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One Saturday morning in March 2004, Ed Lind got an unforgettable phone call at his Draper home.
The man told Lind about an LDS woman in Southern California who had, under her bed, a portrait of Christ by Rembrandt and who wanted to donate it to Brigham Young University's Museum of Art.
"It was an are-you-kidding-me? moment," recalls Lind, the museum's interim director. "We get calls like that all the time, but usually the works are not what people think."
So Lind cautiously answered, while quietly rolling his eyes, that the museum would be happy to "explore the matter further."
Two days later, the caller, attorney Burton McCullough, was waiting for Lind in the museum's Provo parking lot, with the painting in the back of his car. When they took it into the museum and out of its crate, then unwrapped it on the conference table, there were gasps all around. They were staring at a 17th-century image of a dark-eyed Jesus Christ.
"We knew it might not be a Rembrandt, but it was close enough, maybe done by one of his students," Lind says. "It was astounding. I believe everyone there knew, without a doubt, this was an authentic painting of that period."
It was clearly a significant work, he says, and extremely valuable.
Today, BYU's "Head of Christ" is hanging in the Louvre in Paris, on temporary loan as part of a traveling exhibit, "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus," which includes dozens of paintings, drawings and prints by the Dutch master and some of his students.
The LDS Church-owned university's acquisition is the "most faithful of several workshop copies of a lost oil sketch that was executed by Rembrandt [within] the series of sketches at the core of our exhibition," according to Timothy Rub, director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the show will move at the end of July. "Of the three known workshop copies, it most closely reflects Rembrandt's style of the late 1640s and the sketch-like technique and palette of the surviving sketches of Jesus."
But what made these paintings and sketches so important?
It was the Dutch master's radical departure from past images of Christ.
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A new Jesus • For centuries, European artists imagined Christ using their own visual and ethnic sensibilities, directed — and limited — by the clergy. These images tended toward the regal and divine, with Nordic features or aspects of a Roman emperor. And, in the first 20 years of his career, Rembrandt followed that tradition as well.
Then something happened in the 1640s, Rub writes in a 2009 letter to BYU. The artist lived amid the Jewish community of Amsterdam and began to use some of its young men as models for the Galilean. His Messiah became more human.
"In doing so, he broke radically with the entire tradition of Christian art," the Philadelphia director writes. "By choosing an ethnographically correct model, he defied the great spiritual authority of the prototype passed down from antiquity."
The main element in these new faces: empathy.
Rembrandt's heads of Christ "are fascinating nowadays mainly for their complexity of expression," writes Philippe Dagen in the newspaper Le Monde about the Louvre's exhibit. "They offer each onlooker the possibility of interpreting, according to his or her own feelings, the gaze of Christ's dark eyes, the tilt of the head, and the curve of the lips."
The exhibit also showcases Rembrandt's perception of those to whom Jesus appeared such as the "doubting" Thomas and pilgrims on the road to Emmaus.
Jesus may be at the center, Rub writes, but the image of Christ is also mirrored in the faces of his listeners.
Rembrandt's perspective was colored because he "was a Protestant ... in a Protestant republic welcoming all religions," the exhibition catalog says. His art demonstrates 17th-century Holland's "famous religious tolerance" — including embracing Jews who escaped the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal.
Assistants and students in the "circle of Rembrandt" carried on his radical style and approach, making their works nearly as valuable, often commanding nearly as high an asking price.
So how did a Mormon widow in California get it?
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From L.A. to the Louvre • Vivian Vicondo was a wealthy Latter-day Saint widow in a Los Angeles suburb when Christie's auction house in New York advertised the piece for sale in the early 2000s.
Her husband had been an artist, whose works adorned the walls of her home. A friend suggested she buy the "Head of Christ" as an investment, which she did for between $50,000 and $75,000. She didn't arrange to pick it up, however, until Christie's said in 2003 it could no longer store the painting. The auction house then shipped it to Vicondo, who slid it under her bed in the crate, unopened.
One day, she mentioned the piece to her LDS "home teacher," a man in the congregation assigned to visit her each month. She told him it was a painting of Christ by famed French artist Renoir and wondered if the Huntington Art Gallery in San Marino would like to have it. He contacted the museum, but officials there said they weren't interested. They urged the man to try the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. That museum employee said he was fairly certain that Renoir never painted Christ.
So the home teacher went back and looked at the painting again. This time he turned it over and found the Christie's tag, which mentioned Rembrandt. He called the Huntington again. Now, the museum was very interested.
This time Vicondo herself took the painting to the museum with the help of a young woman who had befriended the widow. But when the women arrived with the painting, the official they had discussed it with was not there, so they took it home again.
Meanwhile, the home teacher was growing worried about the widow's dependence on her friend, so he called McCullough, an attorney in the ward.
McCullough says he looked into the matter, determined the young woman was exploiting her relationship with the widow and intervened.
Going through Vicondo's finances, the attorney saw that the widow, being childless, planned to leave some of her estate to BYU.
"Would you like me to see if the BYU Museum of Art would like the painting?" McCullough asked her, and she gave a strong reply, "Yes."
That prompted the Saturday morning call to Lind.
Vicondo died in 2008, but her artistic legacy lives on at the Provo school's museum.
BYU's "Head of Christ" comes closest in composition to a painting from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, says Emily Poulsen, who manages all the school's art loans and hand-carried the painting to Paris. The two works are hanging side by side at the Louvre exhibit.
"When you see all the paintings together, it is clear that they most likely used the same sitter," Poulsen says. "But ours stood out. It had a more finished quality to it."
The donation already has brought acclaim to the LDS school.
"We are thrilled to have it," Lind says. "As far as I know, we've never had a piece in the Louvre before."
Where the exhibit goes
The painting is part of an international exhibition titled "Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus." The exhibition schedule is as follows:
Louvre in Paris • through July 18.
Philadelphia Museum of Art • Aug. 3 through Oct. 30.
Detroit Institute of Arts • Nov. 20 through Feb. 12, 2012. —
The art of faith — a yearlong series
The Salt Lake Tribune is featuring a monthly series this year about religious art.
To view previous stories in the series, see links above.