Testa di Cristo

Rembrandt lived on the edge of Amsterdam's Jewish quarter, and in the late 1640s he did something almost no painter before him had dared. Instead of copying the idealised, often fair-haired Christ handed down for centuries, he hired a young dark-haired Jewish man from his own neighbourhood to sit for him and painted Christ from a living face. This small panel is one result. The head is lit softly from one side and turned a little downward, closer to a quiet portrait than a holy image. When Rembrandt went bankrupt in 1656, the inventory of his belongings listed a picture described as a head of Christ, done from life.