What did Jesus Christ look like?
Have you ever wondered what Jesus really looked like? Many throughout history have attempted to capture the image of Christ, but it has been all too common to depict Christ in ways which do not honour his ancestry and origin. Here at Holy Masterpieces, we dedicate ourselves to sharing artworks which help to connect us to the divine – whatever that means to you. It is always our aim to maintain a vision of the diversity in global belief through which we can be united in our efforts to reflect and become better, in the image of purity, beauty, and holiness. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that we introduce our newest project, which is to share the Portrait of Christ by Curtis Hooper to a new, 21st century audience. This portrait seeks to depict a historically accurate Jesus, and its story is sure to provide inspiration to all.
Historical Depictions of Jesus
Christ is perhaps one of the most frequently rendered subjects of western art. Indeed, we have a great many portraits of him here at Holy Masterpieces! Some of the earliest known images of Christ originate as far back as the 3rd-6th centuries CE, and in the proceeding centuries following this, Christ was depicted in relatively diverse ways, with both Semitic visions of Christ in Byzantine tradition, and Graeco-Roman influenced visions of Christ in Western traditions. However, it was in the medieval period that the frequency of Christ’s depiction in artwork truly began to flourish. During this time, Western portraits of Christ increasingly depicted Him with Western European features, including light skin and light hair. These features were broadly influenced by localised western artistic conventions, as well as local cultural identity. Indeed, as Christ is not physically described in Biblical accounts, many communities envisaged Christ as being ‘one of them’, and as such, Christ came to take on the visual image of whatever community was worshipping him.
Buy The Apparition, Sacred Heart of Jesus
While this was beautiful and meaningful in its own right, as the western world became an increasing power in global relations, this western depiction of Christ became canonised. As such, European depictions of Christ spread across the world through colonial campaign, and these depictions which once aimed to show Christ as being ‘like us’ in the creator’s communities, became a tool of racism, hatred and exclusion to non-western peoples. This history is very difficult to come to terms with, but is not without a cause for hope! Since the 20th century, many people have critiqued the Eurocentric depiction of Christ, and have sought to increase diversity in his depictions once more. In addition, many have sought more ‘realistic’ depictions of Christ which respect his Middle Eastern origin. Indeed, according to Biblical accounts, Christ was born in Bethlehem, a city in the modern West Bank of Palestine, and grew up between modern Egypt and Israel-Palestine.
Buy Leonardo Di Vinci, The Last Supper
It is into this scene that Curtis Hooper found himself in the 1970s. Born in 1945 to a British film actor, Hooper was a child actor himself. However, after finding a passion for drawing and painting from the age of 3, Hooper’s talents in portraiture – in which he was entirely self-taught – eventually became evident. By adulthood, Hooper began completing portraits of actors he knew through his childhood acting career, and by the 1970s, he was renowned for specialising in ‘portraits of the famous’. These portraits included Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, as well as many Dukes and Earls of history. He was exceptionally prolific in this craft, and in 1978 alone produced over 40 editions at Graphic House, including 25 editions of lithographs and intaglios featuring Winston Churchill. He later developed a ‘Homage to the Masters’ series which featured artists from the 15th to 20th century, including relatively contemporary figures such as Salvador Dali. Most significantly, Curtis Hooper trained himself to work from photographs of the historical figures that he studied, and as such became highly adept at bringing together various sources in order to gain a fuller understanding of the structure of a given subject’s face. Given Hooper’s history of capturing famous characters in portrait, it was only a matter of time before he turned to perhaps the most famous of all: Jesus Christ Himself.
A Scientific Portrait?: The Shroud of Turin
It was around 1973 that Curtis Hooper became fascinated with the Shroud of Turin, a world-famous relic which was discovered in Europe in the mid-14th century, and had captured the imaginations of many ever since. The shroud is a 14-foot length linen which, for six centuries, many Christians have believed was the actual cloth used to wrap the body of Christ. In 1898, the first photographic image of the Shroud was produced by Secondo Pia. The photograph appeared to reveal a negative image of a man’s face, which many saw to validate the historical Christian claims to the object, and caused worldwide fascination which has rippled to this very day. It was this photograph which sparked Hooper’s imagination, leading him to the conclusion that his previous work in painting portraits from photographs placed him in a unique situation to be able to paint a ‘scientific’ portrait of Christ based on the negative image.
Following this realisation, Hooper began a period of intensive research regarding the shroud. He began by enhancing dozens of photographs of the facial image imprinted on the shroud, using underexposure, overexposure, bleaching and enlargement in order to bring forth many more details from the image than are immediately visible to the naked eye. After accumulating this mass of variously processed photographs at his New Jersey Studio, he realised that the face he saw in the image was greatly distorted – the eyes appeared sunken, the forehead scratched, and the nose and lips were swollen. As such, Hooper realised that the image of Christ as depicted in the shroud, if used as a model for the portrait, would create an incorrect image of Christ which is based on the crucified person, who – according to Hooper – had a broken nose, broken cheek bone, and broken jaw bone. As such, Hooper sought the advice of experts: a plastic surgeon, an orthodontist (dental surgeon), mortician, and forensic pathologist. Dr. Bernard Roberts, the orthodontist consulted by Hooper, notes that Hooper was ‘painstaking’ in his research, and altogether, Hooper’s consultations confirmed his beliefs that the man who had been buried in the shroud was highly disfigured, which not only acted as confirmation of the Biblical accounts of Christ’s death, but also emboldened Hooper to attempt to reconstruct the man’s face as he would have looked ‘before His face was broken’, using the advice of the consulted professionals.
