马雪儿貂为什么绝育:耶稣到底长啥样？上帝也有“标准像”？！

《每日野兽》艺术版 2011年9月23日讯

作者 布莱克•戈普尼克

译者 seez_franco

Rembrandt once painted a brooding version of Christ that differs widely from its more conventional, blond-haired predecessors, seen in a new show in Philadelphia. By Blake Gopnik 

近日，在美国费城举办的一场画展上，伦勃朗的一幅沉思的基督引发了普遍关注：这位荷兰画家笔下的耶稣同前作中那些司空见惯的留着棕发的人物形象作相比有着天壤之别。——布莱克•戈普尼克

Google “Jesus” (you get a few hits) and you know what kind of images you’ll find: Christ will almost always have a high forehead, blond-streaked locks parted in the middle, a straight nose, a hipster beard, and that faraway look. That sameness ought to seem strange: the artists didn’t exactly have the chance to paint him from life. Except Rembrandt, sort of. Somewhere around 1645, he went out into his Jewish neighborhood in Amsterdam, found a young man, dark, Semitic and brooding, and had him pose for some radically new pictures of Christ. Six that survive have been assembled in a big show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they face off against more conventional Christs by Rembrandt and others. Looking at Rembrandt’s “realistic” Jesus makes you realize how stereotyped other images of him have been, from the Middle Ages right to today. On Sunday, that stereotype, our commitment to it and Rembrandt’s daring revision will be the topic of an interfaith panel hosted by the Philadelphia museum.

用谷歌搜索“耶稣”（你会得到一连串相关链接），结果不外乎那些你烂熟于胸的千篇一律的形象：饱满的额头，金棕色中分长卷发，直挺的鼻梁，文艺范儿十足的大胡子，若有所思的神情。这种雷同难道不令人生疑么？画家们可没机会对耶稣进行实体写生啊。不过，从某种意义上来说，伦勃朗是个例外。1645年前后，伦勃朗前往阿姆斯特丹一个犹太人聚居区，在那里觅得一蒙昧阴沉、郁郁寡欢的犹太青年。于是他以该青年为模特画了几幅标新立异的基督像。而今，这些作品中尚存的六幅在费城美术博物馆举办的一场盛大的画展中精彩亮相，令同台参展的传统耶稣像（其中不乏伦勃朗自己及其他艺术大师的作品）相形见绌。伦勃朗笔下充满着“现实主义”风格的耶稣可谓“独树一帜”，相比之下，你便不难感觉到其他作品（不论是中世纪的老古董还是当代画家的新作）的刻板和陈腐。对于传统的上帝形象，人们缘何以如此忠贞不二？伦勃朗胆大妄为的“变脸”之作意义何在？周日，费城美术博物馆将以此为话题展开一场跨宗教信仰专题讨论会。

“There’s a deep, almost hard-wired interest in a single model of Jesus,” says David Morgan, the panel’s keynote speaker and an expert on how Christ’s image gets used. Once a picture of Christ gets codified in a culture, Morgan explains, believers take it in almost with their mother's milk, until it gets “naturalized” as not just an image of their savior, but the necessary one. Morgan has made an especially close study of our current “necessary” Christ—long-haired, straight-nosed, bearded—in an image painted in 1940 by a Chicago artist named Warner Sallman that has since sold something like 1 billion copies. (It ranks high on Google.) It is so ubiquitous, Morgan says, that “children lock onto the image, and they feel, ‘Yes, that is him. That is The Guy.’” Even when sophisticated Christians know that Sallman’s Christ has no facts backing it up, they find they can’t resist its pull. When Morgan surveyed contemporary Americans about it, one described it as “a true photo of Jesus,” and another said “I always believed that Sallman’s portrait of Jesus was the one that looked most like Jesus really looked when here on earth.” Other Christians, including Sallman himself, have said it matched holy visions they had of their savior.

“人们对某种特定的耶稣形象有着深沉的，几乎是与生俱来的好感。”研讨会主要发言人大卫•摩根说道。在上帝形象的普及这一研究领域，摩根造诣颇深。在他看来，一旦上帝的某种形象在一文化圈内受到认同，那么，该文化圈内的信徒便会把这种形象纳入其认知范围，这个过程就好比婴儿“吮吸”母乳，直到该形象已不仅仅是（信徒心目中）“救世主形象之一”，而是被升华至“理所当然的唯一”。一位来自芝加哥，名叫华纳•索曼的画家于1940年所作的上帝像堪称是这种“唯一”的理想再现——长发，直鼻，大胡子。它的副本至今已热销10亿幅。（该画像在谷歌搜索中排名靠前。）摩根对索曼画作中的上帝形象做过尤为仔细的研究。他认为，索曼笔下的上帝简直可以说是一目了然，“哪怕是孩子，只要他们一看到这幅画像便会立刻反应道，‘恩，就是他。画的就是那家伙’”。即使精明的基督徒们早就知道索曼笔下的上帝纯属凭空杜撰，但他们仍无法抵抗“索氏上帝”的诱惑力。摩根对当代美国人进行了一次调查，以了解他们对该画像的看法。一名受访者称，该画像根本就是“耶稣的真人照”，也有人表示，“我始终深信索曼笔下的上帝是最接近他在凡间的原貌的”。其他基督徒，包括索曼自己，也表示该画像与他们眼中的救世主的神圣形象相符。

