PHILADELPHIA — In the mid-1650s, Rembrandt was nearly bankrupt, and a court ordered the contents of his house in Amsterdam to be inventoried for sale. Among the works in his possession were three small paintings of Jesus, one listed as “Head of Christ, done from life.”

It’s a peculiar description. How could Rembrandt, or any of his peers, have painted Jesus “from life”? But specialists have taken it to mean, simply, that the artist used a live model as a stand-in for Christ. And if that artist was indeed Rembrandt, as some scholars believe, then the model was most likely a young Sephardic Jew from his neighborhood.

Some of the facts surrounding them may be hazy, but the heads of Christ in “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, amount to a gutsy makeover of the most-depicted man in Western art. Jesus was, of course, Jewish. But few artists emphasized his ethnicity, or his humanity, as frankly and directly as Rembrandt did.