Head of Christ

The Holy Face

A head of Christ on its own is a devotional type with a long history: the vera icon, the face believed to have been imprinted on a cloth, which gave the West a licence to paint the features at all. Images of that kind are not episodes. They do not report a moment and they cannot be placed between two others in a cycle; they exist to be looked at directly.

What the size tells you

The record gives 14.9 by 10.8 centimetres. That is smaller than a sheet of writing paper, and it is the strongest indication in the entry of how the object was used: a picture at that scale is for one person, held or hung close, not for a chapel. Five titles in this catalogue contain the words Head of Christ, and of those that carry a measurement this is the smallest.

The record

The catalogue names Petrus Christus — a painter's surname, not a reference to the subject — dates the work to 1445, and gives the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as Flemish; the subject fields class the work as a male figure and as religious. The measured palette reads as red. No commission or provenance is recorded.