The painting was proven to almost certainly be an original by the Dutch master.

“I was very intrigued by it because it looked a lot nicer than the other paintings in storage,” DeWitt said.

That finding paved the way for a historic exhibit that has assembled seven of the eight “heads of Christ” painted by Rembrandt van Rijn and his students in the mid-17th century. Titled “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus,” the exhibit opened at the Louvre in Paris and is now on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until Oct. 30.

The show was the brainchild of DeWitt, and it all began with his hunch about the forgotten painting in the storeroom.

“The big excitement was to see them (the paintings) all in a row and to bring that moment back to life, that moment of Rembrandt doing something that had never been done in the history of art before,” DeWitt said.

The Heads of Christ are a series of paintings that redefined the way Christ was depicted. Rembrandt’s paintings were based on a Jewish model whose dark hair and olive skin contrasted sharply with the European-featured Jesus that was typical in paintings at the time.

It was extraordinary for Rembrandt to create new, true images of Jesus that were consistent with what people recognized about Jesus, said DeWitt.

“This was the reform spirit of his age,” he said. “Both Protestant and Catholic theologians alike had encouraged artists to not be so fanciful but to go back to original sources and stick to what is truthful in art.”

Although there are probably eight heads, the eighth one hasn’t been seen for a long time, said DeWitt. The exhibit also includes a section that explains what resources artists used to find the true image of Jesus, he said.

“It explains what Veronica’s veil, the Lentulus letter and the Mandylion are and how did Rembrandt understand these as sources for the true image of Jesus,” said DeWitt.

DeWitt was very happy with the reaction he observed at one of the openings in Philadelphia.

“I was just so pleased with how people were taking their time and coming away with a smile on their face at the end of it,” he said. “They really had experienced something and I thought that was really very rewarding.” Feelings of vindication came next, said DeWitt. He said it was a somewhat risky idea to take paintings that had sometimes contested authenticity, do an analysis on them and then bring them together in a single exhibit.

“There’s a lot of questions that might not be answered because the panels are not signed or dated…But they’re all so utterly consistent with Rembrandt’s body of work that it’s hard to believe that the directing impulse is done by anybody else.”

In addition to featuring these rare portraits, the Philadelphia exhibit displays Rembrandt’s early work through to the final decade of his career. After closing in Philadelphia the show will travel a little closer to Canada, to the Detroit Institute of Art Nov. 20 to Feb. 12.