Picture Imperfect
Warner Sallman's "Head of Christ"

Close your eyes and try to picture Jesus Christ. What do you see? Chances are, the image is a concoction collected from hundreds of Jesus pictures you’ve barely noticed but somehow remembered. Chances are, the Jesus in your brain is fairly detailed—a certain length and color of hair, a certain type of clothes, maybe even a certain expression. And, if you’re like most Americans, including me, chances are that the image is completely unrelated to Jesus’ real historical context. For most of us the image of Jesus lodged in our minds is something closer to post-Renaissance Europe than First Century Palestine.

The proliferation and popularity of religious paintings (and, in the 20th Century, television and film) from Western civilization have pretty well secured a collective image of Jesus that is, well, Western. The Jesus in our minds is not Jewish, not to mention Middle Eastern. He’s a white-robed, longhaired, generally good-looking Caucasian. Even those who didn’t grow up in church have seen enough Time magazine covers at Easter and Christmastime to have a Jesus image pretty well burned into their brains, and that image is likely a far cry from how he actually looked.

Our idea of Jesus’ physical appearance is a received one—not from the Gospels or any other parts of the Bible, but from artists. The Gospel writers, in fact, say nil about Jesus’ appearance. Indeed, the only biblical mention of his physicality comes hundreds of years before he is ever born, requiring a leap of faith to believe that it refers to him. Isaiah 53:2 says, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” If one believes, as Christians do, that this verse is foretelling the coming of Jesus, then the only thing that can be said for certain is that Jesus would have looked so plain as to not be noticeable. He would have looked like a drummer, not a lead singer. Why, then, do Christians always paint Christ as being so striking? Why so physically appealing? And why does he always look like someone from the culture of the artist who paints him?

The simple—and likely valid—answer is that painters paint into Jesus their own theories about who he is or who he should be. What we’re given when we see a picture of Jesus is not an essential or historical depiction, but an interpretation. And when one of those images becomes popular, all its viewers are affected by that same interpretation. For all we know from the Bible, Jesus could have been a dark-skinned, short, prematurely gray Jew. But, we’ll always think of him as a tall handsome white guy. That image brings with it all sorts of presuppositions that shape our impression of Jesus. What we think about who he was and what he means is at least partially informed by what we’ve been told about how he looked.

In America, the principle influence on most people’s image of Jesus is one painting: Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ.” Completed in 1940, Sallman’s image was received with open arms from what was, at the time, a largely Protestant and Catholic America. Over a million copies were sold by 1941, and the image was produced endlessly on coffee mugs, key chains, clocks and other paraphernalia. Before the turn of the century two years ago, over 500 million copies had been sold, making it the most-produced piece of art of all time. If you’ve ever stepped foot into an American church built roughly between 1940 and 1990 and seen a picture of Jesus on the wall (not to mention a hospital, nursing home, Christian school, or any number of grandmothers’ homes), it’s probably Sallman’s “Head of Christ.”

Just as an artist today would paint a Jesus commensurate with her times (see http://www.guildhall.com/McKenzie.html for an example), Warner Sallman painted a Jesus consistent with Middle America, circa 1940. His Jesus needed to be at once faintly classical and faintly modern—not yet contemporary, but not archaic. Holy, but human. Sallman’s Jesus has hard, striking features. The hair is well placed. A soft light shines directly on his face. His eyes are fixed meditatively, and he looks as if he’s divinely preoccupied.

That this picture of Jesus was so popular suggests that the people in early-20th Century America were looking for a Jesus who could come out from the long shadow of church history and be the human-ish God they needed him to be. Sallman’s Jesus looks spiritual and mysterious, but not too much so. One can talk to him personally, and he can be appropriately serious if the moment calls for it. Furthermore, he looks clean and well kept, like he has good manners and wants to be careful about the business of the kingdom of God. He looks like he can get up on a Sunday morning and get himself ready for church. All this resonated with the people of Sallman’s day: they embraced the picture with their pocketbooks and with the general approbation that “Head of Christ” looked just like the Jesus they had always imagined.

