PORTRAITS OF CHRIST

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 10, 13 January 1933, Page 5

PORTRAITS OF CHRIST

AN ARTIST'S RESEARCHES

NOW FOUND IN LONDON.

(From "the Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 30th December.

Overlooked for many years—why-j nobody can explain—early N portraits of Christ which have been unearthed at the British Museum are now known to have been deposited there about th 9 year 1873 in a portfolio. , The portfolio belonged to a distinguished British artist, Thomas, Heapby, who spent a life time searching for and copying early likenesses of Christ. Ha walked Kome as a boy, seeking a mysterious picture of Jesus in St. Peter's, but failed to find it. A cardinal, noticing the boy's disappointment, told him. that it was tha likeness on the cloth with which Saint Veronica had wiped Christ's face. Only the Pope'and two" dignitaries were- permitted' to see it. Heaphy was allowed to copy the portrait. Af terwjhrds he copied many treasures in the catacombs, - and made friends with numerous prelates. Although a Protestant, he was shown relics inaccessible to the public! He found one of Christ's likenesses on the ceiling of a second-century catacomb. The expression, is appealing and loving, yet anxious and strong, and lacks the hardness, of many later portraits. It may ba the' original of the traditional portraits. The picture had not previously been, reproduced owing to the difficulties of stereotyping at the time when Heaphy; published, other portraits he 'secured. The portfolio includes a copy of a portrait of Christ attributed .to .St. Peter, and believed to have been drawn from memory in ink with a stylus at the request of the daughters of a senator, Pudens. The portrait is now the most jealously guarded relic in St. Prassedes Church, Borne, and is never shown to the.public. St. Peter is believed to have stayed with Pudens during the Neronian persecutions in A.D. 67, when Pudens' daughters rescued the bodies of Christian martyrs and interred them in'--a secret church in their father's grounds. The portrait has never left the church although it was rebuilt in the ninth cen-. tury. Heaphy reveals that the early. Christians covered the faces of the dead with handkerchiefs bearing Christ's features. He conjectures that Pudens' daughters, requiring a handkerchief to cover a maxtyr's face, requested:-St. Peter to draw a portrait of Christ. :