Religion: Familiar Faces

No one knows what the apostles and disciples really looked like. Even so, argues Artist Ade Bethune in Sacred Signs, a bulletin interested in liturgical arts, modern painters seeking to portray Christ’s first followers should not consider themselves free to draw as they see fit. Instead, the contemporary painter should respect “the collective memory of the Church” by following the traditional portrait guidelines that were laid down by the early Christian painters. These models are still followed by the icon makers of the Eastern churches—and, in the case of Christ, by most Western painters.

According to the rules of iconography, St. Peter is an old man with thick, white, curly hair and a round, white beard; he wears “a joyous and simple expression.” St. John the Evangelist, although sometimes shown as a beardless youth with dark hair, is usually pictured as he was at the end of his life: tufts of white hair bordering a bald head, a long white beard, a beatific smile. His brother James is traditionally shown as a young man; he has thick brown hair, receding slightly at two points, and a short, fringelike beard, much like Christ’s. St. Paul has a large bald head, a dark, scraggly, pointed beard, an aquiline nose and “a lively penetrating gaze.” St. Philip wears no beard but has dark, curly hair receding toward baldness. St. Luke has a thin mustache, sunken cheeks, a sparse, round beard, and a bald spot in the midst of brown wavy hair.

Obeying tradition, claims Miss Bethune, does not take away the artist’s creative freedom, but simply makes him face facts. Getting the faces wrong, she argues, is as absurd as representing “George Washington with bushy black whiskers or Abraham Lincoln with soft white wig tied with ribbon.”