Head of Christ

A head that is not a scene

Five works in this catalogue are titled Head of Christ. None of them is an episode: the head alone belongs to a category of picture — study, devotional image, workshop type — that stands apart from the narrative sequence entirely. Seventeenth-century Dutch practice had a name for a painted head made as a type rather than a portrait, and heads of Christ were produced in that tradition, which is why several can share a title and none can share a moment.

Its relation to the cycle

None directly. But the type is not idle in the story: a workshop that had worked out a head could use it in the Emmaus supper, in the arrest, in the Ecce Homo. The single head is upstream of the episodes rather than one of them.

The record

The catalogue names Rembrandt, dates the work to 1652, and gives the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, one of seven entries here in that collection. It measures 60 by 75.2 centimetres. The style is entered as Baroque and the artist as Dutch; the subject fields class the work as a male figure only, with no religious classification attached, which is the case for 114 of the 468 entries in this catalogue. The measured palette reads as brown.