Philadelphia Museum of Art Makes Compelling Case for Rembrandt's Jewish Jesus
THE JEWISH DAILY
By Menachem Wecher
PHILADELPHIA - In a great catalog essay, “Testing Tradition Against Nature: Rembrandt’s Radical New Image of Jesus,” Lloyd DeWitt, associate curator of European painting before 1900 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, traces the history of representations of Jesus leading up to Rembrandt’s series of seven paintings of Jesus, brought together for the first time in this show. Where Jesus had formerly been typically presented in a stylized manner, with a golden mane and European features, Rembrandt chose to present a decidedly Semitic Jesus. The Philadelphia exhibit, propelled by DeWitt’s essay, makes a compelling case for a Jewish model for Jesus, which departed from the “robust, muscular figure with larger-than-life proportions” often depicted by Peter Paul Rubens and the “similarly muscular and idealized figure” represented slightly earlier by Hendrick Goltzius of Haarlem. "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus” is on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until October 30. [link]
By Menachem Wecher
PHILADELPHIA - In a great catalog essay, “Testing Tradition Against Nature: Rembrandt’s Radical New Image of Jesus,” Lloyd DeWitt, associate curator of European painting before 1900 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, traces the history of representations of Jesus leading up to Rembrandt’s series of seven paintings of Jesus, brought together for the first time in this show. Where Jesus had formerly been typically presented in a stylized manner, with a golden mane and European features, Rembrandt chose to present a decidedly Semitic Jesus. The Philadelphia exhibit, propelled by DeWitt’s essay, makes a compelling case for a Jewish model for Jesus, which departed from the “robust, muscular figure with larger-than-life proportions” often depicted by Peter Paul Rubens and the “similarly muscular and idealized figure” represented slightly earlier by Hendrick Goltzius of Haarlem. "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus” is on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until October 30. [link]
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