Rembrandt's Jesus, who emerged in his art between 1648 and 1656, is demonstrably a real person, and above all a Jew. The artist is believed to have modeled him on a resident of Amsterdam's Jewish quarter, where the artist was living. The model's identity isn't known; in fact, scholars don't know for a fact that he was Jewish, although his dark hair and Levantine features make that probable.
Whoever he was, Rembrandt's Jesus has taken up residence at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in an international exhibition called, inevitably, "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus."
The show is assembled around two acknowledged Rembrandt masterworks, the 1648 painting The Supper at Emmaus, lent by the Louvre, and two impressions of The Hundred Guilder Print, Rembrandt's most celebrated graphic work; along with seven small oil sketches - "portraits," if you will - of a radically Jewish Jesus.
The Art Museum organized the show with the Louvre and the Detroit Institute of Arts. At 52 works, many of them on paper, it's not a large production - nor should it be, because thematically it's tightly focused - but it rattles around a bit in the capacious special-exhibition space.
In the interest of keeping the spotlight on his startling innovation, the show glosses over a key aspect: Rembrandt's authorship of some of the paintings.
All seven oil sketches are painted on oak panels of roughly the same size. Three are in American museums, three in European institutions, and one is owned privately. (Originally there were eight panels, but one disappeared long ago.)
