Race & Ethnicity in Christian Art
It is common today to think about the historical Jesus who lived in Palestine & Judea in the 1st century, and to think he would have had olive skin, dark curly hair, and brown eyes. That is because we think historically. For most of the last 2,000 years, people haven’t thought of Jesus Christ historically; they have thought of him as their savior, someone who loved them enough to suffer for them, someone who demonstrated how to best live a human life, and thus someone to imitate.
Artists know that human beings imitate that which we find attractive. We are attracted to beautiful people who are like us in some way. Advertising creators know this as well, so they try to get us to see ourselves in ads for new cars (and a million other products) and imagine ourselves being beautiful and happy like the person in the ad, so that we invest our money in the car being advertised.
As such, artists have long made Jesus and the saints look like the attractive people of their time and place. In Sandro Botticelli’s 'Madonna and Christ Child,' the subjects have blond hair and blue eyes, like many northern Italians. Similar blond-haired, blue-eyed images of Jesus can be found mixed in with brown-haired, brown-eyed, and white-skinned images of Jesus throughout the European and North American art tradition, where the majority of the people (and the majority of the powerful people) had these features.
In Ethiopia and Egypt, where Christianity has thrived since the beginning, the figures in icons have always looked Egyptian or Ethiopian. In Africa and the Caribbean, in artworks depicting Jesus and the saints, the figures tend to have deep brown skin, very curly, dark brown/black hair, and brown eyes. In Central and South America, locally created artworks tend to depict Jesus & the saints as having light brown skin, black hair that is somewhat curly, and brown eyes. It will come as no surprise then that in Asia, artworks tend to depict Jesus and the saints as looking like Asians.
For people who are used to seeing Jesus Christ depicted a certain way, seeing artworks from other places can be disconcerting at first, even offensive. But once we reflect upon the universality of Christ’s message & the universality of Christianity, we can often open our hearts to our siblings in Christ.
One reason people are sometimes offended when they see Christ in other racial/ethnic identities than the one they hold in their heads, is that the inverse of the attraction principle has often been true as well. Artists sometimes paint ugliness into those they fear or distrust. Thus from time to time, Christian art has demonized the Other. Sometimes the Other has been Jews, sometimes Muslims, sometimes people of skin colors other than that of the dominant culture. So, for example, a European artist might make Satan look like an African, while an African artist might make Satan look like a European.
