Today I saw one the top five art exhibits I have ever seen in my life. This show is also going to the Louvre and Detroit. Rembrandt's paintings and drawings were split up when he filed for a special form of bankruptcy. They have not been together until now. My family Bible is an art edition with plates of Rembrandt's paintings. He did more religious paintings than most of his generation. There were many Jews in Amsterdam and he used models to do the faces of his Bible figures. His Jesus faces are fairly consistent.
He also focused on the humanity of Jesus more than any artist until that time. When I seek medieval paintings, I freak out. The images of Jesus cause my heart to beat faster. Jesus' skin coloring is very strange in the older paintings. Rembrandt painting a Jesus that identify with on a personal level. I always wondered why Jesus looks the same in Medieval paintings all around Europe. I found out today that there were two set models. Artists could change the body but never the face. Tradition attributed these set faces to Veronica's veil for one and a legend that says Jesus sent a cloth with a copy of his face to Europe.
It was interesting. The crowd was very large b/c many Christians who never attend art shows were there. My parents would take me to the World's Fair to see the Pieta or whatever. There was always the strain of here is nice Jesus, how nice and OMG my JW father going through the roof about Catholicism and embarassing us in public as we were dragged out. It was similar to the Planetarium. The mere one-time mention of "evolution" was cause for leaving immediately, disrupting other people and loss of ticket money.