My prior Art posts can be found HERE.
How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it..
Let’s study art history together.
Head of Christ
| Artist | Warner Sallman |
|---|---|
| Year | 1940 |
| Location | Warner Sallman Collection, Anderson University, Anderson, Indiana |
I don’t know if this is true for a lot of the rest of the world, but I think I can say that if you grew up as a 20th century American, this is likely one of the first portraits of Jesus that you ever saw. It just looks like my grandma’s house and I’m not entirely sure she actually even had this on the wall. The point is that it was extremely popular and frequently used. Anecdotally it’s much less popular today than when I was a kid, but that is probably related to the fact that the original audience with whom it was popular has largely now passed away. And it is also probably due to the significant de-Christianization that has occurred in American society over the last few decades. It’s hard to say which factors in more.
It’s only very rarely that art maintains a high level of popularity across decades and centuries – though in the case of paintings in particular a famous painting can become obscure and then world famous again several times. Perhaps if this proves true in other mediums some of my old artistic loves will rise to fame once more.
Honestly, I’d settle for the once-popular transatlantic accent making a comeback among my cultural elites. We used to be a proper country.
Anyway… in addition to its familiarity, this work of religious art is near and dear to me because it was painted by an American – Warner Sallman. He was from Chicago and his art has been published and reproduced at Adnerson University in Indiana for decades.
The story behind “Head of Christ” is really fascinating, including in particular its creation story and its subsequent role in the miraculous. The painting also includes an artist trademark of hiding images within the main image. If you look closely at the Head of Christ, you might see a Chalice and a Eucharist wafer (among other things.) So let’s learn a little bit more about this painting!
(more via wiki)
The Head of Christ, also called the Sallman Head, is a 1940 portrait painting of Jesus by Warner Sallman (1892–1968). As an extraordinarily successful work of Christian popular devotional art, it had been reproduced over half a billion times worldwide by the end of the 20th century. Enlarged copies of the work have been made for churches, and small pocket or wallet-sized prayer cards bearing the image have been mass-produced for private devotional use. The painting is said to have “become the basis for [the] visualization of Jesus” for “hundreds of millions” of people.
Origins
The Head of Christ originated as a charcoal sketch entitled The Son of Man done in 1924 and sold to be the cover of the Covenant Companion, the denominational magazine for the Evangelical Covenant Church. Sallman completed several variations of the painting over the years, and the first oil version dates from 1935 for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Evangelical Covenant Church. In 1940, he was asked to reproduce that painting by the students of North Park Theological Seminary. This reproduction was seen by representatives of the Gospel Trumpet Company, the publishing arm of the Church of God (Anderson), who created a new company called Kriebel and Bates to market Sallman’s work. For the next thirty years, Kriebel and Bates marketed over 100 Warner Sallman works. When Kriebel and Bates dissolved, the copyrights to these works were acquired by Warner Press.
The Baptist Bookstore initially popularized the painting, distributing various sized lithographic images for sale throughout the southern United States. The Salvation Army and the YMCA, as members of the USO, handed out pocket-sized versions of the painting to American servicemen heading overseas during World War II. After the war, groups in Oklahoma and Indiana conducted campaigns to distribute the image into private and public spaces. One Lutheran organizer in Illinois “said that there ought to be ‘card-carrying Christians’ to counter the effect of ‘card-carrying Communists.”
Features
Many Lutheran and Roman Catholic Christians have praised the painting for the hidden host on the forehead of The Head of Christ, and a chalice on his temple, both pointing to the Holy Eucharist. The Head of Christ became popular among evangelical Christians as well, as they believed the portrait to emphasize the “salvific power of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus“. David Morgan, a professor of religion at Duke University, states that “for many Christians during the Cold War, Sallman’s portrait did symbolize a virile, manly Christ, while for others it embodied a more intimate and nurturing Jesus, a personal saviour for modern times.”
Alleged miracles
Warner Sallman believed that his initial sketch of The Head of Christ was the result of a “miraculous vision that he received late one night”, stating that “the answer came at 2 A.M., January 1924” as “a vision in response to my prayer to God in a despairing situation.”
The Head of Christ is also venerated in the Coptic Orthodox Church, following a 1991 report in which twelve-year-old Isaac Ayoub of Houston, Texas, who was diagnosed with leukemia, saw the eyes of Jesus in the painting shedding tears; Fr. Ishaq Soliman of St. Mark’s Coptic Church in Houston, on the same day, “testified to the miracles” and on the next day, “Dr. Atef Rizkalla, the family physician, examined the youth and certified that there were no traces of leukemia”. With episcopal approval from Bishop Tadros of Port Said and Bishop Yuhanna of Cairo, “Sallman’s Head of Christ was exhibited in the Coptic Church”, with “more than fifty thousand people” visiting the church to see it.
In addition, several religious magazines have explained the “power of Sallman’s picture” by documenting occurrences such as headhunters letting go of a businessman and fleeing after seeing a copy of the image on his person, a “thief who aborted his misdeed when he saw the Head of Christ on a living room wall”, and deathbed conversions of non-believers to Christianity.
Appearances
The chancel of El Buen Samaritano United Methodist Church features a large copy of Sallman’s Head of Christ rather than a traditional altar cross. St. Francis de Sales Seminary, a Roman Catholic institution in Oklahoma City, “requested and received a gigantic Head of Christ to display on campus”. According to David Morgan, the Head of Christ “is still found in both Protestant and Catholic churches, enjoys fond use among Mormons, Latinos, Native Americans, and African Americans, and hangs in Christian homes in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe”.
The Head of Christ has appeared in scenes of several films, such as Children of the Corn (1984), Jungle Fever (1991) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012).
One of the critiques of this painting is that Jesus looks (to some people) to be too European-looking. The problem though is that we don’t *really* know whether 1st century Jewish person would have looked like, and that’s particularly true if that person was God Incarnate, born of a Virgin. There is some archaeological evidence that there used to be more paler skin and lighter colored hair among ancient people in the Mediterranean. Even today, it’s not uncommon to see people with deep roots in the Levant who look somewhat European. And as I said, knowing what Jesus looked like is a unique challenge.
Recently, though, there’s been a renewed interest in the Shroud of Turin, which – according to some – provides us with an idea of what Jesus actually looked like . If the Shroud Truthers are right, I think Sallman’s portrait is a pretty good likeness.
Of course, not all the AI renderings are the same and we cannot rule out the possibility that Sallman’s painting influenced this AI rendering in some ways.
For more on the Shroud itself, I’ll give you a place to begin your own researches.
And for an informative, fun background video about Sallman’s painting, and the artist himself, let me direct you to the following:
