Paintings of Jesus

[Odin]

When does the first paintings of Jesus as crucified apeard?

[Huon]

You could look at :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depiction_of_Jesus

[MrMacSon]

The god Serapis (as Osiris-Apis) had originated in the form of an Egyptian bull-deity and was re-imaged in the early Hellenistic period with an idealized human form, evoking the visage of the most powerful male gods of the Greek pantheon as a way to confer authority first on the Ptolemaic rulers who promoted his cult, and then on the Roman emperors who followed. The face of Serapis, in particular, was a very ancient and potent image, whose transformation into the authoritative, yet beneficent face of Christ is another characteristic example of a semantic progression within the cosmopolitan context of late Roman Egypt. The polysemous nature of this shared facial type is perhaps what led a late fourth-century author from Alexandria to assert satirically that “those who worship Serapis are, in fact, Christians, and those who call themselves bishops of Christ are, in fact, devotees of Serapis.”16 ...

• 16 Vopiscus, 'Vita Saturnini' 8.2 in Historia Augusta, vol. 3, trans. David Magie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932); David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 284

... By the time of Septimius Severus’s yearlong sojourn in Egypt [199-200 AD/CE], the cult of Serapis was widely practiced in Roman society, from slaves and freedman to the emperors themselves. Temples, objects with cultic images of Serapis, and inscriptions and literary texts from throughout the empire also attest to the cult’s broad geographic diffusion, which was partly due to the popularity of Serapis (and other Egyptian deities) among the sailors of the Roman military and merchant fleets.19 It is not surprising, therefore, that Septimius Severus, a soldier emperor from North Africa, was an enthusiastic devotee of the god (S.H.A., Sev. 17.3–4). Indeed, his veneration for Serapis was so great that he modeled his own image after that of the god, cultivating in his official portraiture the god’s typical bifurcate beard and curled forehead locks.20 These features can be seen in the painted portrait of Septimius Severus and his family from the Fayum (fig. 5.1), where they function as intentional signifiers of his close association with Serapis, his personal heritage, auctoritas, maiestas, and right to rule, as well as his own divine status and that of his dynastic heirs. The hybrid iconography and semantic range of this remarkable imperial portrait reflects the complex, heterogeneous identities and cultures of the Roman world at the beginning of the third century CE.

Nicgorski, Ann M (2014) 'The Fate of Serapis: A Paradigm for Transformations in the Culture and Art of Late Roman Egypt' in Roman in the Provinces: Art on the Periphery of Empire, eds. L. Brody and G. Hoffman (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2014), pp. 153-166. Distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

https://www.academia.edu/8407696/The_Fa ... oman_Egypt

[andrewcriddle]

You could look at :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depiction_of_Jesus

See particularly Alaxamenos graffito

Andrew Criddle