‘Christ in the Manner of God the Father’

Chapter 3 looks at the iconography of the image now called the Salvator Mundi, though this is not a name used at the time for images of Christ blessing and holding the globe of the world. Texts from the gospels of St Matthew and St John portray Christ as the benign comforter of the world’s inhabitants. The bands across Christ’s chest evoke the ‘yoke’ that the biblical Christ invites us to take up. The orb appears in Renaissance paintings in many guises, including metal spheres and terrestrial globes. The genre grew in popularity in the fifteenth century, not least in emulation of images by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. The stock frontal presentation of Christ related to a supposed eyewitness account and miraculous images made without human intervention. The direct stare is explained by Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa) as expressing the ubiquitous nature of God’s gaze. There are also less common variants of the Salvator Mundi as a young Christ.