The Artist: For a biography of Petrus Christus, see the
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
The Painting: This mesmerizing image of Christ derives from the Gospels of Mark (15: 17–18) and John (19: 1–5) wherein Jesus was beaten, crowned with thorns, and dressed in a purple robe, subsequently to be presented by Pilate to the jeering crowd of Jews with the words "Ecce Homo" (Behold the man). According to John: “And the soldiers plaited a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and arrayed him in a purple robe; they came up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’”
Christ is treated as a portrait, surrounded with a trompe-l’oeil frame, thereby underscoring his physical immediacy. 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 (ca. 1380–1471) 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 for the redemption of humankind.
In general, the
Head of Christ belongs to a group of images called
acheiropoetoi, which were associated with devotional practice in the Eastern Church. Thought to have been miraculously created, this group includes two forerunners: the
vera icon, or
sudarium type, and the Holy Face (Upton 1990, Hand 1992). Because The Met’s painting shows Christ crowned with thorns (
Salvator Coronatus) and his portrait bust with the tripartite floriated nimbus found in Holy Face depictions, it has been considered a fusion of the two types (Bruyn 1957, Hand 1992).
This painting stems from the lost
Holy Face by Jan van Eyck, now known only through copies: one from 1438 (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; see fig. 1 above), 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. However, the crown of thorns, causing trails of blood to run down Christ’s forehead, neck, and chest, and his furrowed brow differ from the Eyckian prototype.
This emphasis on the
Ecce Homo and the direct address of Christ to the viewer, as Panofsky pointed out, was an appeal to the faithful to “behold the man” as an object for meditation, particularly during Holy Mass in the guise of the Host.[1] Ludolf of Saxony (ca. 1295–1378), in his
Vita Jesu Christi explained that “the sacrament of the altar commemorates the Lord, and [how] Christ has suffered according to His human nature: for according to His divine nature He is incapable of suffering; wherefore the priest, when elevating the Host, might more fittingly say ‘Behold the man’ than ‘Behold God.’ True, Christ is both man and God; but in that presentation [by Pilate] the man was manifest and the God was latent.”[2] An appropriate way for the viewer to respond to the image would be through prayer, such as the one composed by Thomas à Kempis to the suffering Christ.[3] A chapter of the fourth and final book of his
Imitatio Christi is devoted to meditation upon the union with Christ through the Sacrament.[4] Therefore, the
Ecce Homo or image of the suffering Christ, as in The Met’s painting, may be associated with the Host and thus with the mystical transformation of the body of Christ, or transubstantiation (Ainsworth 1994).
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 (fig. 2). Otherwise, there is limited underdrawing in the painting, showing only some subtle changes in the neck opening of Christ’s garment and a few slight strokes for the features of the face (see Technical Notes).
The small size of the painting and its unusual support of parchment or vellum indicates that it was meant to serve a private devotional purpose, perhaps handheld by the worshiper. Joel Upton suggested that it could have functioned as a
pax, that is, “a liturgical tablet used in the mass to transmit the Kiss of Peace from the celebrant…” (Upton 1990, p. 56). However, such objects are usually enamels or metalwork, not oil paintings on parchment. Moreover, the frequent kissing of Christ’s face or touching it would have damaged the painting, which is relatively well preserved.
The painting is now laid down on a mahogany board and cradled (see Technical Notes). The original dimensions of it must have been somewhat larger, so that the entire illusionistic frame would have been visible. As an independent painting on parchment, the
Head of Christ might initially have been slipped into a prayer book adjacent to devotional texts. Kathryn Rudy has focused on these parchment paintings, which she calls “postcards,” that were tipped into books and exchanged between individuals.[5] Subsequently, the painting may have been attached to a panel. Tack holes, now filled, are regularly spaced around the edge of the parchment (see the x-radiograph and Technical Notes). However, they interrupt and ruin the trompe-l’oeil effect of the frame, and therefore cannot have been the original plan for the image. This may indicate that the painting at one point was 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; fig. 3).
The Attribution and Date: A fragmentary inscription at the lower edge of the painting most likely is the name of Petrus Christus. Although there is little to go on, the formation of the letters in the signature of the Berlin
Nativity provides a convincing parallel for the Gothic script
Petr…, which is also common to manuscript illumination. It is painted in the same location as in other paintings by Petrus Christus and Jan van Eyck, that is, at the lower edge of the fictive frame (see Ainsworth 1994, pp. 27–33 and figs.). Furthermore, the partial inscription was made in the same pale yellow paint as was used for the strokes of the tripartite nimbus surrounding Christ’s head.
There is general agreement about the attribution of the painting to Christus (see References). However, some dissenters (Folie 1963, Gellman 1970, and Richter 1974) have argued that the remarkable refinement of this head is different in approach than the rather formulaic heads of Christ in Christus’s other paintings, such as the
Man of Sorrows (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; Ainsworth 1994, pp. 112–16, fig. 4). Within its trompe-l’oeil frame and directly addressing the viewer, The Met
Christ was conceived as a portrait, and therefore may be compared with Christus’s other portraits, such as the
Portrait of a Carthusian (The Met,
49.7.19). Here one may find a similar approach to subtle handling and detailed execution intended to produce lifelike effects. And yet, there are also similarities to the heads of holy figure types in Christus’s other paintings. The Met
Head of Christ can be compared to the tiny head of Christ in Majesty in the Berlin
Last Judgment, for example, where there are the same vertical wrinkles in the brow, similar morphological details of the facial features (heavily lidded eyes, prominent triangular-shaped nose, and full lips), and the same modeling of the facial features, broadly lit on the left side, sharply defining the boundaries between light and dark.
Friedländer (1967), Upton (1972), and Schabacker (1974) all date the painting between 1444 and 1450, preceding the rather hard-edged geometric forms of Christus’s later works. This stylistic observation, as well as the connection of this painting with the Eyckian Holy Face pictures of the late 1430s and 1440s, reinforces an early date in Christus’s oeuvre. The earliest provenance of The Met painting places it in Spain. It may have traveled there early on, as a Hispano-Flemish
Head of Christ of the late fifteenth century appears to have been copied after it (Calahorra, Museum of Calahorra Cathedral).[6]
Maryan W. Ainsworth 2012, updated Maryan W. Ainsworth 2023
[1] Erwin Panofsky, “Jean Hey’s ‘Ecce Homo’: Speculations about its Author, Its Donor, and Its Iconography,”
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts Bulletin 5, 1956, pp. 95–138, especially 110.
[2] Ludolf of Saxony,
Vita Jesu Christi redemptoris nostril, Lyons, 1519, fol. ccxiv, as quoted in Panofsky 1956, pp. 110–11.
[3] See
Opera omnia, ed. M. J. Pohl, 7 vols., (Freiburg, 1902–22), vol. 5, p. 9: “Laude et glorifico te speciali devotione compassivi cordis mei pro tua gravissima poena, quam in sacri capitis tui spinosa coronatione pro nobis vermiculis patientissime pertulisti…” (as quoted in Sixten Ringbom,
Icon to Narrative, The Rise of the Dramatic Close-up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting, Doornspijk, 1984, p. 143 n. 5.
[4] Thomas à Kempis,
The Imitation of Christ, trans., L. Sherley-Price, Harmondsworth, England, 1952, pp. 209–10.
[5] Kathryn Rudy,
Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books, New Haven, 2016, pp. 309–10.
[6] Manuel Parada López de Corselas and Jesús Folgado Garcia, “Jan van Eyck’s Holy Face, the Holy Shroud, and Spain,”
Colnaghi Studies Journal 7 (October 2020), p. 32.