Famous Jesus artwork: ten paintings and what each one shows

You have seen most of these already. The Last Supper over a dining-room sideboard, the Head of Christ in a grandmother's hallway, the man praying on a rock in a church basement. You just may not know who painted them, where the originals are, or why they look the way they do.

The famous Jesus artwork people actually search for spans about fourteen centuries, from an icon in a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai to a 1940 portrait that hung in American living rooms by the million.

Here are ten of them, with what each one shows, where it hangs, and what it taught the painters who came after. Dates appear only where the record is firm.

What is the most famous Jesus artwork?

By reach and reputation the list is fairly stable: the Sinai Pantocrator, Giotto's frescoes in Padua, Leonardo's Last Supper, Caravaggio's Calling of Saint Matthew, Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Carl Bloch's Frederiksborg cycle, Heinrich Hofmann's Christ in Gethsemane, Warner Sallman's Head of Christ, Ivan Aivazovsky's Christ walking on the water, and the Christ of Georges Rouault.

Christ Pantocrator, Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai

The oldest one here is an icon painted in encaustic, pigment bound in hot wax, on a wooden panel, usually dated to the sixth century. It survived at the remote monastery of Saint Catherine in Egypt, and it is among the oldest surviving panel icons of Christ.

He faces you directly, a Gospel book in his left hand, his right raised in blessing. Look for a moment and you may notice that the two halves of the face do not quite match, one side calm and the other severe. It has long been read as showing his two natures; that is interpretation, but very old interpretation.

What the icon taught later painters is simpler: long hair, beard, direct gaze, book. This is the face Christian art would keep for a thousand years.

Giotto, the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua

In the early fourteenth century Giotto covered a small chapel in Padua with scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ, and Western painting changed. Before him, holy figures floated on gold. After him, they had weight, and they grieved.

The scene people remember is the Kiss of Judas. Jesus and Judas stand face to face, inches apart, and Judas's yellow cloak sweeps around Christ's body as if to swallow it. Jesus does not flinch. He looks at his betrayer steadily, and the whole drama is in that look.

Giotto's lesson is that a Gospel scene can be carried by two faces and a gesture.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, Milan

Leonardo painted the Last Supper in the 1490s on the end wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where it still is. It is not a true fresco. He worked on dry plaster with an experimental mixture that let him paint slowly, and the surface began to fail within decades.

The moment he chose is the announcement: "Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me." (Matthew 26:21, KJV) The twelve react in waves along the table. Judas sits among them rather than isolated across it, his face in shadow, and Jesus at the center is still.

Leonardo taught painters that the right instant matters more than showing everything.

Which painters turned the Gospel into drama?

Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, Rome

Around 1600 Caravaggio painted the Calling of Saint Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, where it hangs today. The whole story is one verse: Jesus "saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him." (Matthew 9:9, KJV)

Caravaggio set it in a bare room that could be a Roman tavern. A hard shaft of light falls from the upper right across men counting coins. Jesus stands at the far edge, almost hidden behind Peter, only his face and pointing hand clearly seen. The light does the preaching, and painters have borrowed that idea ever since. Long before him, Nativity painters had made the light come from the child himself, as our guide to famous Nativity paintings and the Christmas story shows.

Rembrandt, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

Rembrandt painted his only seascape in 1633: the disciples' boat heeled over in a wave, sail tearing, men hauling ropes and being sick over the side, and Jesus in the stern, calm, about to speak. The passage is Mark 4, where he "rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still." (Mark 4:39, KJV)

One disciple looks straight out of the canvas and is often taken to be the painter himself. The painting was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and has not been recovered. Its empty frame still hangs.

Rembrandt's quieter gift came in the 1640s and 1650s: small heads of Christ painted from a live model, whom scholars widely believe was a young Jewish man from his Amsterdam neighborhood. They are the first famous paintings of Jesus that look like a portrait of someone the painter actually knew.

Which paintings of Jesus hung in ordinary homes?

Carl Bloch, the Frederiksborg paintings

The Danish painter Carl Bloch spent the 1860s and 1870s on a series of paintings of the life of Christ for the chapel at Frederiksborg Castle, north of Copenhagen. They are clear, warmly lit and carefully staged.

Christ in Gethsemane, with an angel bending to hold the exhausted Jesus, and Christus Consolator, Christ with arms open to the suffering, are the most reproduced. Bloch's work traveled through prints and Sunday-school materials and is especially familiar to Latter-day Saints, whose publications have used it for generations. His lesson is gentleness.

Today the life of Christ in series travels mostly in books, and we set seven illustrated lives of Jesus side by side, from James Tissot's watercolors to collections of the old masters.

Heinrich Hofmann, Christ in Gethsemane

Hofmann, a German painter working in the 1880s, painted Jesus in profile, kneeling on the rock, hands folded, face lifted toward a light from above. It illustrates the prayer in Matthew: "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt." (Matthew 26:39, KJV)

The original hangs at the Riverside Church in New York. Reproductions of it have hung in Protestant homes for over a century; you may have grown up under one. Hofmann gave the devotional print its posture: one figure, in prayer, lit from above.

