I meant to include links to these two pieces in my earlier post but I forgot about them.

A new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art explores Rembrandt’s “Faces of Jesus.”

“Rembrandt’s concept of Christ changed significantly as his art evolved from one decade to the next,” argues George S. Keyes in his catalog essay, with “Rembrandt’s earlier representations of Jesus [showing him] in dramatically charged events” and later depictions making “Christ… an object of profound meditation.” This evolution can clearly be seen in Rembrandt’s almost endless returning to his favorite story of Jesus on the Road to Emmaus and the Supper at Emmaus. From small drawings focusing on the explosively radiant divinity of Christ at the moment of revelation at Emmaus to paintings such as the Louvre’s 1648 Supper at Emmaus focusing more on the reactions of the disciples than on the more-reserved, resurrected Jesus (whose appearance seems based on the “Philadelphia” head), Rembrandt shifted away from Jesus as the heroic superbeing of antiquity towards a more human, more accessible to believers, and, perhaps, truer face of Christ.

More here. The exhibition will also travel to Detroit. Well worth the trip, I should think. I’m interested in the article’s identification of the Supper at Emmaus as Rembrandt’s favorite subject, especially given the loaded theological significance of the story for seventeenth-century religious conflict. No doubt dissertations have been written on the topic (none of which I plan on reading).

From visual art to music. Peter Phillips’ review of Christopher Page’s The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years. Money quote:

Largely as a result of Guido’s invention, the Latin West had become a place of common worship by the twelfth century, and was given a name: Latinitas. By 1200, clerics envisaged the way they lived and worshipped as being of one tradition with one chant, despite the individual histories of sees such as Milan, with its Ambrosian rites, and the Mozarabic chant in Spain. The Cistercian order was founded by Bernard of Clairvaux to perpetuate the unity of the Roman way of doing things, and staff-notation was from the beginning crucial to their work. During the twelfth century they carried this notation to all corners of the Latin West, deliberately founding houses in remote places.

Of course, the Cistercian order wasn’t founded by Bernard of Clairvaux. Oh, well.