Head of Christ

This intimate depiction of Christ’s face relates to the moment from the Gospel of John when Pilate presented Christ to the jeering crowd with the words “Ecce Homo” (Behold the man). Christus treats the head like a portrait by surrounding it with a fictive frame, thereby underscoring the physical immediacy of Christ. Christ’s Passion was a particularly popular devotional focus in the Netherlands during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In his Imitatio Christi of about 1425, Thomas à Kempis encouraged piety based on imitating Christ’s life and Passion through daily prayer. This devotional surge resulted in the production of paintings that evoked compassionate reflection on Christ’s suffering. This painting derives from the lost Holy Face by Jan van Eyck, now known only through copies: one from 1438 (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), and two dated 1440 (Groeningemuseum, Bruges, and formerly J.C. Swinburne collection, Newcastle-upon-Tyne). Like Van Eyck’s image, Christus’s version includes a fictive frame, with an inscription. It is also similar in the frontal presentation, the direct gaze of Christ, and the cross-shaped, floriated nimbus behind Christ’s head. The furrowed brow and trails of blood which run down his forehead, neck, and chest differ from the Eyckian prototype (Sperling 1998). Both the Holy Face and the Head of Christ relate to a group of miraculously created images of Christ’s face, known as acheiropoetoi, which includes the image on Veronica’s Veil. Christus uses a similar depiction of Christ in his Man of Sorrows painting, dating to 1444 (City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham). Christ’s visage corresponds with the description of his appearance in the apocryphal Letter of Lentulus—supposedly written by Publius Lentulus to the Roman Senate, but which actually dates from the thirteenth century. To demonstrate the perfection of Christ’s face as described in the Lentulus letter, Christus used Pythagorean and Neoplatonic ideals, basing the structure of the head on the intersection of the circle and the square, with the distance between the eyes providing the base measurement (Ainsworth 1994). Infrared reflectography has revealed a ruled underdrawn line running down the center of the face, demonstrating the importance of symmetry to its proportions. Infrared reflectography did not penetrate the blue-green background, and the only other underdrawn lines of the painting show some subtle changes in the neck opening of Christ’s garment and some slight contour lines below the eyes. This image is painted on parchment, laid down on an oak panel, which was pared down to a sliver and remounted onto a mahogany support. Despite being on parchment, it is not likely to have been cut from an illuminated manuscript. The original dimensions must have been somewhat larger, so that the entire illusionistic frame would have been visible. Holes, which are now filled, are regularly spaced around the edge of the parchment. This may indicate that it was once tacked to a panel that could be hung on a wall or handheld for contemplation. An example of a wall-mounted Holy Face image is found in the background of Christus’s Portrait of a Young Man of about 1450 (National Gallery, London). The Met’s painting is somewhat abraded, making the inscription at the bottom of the painted frame mostly illegible. It is believed to have been the artist’s name. Maryan W. Ainsworth 2012