Warner Sallman, Head of Christ

Sallman's Head of Christ, painted in 1940, grew from a charcoal drawing he had made in the 1920s. It is a portrait alone: Christ in three-quarter view, eyes lifted, light on the hair and face. Estimates of its reproductions run into the hundreds of millions: wallet cards carried by servicemen in the Second World War, calendars, church basements.

It is the most famous Jesus painting of the twentieth century and the most argued over. Some people find steadiness and kindness in it. Others find sentiment, and a Christ who looks like the painter's own neighbors. Either way, Sallman proved that a face alone can carry a household's devotion.

What did Aivazovsky and Rouault do differently?

Ivan Aivazovsky, Christ walking on the water

Aivazovsky was the great Russian marine painter of the nineteenth century, famous for seas that seem to move. Late in his career he painted Christ walking on the water, and the sea takes almost the whole canvas. Christ is a small, luminous figure on the swell; the boat is a dark shape in the distance.

The passage is Matthew 14: "in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea." (Matthew 14:25, KJV) Aivazovsky's lesson is that the setting can preach. The water is the sermon and Christ's stillness on it is the point. There is more in our guide to Jesus walking on water.

Georges Rouault, the suffering Christ

Rouault, a French painter who apprenticed in a stained-glass workshop as a young man, painted Christ all his life in heavy black outlines and glowing color, so that his canvases look like windows with light behind them. The face is rough, sorrowful and unmistakable.

His Miserere, a long series of prints made in the 1920s and published after the Second World War, is one of the century's great religious works. Christ Mocked by Soldiers, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, shows the beaten Christ of Mark 15, eyes closed, between two coarse faces.

Rouault showed that modern painting could still be devotional, and that a Christ without prettiness can hold you longer than one with it.

What do all these paintings have in common?

Almost every one chooses a single moment and a single light. The moment is decisive: a betrayal announced, a man called, a storm about to be stilled. The light is deliberate: a beam through a window, a glow on a face.

Where the painters disagree is how much of Christ to show you. The icon and the devotional print give you the whole face and nothing else. Caravaggio hides him behind Peter. Aivazovsky shrinks him to a flame on the water. There is no right amount of Jesus in a painting of Jesus.

Why does Jesus look different in every one of them?

Because the Gospels never describe his appearance, and every century has painted him with its own face. There is no verse about his hair or his features.

The prophetic line Christian readers have long applied to him points the other way: "he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him." (Isaiah 53:2, KJV)

The Sinai type, long hair and beard, set a pattern Byzantine and medieval painters followed, once the beardless shepherd boy of the catacombs had given way to it. Renaissance Italians gave him Italian features. Rembrandt looked at a Jewish neighbor. Bloch and Hofmann painted a fair northern European, and Rouault painted no one in particular and everyone in pain.

Each one is a confession of where the painter stood. Knowing that makes it easier to look honestly at any painting of Christ, including the ones painters are making today and the one you are thinking of buying.

How do painters show Christ now?

Many of the strongest painters working today have gone back to the scene, painting Gospel moments in a loose hand with calm colors made for the rooms people actually live in; we have written about why painted scenes are back in Christian art. That is where we sit: contemporary on the surface, traditional underneath.

In His Presence is our answer to the portrait line that runs from Sinai to Sallman. It shows Christ with a steady gaze in gentle light, without ornament, and it takes its passage from Matthew: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28, KJV)

We kept the face particular but not pretty, closer to Rembrandt's small heads than to a devotional card, so that you can look at it for years without tiring of it.

Each piece is made to order in the US, printed on matte cotton-polyester canvas over a solid pine stretcher, frameless or in a natural or black pine frame, in sizes from 8x12 to 30x40 inches and from $59. You can see all of them side by side in our contemporary Christian art collection.

One face, many hands

Fourteen centuries of painters have tried to show the same man, and not one of them agreed on what he looked like. What they agreed on is what he was doing: calling, calming, praying, being betrayed, being struck, and looking back at the person standing in front of the picture.

When you hang a painting of Christ, you join that line. You are choosing which moment you want to see every day, in your own hallway, and in what light.

Frequently asked

What is the most famous painting of Jesus?

By reputation, Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper in Milan. By sheer number of copies, Warner Sallman's Head of Christ, painted in 1940 and reproduced by the hundreds of millions.

What is the oldest painting of Jesus?

The earliest surviving pictures are third-century wall paintings in the Roman catacombs and at the house church of Dura-Europos in Syria, mostly showing Jesus as the Good Shepherd or performing miracles. The oldest famous panel painting of his face is the Christ Pantocrator at Saint Catherine's Monastery on Sinai, usually dated to the sixth century.

Is Leonardo's Last Supper a fresco?

No. A true fresco is painted into wet plaster. Leonardo painted on dry plaster with an experimental mixture so he could work slowly, and the paint began to flake within decades. Much of what you see today is restoration.

Who painted the pictures of Jesus in old Sunday-school rooms?

Most often Warner Sallman, Heinrich Hofmann or Carl Bloch, whose paintings were reproduced by the million from the late nineteenth century onward. Bernhard Plockhorst's Good Shepherd was also common.

Passages cited: Matthew 26:21; Matthew 9:9; Mark 4:39 (Mark 4:35-41 described); Matthew 26:39; Matthew 14:25; Mark 15 (mocking, described not quoted); Isaiah 53:2; Matthew 11:28.