Amazingly, Morgan might have got similar answers 500 years ago. When an Eastern Orthodox cleric visited Italy in 1438, he complained about how Western artists painted their holy men. Not one of their figures was recognizable to his Eastern-trained eyes, he said, except of course Jesus Christ … with his regulation pale hair, parted in the middle over a long face, high forehead, straight nose, and tidy beard. Even Leonardo da Vinci, who could never bear to stick with a received idea, went conservative when it came time to paint a portrait of his savior, sometime around 1500. After a recent cleaning, an old version of his painting has been garnering headlines as the long-lost original, but there’s nothing newsworthy about what it shows: the portrait is a model of standard Christliness, with all the features that Sallman’s painting still has. (It even has the same delicacy that some sterner Christians have attacked in Sallman’s “girlish” Christ.)  

你也许想不到，若时光倒流500年，摩根也可能得到相似的答案。当一位东正教牧师于1438年造访意大利时，他就对西方艺术家所作的圣人肖像颇有微词。对于这位一贯受东正教教义熏陶的牧师来说，他根本无法辨认这些画作描绘的到底是何方神圣，当然，带有一张“标准脸”（灰白的长发，中分，长脸，高额，直鼻，整洁的大胡子）的上帝除外。在基督像的创作上，即便是向来离经叛道的列奥纳多•达•芬奇也未能免俗——他于1500年前后创作的上帝肖像带有明显的保守倾向。经过最近的一次清洗，一幅被认为是失传已久的真迹的达•芬奇旧作成为了媒体竞相关注的焦点。可惜的是，这幅真迹的新闻价值寥寥：不过是又一幅耶稣“标准像”，跟索曼的画作如出一辙。（甚至跟索曼笔下的耶稣一样有着某种“女性化”特征，这一点饱受严肃基督徒的诟病。）

Photos: The Faces of Jesus  

照片：耶稣的容貌

Leonardo, like many other artists of his era, may have been relying on a document to guide him. Around 1300, someone forged a letter that pretended to be by either Pontius Pilate or a fictional Roman dubbed Lentulus and that offered a supposedly eyewitness account of Jesus’s face, with the same features seen in both Leonardo and Sallman. But the Lentulus Letter gives only pseudo-factual backing for how Jesus had already been pictured for hundreds of years. From 1216 on, the great “Veronica” relic in Rome, said to be an actual rag that Jesus wiped his face with, had been given “Lentuline” features whenever it was copied. (You could get tens of thousands of years knocked off your time in purgatory just for praying in front of such copies. No wonder you needed a license to paint them.) Even frescoes and icons from the early Middle Ages already have the basic look down pat.

与跟他同时代的画家一样，达•芬奇在创作上帝肖像时也可能参照了某些历史文献资料。在1300年前后，有人伪造了一封信件，谎称是本丢•彼拉多（译者注：罗马帝国犹太行省的执政官（26年-36年）。根据新约圣经所述，曾多度审问耶稣，原本不认为耶稣犯了什么罪，却在仇视耶稣的犹太宗教领袖的压力下，判处耶稣钉死在十字架上。）或历史小说中被唤作兰图鲁斯（昆图斯•巴蒂塔斯•兰图鲁斯，一个决斗学校的主人，公元前73年，奴隶斯巴达克斯带领70多名追随者从该学校逃走，随后发起了著名的斯巴达克斯起义。据小说描述，兰图鲁斯杀害了斯巴达克斯之妻，最终死在斯巴达克斯刀下。）的罗马人的手迹。信中记载了据称是写信人亲眼所见的耶稣的形象，而这个形象跟达•芬奇及索曼笔下的耶稣并无二致。然而，“兰图鲁斯之信”所记载的不过是一个披着史实外衣的伪真相，其中描述的上帝“真”容实际上参考了之前几百年中各类画作所描绘的耶稣的相貌。现存于罗马的“圣维罗妮卡”遗物，也就是传说中因被上帝用来擦汗而浮现出上帝头像的手帕，所说的也是同一个道理：自1216年起，每当人们制造手帕复制品时，其上的耶稣总是被赋予了如“兰图鲁斯之信”中所描述的相貌特征。（只要在这些复制品面前祈祷，你在炼狱受苦的日子就能缩短几万年。怪不得你得要张许可证才有权“复制”上帝。）即使在中世纪早期的壁画和肖像中，上帝的容貌也与上文所描述的基本相同。

