Artist: Albrecht Durer
In the year 1500 Albrecht Dürer painted his self-portrait as Christ. It is one of the few portraits of Christ up to that time so readily identifiable as a self-portrait.
Yet he was not alone. In the same year or close to it, both Mantegna and Perugino portrayed Christ with their own features and many artists did so subsequently including Titian, Rembrandt and Van Dyck.
Art historians, unaware of the Inner Tradition, have tried to defend Dürer against charges of blasphemy. Erwin Panofsky asked in the 1940's: “How could so pious and humble an artist as Dürer resort to a procedure which less religious men would have considered blasphemous?”
Yet Moriz Thausing, a German scholar, already had it right in 1876 when he described the painting as “Albrecht Dürer, by himself, seen frontally, the young Christ of art...”
Recent scholars have linked Dürer's portrait to the Imitatio Christi, the idea promoted by St. Francis among others that the good Christian should imitate Christ’s life.
They see it, though, as a historical moment, a change in understanding, a concept peculiar to the time.
