Warner Sallman’s painting, Head of Christ, will make its first-ever appearance on a postage stamp next year. The stamp will be released March 24, 2010, in the Åland Islands, an autonomous province of Finland situated between that country and Sweden. Sallman’s father, Elias Sallman, emigrated to the United States from the Åland Islands in 1886. Read more.

With the race for best-known artist of the century nearly over, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol are running neck and neck, with Andrew Wyeth a respectable third. But when the official tally is made, all three are likely to be buried in a landslide vote for Warner E. Sallman. Read more.

We’ve all seen it. An entire generation grew up with this image of Jesus in their minds. But who made it, and how did it become so popular? Read more.

“For nearly two millennia, Christians around the world have created images of Jesus. But just as the precise understanding of who Jesus was, and what his life means, always has varied, Christian artists have portrayed him in a staggering range of ways,” says art historian David Morgan of Valparaiso University. … For Easter weekend, he shares with USA TODAY’s Shawn Sell some distinctive images found throughout the world. Read more.

Long before most people could read a Bible, art was the language of faith. And when Protestants diverged from Catholics to focus solely on Scripture, their images of the central event in Christianity — the Easter story of Jesus’ death and resurrection — diverged as well. Read more.

Writers and artists have been imagining the Second Coming of Jesus for 2,000 years, but few have portrayed him wreaking more carnage on the unbelieving world than Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Read more.

If America is the land of the free and the brave, it’s also the land of the celebrity, the sort of person we increasingly call an “icon” nowadays. Considering our obsession with such icons as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, or John F. Kennedy, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would get around to Jesus. Read more.