Christ Pantocrator at Sinai, from St Catherine's Monastery. Purchase here
It is this which sets apart Hooper’s work as the first ‘scientific’ portrait of Christ. He believes that prominent depictions of Christ before his had attempted to work from the shroud, such as the ancient icon of Saint Catherine, but that its result was a misshapen and disfigured version of Jesus’ face due to the injuries sustained prior to being wrapped in the shroud. Since Hooper states that later portraits were influenced by the icon of Saint Catherine, he believed that there had never before been a realistic, historical depiction of Jesus, and rather that all prior depictions of him had been incorrect, built on a false premise. As such, an element of Hooper’s determination was to attempt to right this historical wrong, by returning to the source material of the shroud.
Research into the Shroud of Turin
While Hooper’s artistic research continued, the largest-scale scientific analysis of the shroud was also taking place. In 1978, a team of 42 international scientists submitted the shroud to a series of rigorous analytical tests, including X-ray fluorescence, infrared thermography, and ultraviolet light analysis. The study, titled ‘STURP’ (Shroud of Turin Research Project) involved physicists, chemists, photographers, and imaging experts, some of whom had worked with NASA technologies. The results of this study seemed to corroborate what Christians had long-believed about the Shroud of Turin. Indeed, chemical examinations discovered that the stains on the cloth contained hemoglobin and serum separation, indicating the presence of real human blood. Furthermore, the bloodstains aligned with wounds which would be consistent with the assumption of death by crucifixion. Additionally, when the shroud was analysed with a NASA-developed VP-8 Image Analyser, it produced a 3D relief of a human face and body, suggesting that the image had not been painted onto the linen. Microscopic inspection corroborated that the image had not been painted onto the cloth, but rather suggested that the image colouration was the result of oxidation and dehydration of the linen fibres, with an effect akin to scorch marks. All of this research was of great interest to Hooper, and only further emboldened him in his goal of depicting the subject of the burial as they would have looked when they were alive. However, the fact that the image on the shroud appeared as a scorch mark was perhaps of the greatest interest to Hooper. As an artist, he had noticed that the source of light creating the negative image appeared odd. It was Hooper’s conviction that the source of light appeared to emanate from the body of the interred individual, which would explain the pattern of the ‘scorch marks’, and he explains this as a ‘flash of energy’ similar to ultraviolet light. For Hooper, this was indisputable evidence that the interred body was indeed that of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
In that same year, Hooper finalised a sculpture of the interred individual on the basis of his research, with the aim to use the sculpture as a model for his final portrait. This sculpture attempted to revert the features of the shroud back to how they would have appeared prior to disfigurement. Hooper’s final point of research was to determine what Christ’s colour palette should be, including hair, skin, and eye colour. In order to achieve this, Hooper visited Israel to observe the Bedouins and Sephardim, whom he had read held the best resemblance to the jews of 2000 years ago. In this trip, he noted a much deeper skin and hair colour than had been traditionally depicted in Western artworks, as well as dark brown eyes in 99.9% of the population he studied. This is, of course, a far cry from the Eurocentric depictions of Christ which have been central to some of the most famous works of art in the Western tradition, such as in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
Buy Curtis Hooper's 'Portrait of Christ' here
The Perfected Portrait
Between 1978 and 1984, Hooper completed and perfected his portrait of Christ, the first scientific portrait of Jesus of Nazareth ever made. According to Hooper, the portrait captures at least with 80-95% accuracy what the interred man from the Shroud of Turin would have looked like one week before his crucifixion. After the portrait’s reveal in 1984, Hooper claimed that the process had made him ‘gentler’ and set about working with church groups in order to talk about his research and share his findings with those who it affects most greatly. Now, in 2025, over 40 years since the portrait’s initial unveiling, we at Holy Masterpieces are heartened to be able to share this historical Jesus portrait with the world once more. Given recent research which seems to corroborate the legitimacy of the Shroud of Turin, there has never been a better time to own a piece of history like the Portrait of Christ. We share this story and artwork with the hope that, in a world which can sometimes be dark, we all can become gentler and more gracious through the inspiration that this holy masterpiece provides.
The Portrait of Christ is now available for limited purchase at Holy Masterpieces. Find more details here.
Curtis Hooper's Portrait of Christ
Sources
Brett, M. (1997). Missionary Images: Iconography, Colonialism, and the Representation of Christ. London: Routledge.
Brown, D.E. (August 27th, 1978) ‘Portraitist Seeks to Reveal True Image of Christ’ in The Home News.
Life Magazine (February, 1984) IS THIS WHAT CHRIST REALLY LOOKED LIKE?.
Times of Israel. (n.d.). Whitewashed: How a Jewish and brown Jesus became an Aryan. Available at: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/whitewashed-how-a-jewish-and-brown-jesus-became-an-aryan.
Weaver, K.F. (June, 1980) "Science and the Shroud" in National Geographic 157(6), pp. 730-753.