Christianity may be the world’s most embodied religion, built around the idea that God could become man and that a man—one, specific, historical being—could have Godhead in him. “There’s this huge emphasis on Christ as the unanticipated revelation of the hidden God,” says David Hart, an expert on the history of Christian thought. In theological terms, says Hart, Christ can be described as “God’s own depiction of himself,” so it’s no surprise Christianity went on to breed great realist artists. One of their big jobs has always been to help Christians spot God in the man Jesus by getting at what Jesus himself would have looked like. “Lead us, wonderful image, to our true homeland, that we may see the face of Christ himself,” said the official prayer to the Veronica image in Rome. “It’s not just that [Christ] existed in history—but his having existed in history is one of the main planks in the argument justifying the use of images in Christian art,” explains art historian Alexander Nagel, a professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. The Christian incarnation, he says, has been described as “the font of Western realism.” The influence may have gone the other way, too: as artists perfected their realist techniques, the whole culture had to commit to a more detailed idea of what their incarnate god looked like. Ambiguity and vagueness were no longer an option. Realist painting may even have triggered the Lentulus forgery: art that looks documentary calls for similar precision on paper.

基督教大概是世界上最能体现人类精神情感的宗教。它的创立基于这样一种思想：上帝可以化身为人，而一个人——具体来说，一个历史人物，也可以具有神性。“我们一再强调基督的重要性，是因为他在不经意间揭开了看不见的上帝的神秘面纱。”基督教思想史专家大卫•哈特说道。哈特表示，从理论上看，基督可以被视作“上帝的自画像”，因此，基督教能够孕育出一代代杰出的现实主义艺术家也就不足为奇了。基督教最重要的工作之一就是让信徒们了解耶稣的样貌，以便帮助他们透过耶稣的化身（译者注：即化身为凡人的耶稣）看见上帝。“神奇的影像啊，请带我们去真正的家园，让我们一睹基督的真容吧。” 在罗马圣维罗妮卡画像（译者注：即手帕上出现的耶稣头像）前一位官员这样祈祷着。“基督不是曾经存在过，而是从古至今一直都存在。当人们为在基督教艺术领域使用这些（耶稣）肖像的合理性辩护时，上述观点便成为了争论的重头之一。”艺术历史学家、纽约大学艺术学院教授亚历山大•奈杰尔解释道。他表示，基督的化身一直以来被描述为“西方现实主义的源泉”。不过，（基督的具象化所产生的）影响也可能是负面的：随着画家的现实主义表现手法日益精湛，整个社会文化都将目光聚焦于对上帝相貌的更为详实具体的描绘之上。模棱两可和含糊不清已不再为人所接受。现实主义画风的盛行甚至会引发兰图鲁斯式的（文学）伪造品的泛滥：看似纪实性的绘画艺术激发了人们对同样细致入微的文学作品的诉求。

Which brings us back to Rembrandt, the most ambitious of realists. By the 1640s, after more than 500 years of use, the classic image of Christ no longer felt that “real” because it looked so much like artistic conventions. To revive it, Rembrandt had to play a balancing act: he had to keep just enough of its elements (the long, midparted hair, the faraway look) to make his Jesus recognizable, while adding enough new ones to make it a credible image of a living man, such as you might meet on an Amsterdam street. In a weird way, Rembrandt’s realism, for all its specificity, ends up arguing the broad theological point of God’s incarnation in a regular Joe rather than giving a vision of Jesus’s actual flesh.

是什么把我们的视线拉回到伦勃朗——这个最具野心的现实主义大师的身上？在17世纪60年代，风靡了五百多年的经典基督像已经无法像过去那样给人以“真实感”，因为它看起来就像一成不变的艺术惯例。为了给它注入新的活力，伦勃朗不得不在传统和创新之间寻求一个平衡点：一来，他必须保留足够的使耶稣具有高度识别性的元素（中分的长发、出神的表情）；二来，他必须给肖像增添新的元素从而让他看来更像一个活生生的人，一个你有可能在阿姆斯特丹大街上遇见的人。奇怪的是，伦勃朗那讲求面面俱到的现实主义最终止步于一个宽泛的神学观点，即上帝转世成为凡人乔（译者注：乔，圣约瑟夫的简称，即耶稣基督）。至于耶稣到底长什么模样，他并未给出答案。

Maybe that’s why Rembrandt’s new Jesus never caught on. After all, if Christ was a real person in a single real body, his features can’t suddenly change. “The continuity of the image is a kind of testimony to the incarnation,” as Hart puts it, while Nagel refers to the paradox that “the claim of specificity requires seriality.”

这或许可以解释为什么伦勃朗标新立异的基督像从未大红大紫。毕竟，基督若的确以一个人的形式存在过，那么，他的特征也不可能一下子改变。用哈特的话来说，“这种前后一致的形象恰恰是上帝转世的证明”；而奈杰尔对这种自相矛盾的看法是“（对基督形象的）具体化要求其具有传承性”。

Rembrandt’s one Jew, that is, could never compete with a billion blond Jesuses.

看来，伦勃朗笔下的那个犹太人终究敌不过十亿个金发耀眼的耶稣。

参考文献：
1）百度百科 本丢•彼拉多    http://baike.baidu.com/view/187809.htm
2）维基百科 昆图斯•巴蒂塔斯•兰图鲁斯http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentulus_Batiatus