But public enthusiasm didn’t last long. Interestingly, while the painting was originally celebrated for its manliness, after World War II people complained that Sallman’s “Head of Christ” was too feminine. When looking at the portrait it’s possible to imagine both why people thought of him as manly and later thought of him as feminine. His hair is too flowing, his beard too light. He does look a little wimpy. This Jesus can’t storm the beach at Normandy. He’s fine for a serious conversation, but doesn’t suggest anything in the way of real physical activity. And, of course, today the argument that the Sallman painting is too Caucasian (as was vehemently put forth in the 1970s) seems perfectly appointed. Even for Americans who prefer a white Jesus, Sallman’s Jesus is too white. He may have looked comely in 1940, but today he looks suburban and outmoded.

Sallman’s Jesus, then, is out of fashion. But no other single image has taken its place. Attempts have been made, from hippie-ish Jesuses in the 1960s and African-American Jesuses in the 1970s to the t-shirt Jesus of the 1990s that turned the crucifixion into a pun by emphasizing Jesus’ “body piercings.” These images of Jesus were popular within certain subcultures, but nothing has enjoyed the success of “Head of Christ.”

What has taken “Head of Christ’s” place, is, depending on one’s perspective, either a diverse mosaic or a garbled mess. Multiple representations of Jesus have been offered. People have felt more and more comfortable coming up with a Jesus of their own, one that reflects their particular community or gives credence to their aspirations. You don’t have to look far into American culture to find these images, because Jesus is still very much on the American mind—just listen to the radio, go to the movie theater, or check out the yearly results of paintings funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and you’ll find all sorts of stylized Jesuses. The people of Sallman’s day wanted a Jesus who was masculine, or handsome, or clean and polished, or non-traditional and accessible. Today, people want a Jesus who can be uniquely personable. They want a Jesus made in their own image. They are free to open him up, hollow him out, and tell their own story within his story, making him (depending on their purposes) politically conservative or liberal, capitalistic or socialistic, rich or poor, straight or gay. With such latitude, Jesus can be deeply Mormon, deeply Catholic, or even deeply Buddhist. (And each community has it’s own paintings to prove it!)

Let me ask my earlier question with a different intonation: “Close your eyes and try to picture Jesus Christ. What do you see?” That is the question of people looking for Jesus today. When they start looking for Jesus, they begin by looking for themselves.

Perhaps the time for a popular and widely accepted mainstream image of Jesus has passed. If Americans are accustomed to reacting to a picture of Jesus from a personally critical standpoint (“That’s not how I see him.”), then no one image of Jesus will be enough. What’s easier to imagine is what has already happened—the propagation of commodified ideas about the essence of Jesus, such as the W.W.J.D. bracelets (and coffee mugs, key chains, clocks, etc.) These may be as close to a mainstream “portrait” of Jesus as America is now able to come.

But there remains one important and nagging fact: all of these images of Jesus—from Michelangelo to Martin Scorcese to all the Warner Sallmans in between—derive from one persistent and unchanging source: the stories about Jesus told originally in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. No matter what we believe about the veracity of those stories (and in spite of my earlier complaint that they neglected to describe Jesus physically) it remains true that those four books loom large over the world’s cultural history. They remain the earliest and most influential sources on the life of Jesus. Those four men who dedicated to paper the events as they believed them to have happened a generation before are four of the most widely read writers of all time, and nearly every image of Jesus through history begins with them. They may not have told us everything we would like to know about Jesus, but surely they told us enough—enough, at least, to fertilize the imagination of billions of believers and unbelievers alike. And while our impression of who Jesus was might be shaped by the images of him we see, we can always change, inform, and deepen that impression by simply opening one of the four Gospels and reading.

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Warner Sallman's
"Head of Christ"