Mural painting from the catacomb of Commodilla. One of the first bearded images of Jesus, late 4th century. The depiction of Jesus in pictorial form dates back to early Christian art and architecture, as aniconism in Christianity was rejected within the ante-Nicene period. The conventional image of a fully bearded Jesus with long hair emerged around AD 300, but did not become established until the 6th century in Eastern Veronica neave, and much later in the West.
Images of Jesus tend to show ethnic characteristics similar to those of the culture in which the image has been created. Beliefs that certain images are historically authentic, or have acquired an authoritative status from Church tradition, remain powerful among some of the faithful, in Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, and Roman Catholicism. Synod of Elvira in Spain in 306 states in its 36th canon that no images should be in churches. Incised sarcophagus slab with the Adoration of the Magi from the Catacombs of Rome, 3rd century. Jesus in the Catacombs of Rome. Third-century fresco from the Catacomb of Callixtus of Christ as the Good Shepherd. 6 “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” is one of the Ten Commandments and made Jewish depictions of first-century individuals a scarcity.
During the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire, Christian art was necessarily furtive and ambiguous, and there was hostility to idols in a group still with a large component of members with Jewish origins, surrounded by, and polemicising against, sophisticated pagan images of gods. Among the earliest depictions clearly intended to directly represent Jesus himself are many showing him as a baby, usually held by his mother, especially in the Adoration of the Magi, seen as the first theophany, or display of the incarnate Christ to the world at large. The appearance of Jesus had some theological implications. Bearded Jesus between Peter and Paul, Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter, Rome. Second half of the 4th century. Christ Pantocrator in a Roman mosaic in the church of Santa Pudenziana, Rome, c.
The oldest surviving panel icon of Christ Pantocrator, encaustic on panel, c. 6th century, showing the appearance of Jesus that is still immediately recognised today. Another depiction, seen from the late 3rd century or early 4th century onwards, showed Jesus with a beard, and within a few decades can be very close to the conventional type that later emerged. After the very earliest examples of c. 300, this depiction is mostly used for hieratic images of Jesus, and scenes from his life are more likely to use a beardless, youthful type.
Christ as Emperor, wearing military dress, and crushing the serpent representing Satan. Traditio Legis image initially uses this type. Once the bearded, long-haired Jesus became the conventional representation of Jesus, his facial features slowly began to be standardised, although this process took until at least the 6th century in the Eastern Church, and much longer in the West, where clean-shaven Jesuses are common until the 12th century, despite the influence of Byzantine art. As to the historical appearance of Jesus, in one possible translation of the apostle Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul urges Christian men of first-century Corinth not to have long hair. Christ in Majesty, still with no beard, from an English 12th-century illuminated manuscript. By the 5th century depictions of the Passion began to appear, perhaps reflecting a change in the theological focus of the early Church.
The period of Byzantine Iconoclasm acted as a barrier to developments in the East, but by the 9th century art was permitted again. During the 17th century, some writers, such as Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica criticized depictions of Jesus with long hair. By the end of the 19th century, new reports of miraculous images of Jesus had appeared and continue to receive significant attention, e. Secondo Pia’s 1898 photograph of the Shroud of Turin, one of the most controversial artifacts in history, which during its May 2010 exposition it was visited by over 2 million people. Certain local traditions have maintained different depictions, sometimes reflecting local racial characteristics, as do the Catholic and Orthodox depictions. The Coptic Church of Egypt separated in the 5th century, and has a distinctive depiction of Jesus, consistent with Coptic art.
The CGI model created in 2001 depicted Jesus’ skin color as being darker and more olive-colored than his traditional depictions in Western art. In 2001, the television series Son of God used one of three first-century Jewish skulls from a leading department of forensic science in Israel to depict Jesus in a new way. Using third-century images from a synagogue—the earliest pictures of Jewish people—Goodacre proposed that Jesus’ skin color would have been darker and swarthier than his traditional Western image. He also suggested that he would have had short, curly hair and a short cropped beard.