The New Testament tells a story of Jesus becoming a mountain climber. The artist Raphael has a collection of the Hallwyl Museum.
Leer en espaol.
The portrayal of Jesus as a white, European man has come under renewed scrutiny due to the legacy of racism in society.
As protesters called for the removal of Confederate statues in the U.S., activist Shaun King suggested that murals and artwork depicting "white Jesus" should come down.
His concerns about the depiction of Christ and how it is used to uphold notions of white supremacy are not isolated. Prominent scholars have called for a rethink of Jesus' portrayal as a white man.
I study the evolving image of Jesus Christ during the European Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" and Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" are some of the best-known depictions of Christ.
The most-reproduced image of Jesus is from another period. It is a light-eyed, light-haired Head of Christ from 1940. This picture was marketed by a former commercial artist who created art for advertising campaigns.
The Head of Christ came to be included on everything from prayer cards to stained glass, as a result of partnerships with two Christian publishing companies.
The tradition of white Europeans making and distributing pictures of Christ in their own image has been ended by the painting of Sallman.
In search of a holy face.
The brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee is what Jesus likely had. Nobody knows what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime, and while the Old Testament Kings Saul and David are called tall and handsome in the Bible, there is little indication of Jesus' appearance in the Old or New Testaments.
The Good Shepherd. Joseph Wilpert is a man.
The Book of Psalms claims that the coming Savior was more fair than the children of men, while the Old Testament prophet says he had no beauty or majesty.
Concerns about idolatry led to the emergence of the earliest images of Jesus Christ. They were more interested in clarifying Christ's role as a ruler or as a Savior than in capturing the actual appearance of Christ.
Christian artists used syncretism to indicate their roles, because they combined visual formats from other cultures.
Daily deep knowledge. Sign up for The Conversation's newsletter.
The most popular syncretic image is Christ as the Good Shepherd, a youthful figure with no beard and based on pagan representations of Orpheus, Apollo and Hermes.
Christ wears the toga in depictions of the emperor. The theologian Richard Viladesau believes that the mature bearded Christ, with long hair in the "Syrian" style, is a descendant of the Greek god Zeus and the Old Testament figure Samson.
Christ is a self-portraitist.
The first portraits of Christ were believed to be self-portraits, which were not made by humans.
The word is apoietos. The gallery is in Moscow.
The belief that Christ healed King Abgar of Edessa in modern-day Turkey is based on a legend that dates back to the seventh century A.D.
The volto santo, or "Holy Face," is a legend that was adopted by Western Christianity between the 11th and 14th centuries.
These two images are part of a tradition about the true image of Christ.
The artifacts reinforced an already standardized image of a bearded Christ with shoulder-length, dark hair.
European artists combined the icon and portrait to make Christ in their own likeness. This happened because of a variety of reasons, from identifying with the human suffering of Christ to commenting on one's own creative power.
The 15th-century Sicilian painter, Antonello da Messina, painted small pictures of the suffering Christ formatted exactly like his portraits of regular people, with the subject positioned between a parapet and a black background and signed "Antonello da Messina painted me."
Drer blurred the line between the holy face and his own image in a self-portrait of 1500. He posed like an icon, with his beard and luxuriant shoulder-length hair. In the year of our Lord, the "AD" monogram could be used for both "Albrecht Drer" and "Anno Domini".
Whose image?
There are pictures of Jesus with features from Ethiopia and India in the 16th and 17th century.
The image of a light-skinned European Christ began to influence other parts of the world through European trade and colonization.
One contemporary tradition says that the magi in the painting came from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Porcelain, agate, and brass would have been prized imports from China and the Persian and Ottoman empires.
Jesus has light skin and blue eyes that suggest he is European. Mary wears a faux-Hebrew script embroidered on her cuffs and hemline, which is a complicated relationship to the Judaism of the Holy Family.
Anti-Semitic myths were common among the majority Christian population in Mantegna.
Jesus and his parents are Jewish. The removal of earrings from Jewish women's ears could be a sign of a transition to Christianity.
The Nazis and other anti-Semitic forces in Europe tried to divorce Jesus from his Judaism in favor of an Aryan stereotype.
White Jesus is outside.
Europeans brought a European Jesus with them. Jesuit missionaries established painting schools that taught new converts Christian art.
A small altarpiece made in the school of Giovanni Niccol, the Italian Jesuit who founded the "Seminary of Painters" in Kumamoto, Japan, around 1590, combines a traditional Japanese gilt and mother-of-pearl shrine with a painting of a distinctly white, European Madonna
The caste system in colonial Latin America was reinforced by the images of Jesus, who was white, Christian Europeans, and those with darker skin.
The first Catholic saint born in New Spain is depicted in a painting as a marriage to a blond, light-skinned Christ.
Legacies of a person.
The image of a white Christ could be used to justify the oppression of Native and African Americans after European colonization of the Americas.
There was a disproportionate representation of white Jesus in the media. A large number of actors who have played Jesus on television and film have been white with blue eyes.
Pictures of Jesus have served many purposes, from symbolically presenting his power to depicting his actual likeness. The history of the images of Christ need to be understood by viewers.
The Conversation is a news site that shares ideas from academic experts. The author is Anna Swartwood House, University of South Carolina.
Read more.
