Reading Light: Vision as a Hermeneutic Mechanism in Rembrandt's Etching Joseph Telling his Dreams (1638)

Abstract

Rembrandt produced some seventy biblical etchings over the course of his artistic career, a testimony to his sustained interest in investigating subjects dealing with human failings, faith, and salvation in the print medium. Beyond distilling the essential elements of the scriptural narratives, Rembrandt's prints convey the raw emotive and psychological states of humankind as a means to evoke the existential impact of image on the beholder. One of his most familiar and accomplished Old Testament etchings, Joseph Telling his Dreams from 1638, is a work that articulates nuanced portrayals of facial expression and gesture with a deftness of line and shading few artists could match. Credited with an extraordinary talent for visual storytelling, Rembrandt incorporates into this etching a number of meticulous and enigmatic details which, upon closer inspection, do not actually derive from the biblical text. These unexpected details call into question the traditional art historical understanding of Rembrandt's complex visualization process, shifting us from seeking what the image means to how it constructs meaning. Through descriptive analysis of the artist's manipulation of light and shadow, the etching Joseph Telling his Dreams is here revealed as a masterful work of visual exegesis in which the artist explores the contiguities between artistic and religious experience through their shared claims on vision.