The face of Christianity: Images of Christ in art come in all forms

A song by Michael Kelly Blanchard tells of a young girl whose life is a knot of problems — unwanted pregnancies, feuds.

But at night, back home, she's greeted by familiar a face. She says:

There's a picture of Jesus on my wall;

Been there since I was very small;

And he looks like he just saw a little girl fall;

But, you know, he don't look angry at all.

Carmen and Nora Mancuso, owners of Mancuso's Religious Goods, are surrounded daily by more than a hundred pictures of Jesus. But for Nora, it all goes back to childhood.

"Most Catholic homes, when I was growing up, were dedicated to the Sacred Heart," she says. "So that was the picture of Jesus that still comes to my mind. In the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of modern paintings of him came along, butnone were as powerful for me as the Sacred Heart."

Carmen Mancuso says when he dreams, he'll see himself walking along the Sea of Galilee with Jesus. But Jesus' face isn't the versionof any artist. It's almost a combination of all of them.

"We get paintings of Jesus with blue eyes and things like that," he says. "But they're not how I see him."

Because the Savior has been such a powerful subject for artists, thousands of versions of his visage exist — many by the greatest painters in history. Depending on the culture, he has also been depicted as African, Chinese, Native American, Hispanic and even Eskimo. And portraits of him run the gamut — from realistic to completely abstract and unrecognizable. And every hue of the color wheel has been employed at one time or another.

One painting even shows him dressed in a robe made from the flags of dozens of nations.

In short, there's a Jesus for everyone.

Ironically, in the early Christian church, leaders felt that depictions of Jesus were "graven images" and were idol worship. The earliest artistic rendition, in fact, doesn't appear until 320 years after his birth, where Jesus is shown as a young, beardless boy carrying a sheep across his shoulders.

When the Eastern and Western Christian churches split, the East opted for paintings of Jesus that show him to be wise and aloof — a celestial judge. The famous Russian icons have such a look. The West, however, chose to portray passion. The image of Christ on the cross became the definitive visual image.