its president.