The Image of Christ

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The Image of Christ Overview

Christ is readily recognizable to us in all sorts of images, in painting, sculpture, film and illustration; his likeness is familiar, and yet the Gospels and the early Christian texts do not provide any information about his appearance. This book explores how the challenge of representing Christ has been confronted. How do you represent someone who is both God and man, both human and divine, immortal, but with a mortal body? Every act of representing Christ requires a choice about what kind of Christ one wants to show. Every image is laden with assumptions about who Christ is. The making of the image of Christ becomes a statement of belief, a sort of visual theology.

The Image of Christ Specifications

The Image of Christ by Gabriele Finaldi is a beautifully illustrated, colorful history of how Christ has been portrayed by artists from the early church to the present. It is not, however, a life of Christ told in pictures. Instead, the book explores the challenges Christian artists have faced as they have tried to imagine what Jesus looked like. Since no eyewitness descriptions of Jesus' physical appearance survived, the earliest artists' depictions of Christ played on the symbols and images that he used in his parables--such as the Good Shepherd, the Light, and the Vine. Later, artists became concerned with capturing Christ's true physical likeness, based on miraculous relics such as the cloth that Saint Veronica offered him on his way to Calvary, which was believed to be imprinted with an image of his face. These stages in the history of Christian art are described by several art historians in brief essays, each of which is lavishly illustrated. The book, which was inspired by Seeing Salvation: The Image of Christ, an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, will be treasured by secular and believing readers alike. A deeper understanding of the religious context of these works will sharpen viewers' experience of their universal relevance. The dozens of pictures, paintings, and sculptures reproduced here bear profound witness not only to the events of Jesus' life, but also to the enduring power of a mother's love for her children, the suffering of innocents, and love's triumph over death. --Michael Joseph Gross