What did Jesus really look like? Western art has frequently stumbled over the contradiction between the ascetic figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the iconography of Christ inspired by the heroic, Hellenistic ideal: Christ as beautiful, tall, and broad-shouldered, God's wide receiver; blue-eyed, fair-haired, a straight aquiline nose, Christ as European prince.

Rembrandt van Rijn, in a career rich with artistic innovation, begged to differ. An exhibition at Paris's Louvre Museum showed in dozens of oils, charcoal sketches, and oak-panel studies how the 17th-century Dutch painter virtually reinvented the depiction of Jesus and arrived at a more realistic portrait.

Before Rembrandt painters tended to reiterate the conventional imagery of Christ. Where artists did rely on life models, they were uniquely beautiful specimens, such as in Michelangelo's Pietà. Rembrandt, working in the relatively open and tolerant society of Golden Age Holland, turned to life models for Jesus to give an "earthly reality" to the face of Christ. He often relied on one model, a young Dutch Jew, whose face appears in the seven oak panels. The result was a more realistic, culturally-appropriate, and biblical portrayal of Jesus.

The poor and ascetic Jesus likely was small and thin and almost certainly olive-skinned, with black hair and brown eyes, and so Rembrandt painted him. In this he anticipated much more recent studies of what the historical Jesus was like. The savior of Rembrandt's faith was a young man with a sweet, homely face, heavy-lidded, stoop-shouldered, and wan.

Viewing the pictures in order of their creation shows how Rembrandt's own features gradually infiltrated the images of Christ. It feels like the most spiritually edifying aspect of these works: When Rembrandt looked into the face of his Savior, he saw his own.