Rembrandt's Art Research Articles

Modernism and Rembrandt

Art history situates the artwork within categories of time, place, and style. In special cases, works of art exceed these categories. The masterpiece is the work which surpasses categorisation. The work of art of universal significance is another. Rembrandt has been positioned and repositioned in the history of art. Today, Rembrandt resides in the firmament alongside those other (mostly Renaissance, mostly male) artists we know by their first names. The Rembrandt Research Project has ended its long, rather contentious labour of authenticating the paintings and Ernst van de Wetering's monumental survey, Rembrandt's Paintings Revisited (Springer, Dordrecht, 2014), has presented substantial reattributions and perhaps more importantly for art history, it has helped to shift the focus from connoisseurship to ‘processes’ of artistic creation, the evidence of contemporary texts and the analysis of painting technique.1 The exhibition in 2014 of Rembrandt's late works organised by the National Gallery, London, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, of approximately ninety paintings, prints, and drawings from the early 1650s to the artist's death in 1669 (more were included in the second venue in Amsterdam), and the publication in the same year of Richard Verdi's monograph, Rembrandt's Themes: Life into Art, present an artist of the first rank. They focus on the artist's themes, including elemental themes of life and death, to argue for the universal significance of Rembrandt's art.

Germanic and Classical Romanic Style

Here, Simmel argues that everything belonging to a particular civilization or national life evokes a common tone or character. He calls this the 'style of the age' or the '.style of a people'. Simmel goes on to claim that whereas Italian art gives the overall impression of generalized stylization in the presentation of form in the appearance of life. in Germanic art. of which Rembrandt's art can be viewed as the highest embodiment and expression, style is expressed by presenting life through the appearance of form. In Germanie art, Simmel claims, a general form and stylization would be meaningless because it seeks to express an individuality stemming from life itself, in which life forms itself wholly from within Simmel concludes that whereas life among 'Romanic peoples' finds its guiding idea in formal perfection. in Germanic peoplies' it finds it in the laws of inner forces springing from the reservoirs of the individual life.

Fashion and fancy: dress and meaning in Rembrandt's paintings

Until now dress has played a minor role in the studies of Rembrandt's paintings. This is all the more surprising since the artist clearly delighted in the rendering of clothes. He made extensive use of clothing and jewellery to emphasize the character, religious affiliation or social status of the sitters in his portraits, and to clarify the narrative or heighten the drama in his history pieces. De Winkel fills this lacuna and shows that research of this neglected field can contribute in many and unexpected ways to our understanding of Rembrandt's art. Serious study of the history of dress is itself a rather new field, and was long regarded by art historians as merely ancillary to art history, mainly as a help in matters of dating. However, the knowledge of dress can contribute to the identification of the sitter. It can also help to determine the message the sitter or the artist wished to express. The wider aim of the author is to investigate the possible contemporary connotations of clothes in Rembrandt's painted oeuvre by placing them within a wider cultural and historical context.

La Visitazione di Rembrandt già a Torino. Una rilettura critica

The article discusses Rembrandt's painting, The Visitation, dated 1640, now preserved in the Detroit Institute of Arts, USA. Initially The Visitation was a part of Prince Eugene of Savoy's collection which reached the royal court of Turin in 1741. During the French rule in Italy the painting was transferred to France and, even after the Restoration, it was not returned to Piedmont anymore. Later, the Rembrandt's work passed into the art trade and finally reached the Detroit Institute of Arts, at that time led by W. Valentiner, an eminent scholar of Rembrandt. The painting is analysed in relation to the evangelical text which inspired it; then it is compared with the iconographic models of the tradition in which Rembrandt worked. The iconographic sources of the painter's inspiration were Durer, Heemskerck, as well as Rubens. The essay focuses on various iconographic and symbolic elements which are present in the sacred scene. The work was created near the stylistic turning-point in Rembrandt's career which is to be placed in the 1640s. Differing from the magniloquence of the contemporary Baroque paintings (culminating with The Night Watch), the little tablet is part of a series of a few paintings of religious and inspiration and landscape. It is small in size, sending forth an intense evocative sense of moving humanity; but it does not hold back from the constructive formulas deriving from the contemporary theatre. The difference is also attested to by some drawings of Visitation that Rembrandt had conceived in connection with the analysed work. The final part of the essay deals with the problem of the destination and purchaser of the small and fine painting. As we do not have any documentation, a notion - supported by indirect hints - is proposed, that the painting was commissioned by a Catholic patron (considering the uniqueness of the treated subject), with the purpose of placing it in his small cabinet d'amateur. This indication is strengthened by the esteem of many Catholic sources of Rembrandt's art.

