Testa di Cristo

In the 1640s Rembrandt lived on a street at the edge of Amsterdam's Jewish quarter, and it seems he asked a young man from that neighbourhood to sit for him. Out of those sittings came a small group of studies, about a dozen known today, in which the face of Jesus is drawn from a living Jewish model rather than from the fair, idealised icon Christian art usually reached for. This is one of them, painted around 1648, small and close-to, more the study of a thoughtful young man in soft light than a finished religious picture. It stayed in private hands until 2019, when it was bought for the Louvre Abu Dhabi.