Why does Jesus have shoulder-length, brown wavy hair and a beard?

One of my personal favorite bits of touristing is doing the museum tour, and there’s plenty to choose from in Europe.  The grand cities have some of the greatest art musuems of the world, collecting over a millennium of masterpieces (mostly from Europe and North America, granted, but also some from further afield).  In our time here, Susan and I have been privileged to explore the Prado, Reina Sophia, Thyssen, Louvre, d’Orsay, National Gallery, and Victoria and Albert.  And that’s not counting other art museums that we’ve seen on other occasions or the vast amounts of art accumulated in palaces, cathedrals, churches, mansions, and random other tourist destinations.  It brings alive all those dusty memories of art movements that (for me) date back to high school, making them vivid and setting them in context.  Still, with all of this art trekking, we’ve noticed a few other features that aren’t mentioned quite so often.

For one, why is Jesus always pictured as having shoulder-length, wavy brown hair and a beard?

Jesus and his hairdo

For most of us, this is an image we’ve seen all our lives — so much so that we probably don’t even think about it.  There is always the observation that Jesus was, of course, almost certainly Semitic, rather than Caucasian (as he is usually pictured in Euro-derived art).  But I have never really heard anybody discuss this artistic convention about his hairdo.

I mean, really — where did this notion come from?  It’s everywhere — in art going back at least a thousand years, J.C. is drawn this way.  It’s there in medieval paintings, stained glass in cathedrals, Renaissance statues, and everything since, up to and including modern neon light displays.  You have to look hard to find a rendition of Jesus that doesn’t have those features.  But, as far as I know, we have no actual evidence or description of how he really looked.

So who came up with it?  Somebody had to have been first to draw him like that, and it has stuck ever since.  But who?  And why?  I suppose that it sticks because it has become a set of attributes that we use to identify J.C.  In the same way that the crescent moon and the third eye are attributes that identify Shiva to Hindus, Christians know to look for the coiffure.

Saint Sebastian (as rendered by Crivelli)

Another thing we’ve noticed is an overwhelming fascination with certain specific saints.  While the Catholic church acknowledges an incredible number of saints (over 10,000 according to the Wikipedia article), only like five or six ever show up in European art.  One of the favorites is Saint Sebastian.  The story is that this poor bastard managed to piss off Emperor Diocletian and got his ass filled with arrows for his trouble.  Miraculously, of course, he didn’t die, but lived on to work other miracles and harangue Diocletian some more.  (Not surprisingly, this did not sit well with Diocletian, who decided that he must not have done the job thoroughly the first time and had his soldiers drag Sebastian out, beat him to death, and toss his body into the outhouse.  Yum.)  Anyway, Sebastian is all over the place.  Everybody seems to love to paint him.  We’ve seen dozens of images of this poor fellow, all recognizable by the arrows.  (Sometimes only a couple, sometimes a porcupine’s complement.)  Usually, he has a far-away expression that is probably intended to represent his holy fixation on the heavens and his unconcern with paltry physical ephemera like being pincushioned with broadheads.  Unfortunately, too few artists can really capture “ethereal”, so it usually comes out feeling like a cross between marijuana mellow and constipated.

Salomé with the head of John the Baptist, as rendered by Caravaggio

You see a similar sort of ambiguous facial expression in the omnipresent images of Salomé.  So this chick either deliberately, or at her mother’s behest, requested John the Baptist’s head on a platter as a present.  Most teenage girls don’t get such extravagent gifts from their dads, but when your dad is the king, special rules apply.  (I would have gone for the red sports car myself, but hey — no accounting for tastes.)  So Herod’s soldiers dutifully brought her the head on a plate.  The funny thing

Titian's version of Salomé and John

is that she’s so often pictured almost completely impassively, or at most with a little distaste or perhaps some smugness.  But a surprisingly underwhelming reaction for someone who has just had a dish of gore dropped in her lap.  I guess I haven’t verified for myself, but I’m pretty sure that the Bible doesn’t say anything about her being clinically psychopathic or having dangerously flattened affect.  Or maybe that was just the kind of thing you got for your daughter in those days and she was used to it — had a dozen in her closet already.  I dunno.  shrug

Little old man baby Jesus

Ugly babies are another popular theme.  Specifically, ugly baby Jesuses.  We can’t quite figure out what’s going on, but our best guess is that it was way easier for Rennaisance painters to get adult female models than baby males.  (Or to get them to sit still or something.)  Or maybe it’s just that the painters are all struggling to make the little guy look simultaneously like a cute and helpless infant and the King of Kings with all the wisdom of the ages in his barely postnatal eyes.  For whatever reason, the galleries are littered with truly fugly baby Jesuses.  Warped little beasts that look sometimes more like a lizard and sometimes more like a goblin.  Sadly, I don’t have the absolute best example of this genre here.  They don’t allow photos in the National Gallery in London, but there’s an absolutely stunningly horrendous baby Jesus in their collection.  The kid is, I shit you not, gray.  And it’s not that the painting has aged — the other people in the painting are relatively normal flesh-toned.  In comparison, the little Lamb of God comes off as, well, a baby zombie.  “Awwww….  Kewt widdle baby zombie Jesus!  Smile for Mr. Painter man!”

Baby Jesus: lord of the pit fiends

Madonna with creepy child

With looks like these, the little guy would have had to have God looking out for him, to keep his parents from drowning him quietly in the night…