Early Christian art depicted a clean-shaven Christ. When did that change? Did the addition of a beard have a specific iconographical meaning, or was it just a fashion that has stuck?
Here is one from the 6th Century AD.
I can’t vouch for the reliability of this, but here’s a site claiming that a 4th century fresco is the earliest known image of Jesus with a beard.
ETA: the gallery page on that site is pretty cool.
It probably depended on the culture/background of the artist doing the work, but it looks as if it was around the fourth century.
But that doesn’t mean all the portraits went to bearded then. Images of Christ as the Good Shepherd often showed him as a beardless youth. One here:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Good_shepherd_m2.jpg&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Good_shepherd_m2.jpg&usg=__4ItNx9E3CmRa5jQjfwH-r7zl6qo=&h=868&w=900&sz=333&hl=en&start=18&tbnid=owZ_V2mHsrgGfM:&tbnh=141&tbnw=146&prev=/images%3Fq%3D4th%2Bcentury%2BChrist%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den
I have a picture in a book that I can’t find online, an early mosaic, that has Christ depicted as a beardless warrior figure, it’s supposed to be from the fourth century.
A lot of the early artwork I’ve seen was from Roman sites, the catacombs and such. There’s one really fascinating one I saw which depicts Christ with His apostles, a fresco work, thathas them all in what looks like togas, or similar Roman garments.
The bearded Christ starts to get pretty popular by the 6th century, and shortly afterward becomes the standardized form of portrayal. Like Blake points out, there was a period when both bearded and beardless Christs were being depicted. One of the later beardless Christs appears in the apse mosaic at San Vitale in Ravenna (c. 526-547).
The bearded Christ first becomes standardized in Byzantine art (in fact, Western European artists were probably influenced by Byzantine prototypes in adopting this format). This could be due simply to Byzantine fashion–men generally wore beards in the East, in contrast to the clean-shaven look of the Romans (up until Hadrian, anyway, who himself began wearing a beard due to his enthusiasm for Greek culture).
But the beard might have symbolic value, too. The bearded Christ has also been described as looking more authoritarian in appearance–unlike the simple shepherd of the beardless images, the bearded Christ in Byzantine art often wears purple robes (imperial colors). In other words, he just looks more like an emperor (and considering the interwoven nature of the church and state in the Byzantine Empire, this may not be mere coincidence)–certainly this is the case in the Pantocrator (literally, “Ruler of All”) images that become all the rage in Byzantine churches from the 9th century onward.
How would one have shaved back in those days, anyways? Just a blade on rough skin? I could see why someone would grow a beard.
It’s a bit sad that the “religion facts” website is claiming that the Shroud of Turin is as old as they claim. Since 1988, it’s been discovered that the cloth was made in the middle ages based on carbon dating (1300s).
I have a vague memory of reading that it would be common for unmarried Jews from that time to wear a beard. Can anyone verify that?
As far as I know, it was common for all religious male Jews to wear a beard.
Thanks everyone.
So was it a Roman cultural conceit to depict Christ clean-shaven?
That’s the creepiest looking picture of Jesus I’ve ever seen. They made him look like Rasputin.
More likely, they were trying to make him look like Zeus.
Did everyone back then also have long hair?
I keep hearing that the Romans depicted Chist as clean-shaven, but I’ve never seen convincing proof of it. The carving that’s dragged out to make the case is, as even its proponents admit, supposed to be illustrating the parable of The Good Shepherd. It’s not evident to me that they also intended it to represent Jesus.
I think they used olive oil or goose grease or something. Anyway, Roman men usually shaved; just look at any bust of Julius or Augustus Caesar. Greeks and Jews wore beards. Greeks in most periods, anyway; I think Alexander the Great started a fashion for shaving. (He said it was so no enemy could grab him by the beard, but more likely he didn’t want to lose his boyish beauty.)
One of the most reproduced images of Jesus- and apparently the one on which most modern interpretations are based- is a 1940 painting by Walter Sallman called The Head of Christ.