At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, there is a series of pictures painted by the so-called Master of Alkmaar. These are scenes of everyday life, people gathered together for reasons which change from picture to picture; in each group, there is one figure, always the same: lost in the crowd, which is represented as though unaware of being observed, only this person, each time, gazes at the painter (and hence at me) right in the eyes. This figure is Christ.
Roland Barthes, “Right in the Eyes [1977],” in The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 240.