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These portrait heads offer a very Protestant vision of Jesus, one who speaks to the heart directly, with no signifiers of his heavenly station. Begun the same year the Protestant Netherlands won its independence from Catholic Spain, these slightly unnerving pictures seem not like devotional art in the ordinary sense but more like portraits, albeit of the Son of God. In a court-supervised inventory of his belongings that a debt-ridden Rembrandt drew up in 1656, he even appears to be referring to one of the heads as "a Christ portrait painted from life." What he meant, of course, was "from a live model." But life was exactly what he had brought to it. In Rembrandt's late, great reckoning with Christ, the natural and the supernatural are one and the same.