Rembrandt's metaphysical wit: The Three Trees and The Omval

Rembrandt's etching The Three Trees of 1643 has a fair claim to being the single most celebrated and familiar landscape in Dutch art. Most of the attention it has received has dwelt on its sheer power and richness as an image, which are unparalleled in the master's graphic work in the genre. But The Three Trees also marks a critical nexus in Rembrandt's art between the languages of painting and printmaking, which in landscape at least entails a further distinction between 'poetic' and realistic modes of representation. As a subject in its own right, landscape had not drawn his interest until the second half of the 1630s, and it was only in 1640 that he began making landscape etchings. Unlike his painted landscapes, which began earlier and are mainly rather fanciful and romantic, the prints focus on the prosaic realities or the countryside around Amsterdam. Moreover, these etched landscapes belong to a broader trend toward 'prose realism' in Rembrandt's art during the 1640s, as baroque torsion and dynamism give way to quieter formal Structures, where the unities are generally less fluid, more complex, and carry a more direct sense of encounter with everyday reality.

Perceptions of Otherness: Critical Responses to the Jews of Rembrandt's Art and Milieu (1836–1945)

A leitmotif of Rembrandt criticism is that the artist was inspired by his contacts with the Sephardic and Ashkenazi immigrants of Amsterdam. This study investigates, for the first time, varied critical responses to the Jews in Rembrandt's society and art from the nineteenth century, up to and including the Nazi regime. More particularly, this study focuses upon critics who expressed strong opinions regarding the Jews in the artist's art and milieu, and who shared the belief that Rembrandt's uniqueness as an artist was especially revealed by his representations of them. The writings of John Smith, Eduard Kolloff, Charles Blanc, Julius Langbehn, Wilhelm von Bode, Carl Neumann, Anna Seghers, Alfred Rosenberg and Maria Grunewald demonstrate how discussions of Rembrandt's Jews were integrally intertwined not only with the writers' opinions of the Dutch artist, but also with each author's perceptions of the Jewish residents of seventeenth century Amsterdam, as well as of contemporary Jews.

The Ruins of Rembrandt

Who would dare to defend the ‘Romantic myth’ that Rembrandt's Nightwatch caused a scandal in its time? I would. Beginning with Alexander Korda's film Rembrandt, I argue that Romantic accounts are historically more accurate and aesthetically more sophisticated than current explanations, and more relevant, since they can accommodate our own relation to Rembrandt's art. Romantic constructions can also be traced back to Rembrandt's innovations. Conversely, confusion about Rembrandt's autograph oeuvre results from the efforts and investments of later commentators, not Rembrandt. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Aloïs Riegl, I propose that Rembrandt's works can be understood as ‘ruins,’ or historical phenomena of artistic significance to our time, understood belatedly, in an ongoing, imperfect process.These issues are directly relevant to reception studies. In my view, the meaning of Rembrandt's work does not necessarily reside in the perspective of his contemporaries, whereas other forms of reception, such as later commentaries or popular consumption and commercial use of his art, offer insights inaccessible to current scholarship. Indeed, art historical scholarship is itself reception, the unfolding of the meaning of historical art in the present. Instead of limiting the work to its ostensible historical function, our task should be to understand how the work makes possible our present concepts of art and art history, which we must continue (philosophically) to rethink and to refine.

:Rembrandt: A Genius and His Impact

In recent decades, a major change has taken place in the appraisal of Rembrandt and his work and impact. Modern scholars have rejected scores of paintings which were previously regarded as masterpieces by the genius Rembrandt and which dazzled the world for centuries. Many of these pictures are now said to be studio pieces or the work of obscure or anonymous pupils, while paintings that were once admired as vivid depictions of daily life have been interpreted as biblical scenes. This book presents the first critical review of recent conclusions about Rembrandt's uvre, many of which have proved unfounded. It also reveals that his work has always inspired legends and myths as well as convoluted interpretations. One of the aims of the book is to extract the kernels of truth from both the old and the new mythologies. Rembrandt's art can only be fully understood when viewed in the context of his impact. For this reason Rembrandt - A Genius and His Impact includes small monographs on the master's most gifted pupils and followers, represented here by the best works they produced. Separate chapters are devoted to drawings and etchings, which form an integral part of Rembrandt's uvre. The book examines the latest research techniques and the most recent insights and discoveries in this field.

De Amsterdamse verzamelaar Herman Becker (ca. 1617-1678); Nieuwe gegevens over een geldschieter van Rembrandt

De Amsterdamse verzamelaar Herman Becker (ca. 1617-1678); Nieuwe gegevens over een geldschieter van Rembrandt

A New Look at Rembrandt Iconography

The article brings modifications to the author's study of 1957 (Munchner Jahrbuch der bild. Kunst) taking into account research done since then on the subject, especially studies by Christian Tumpel. It appears that the basic source of Rembrandt's imagery was the rich repertory of pictorial narrative produced by the German and Netherlandish graphic art of the 16th and the late 17th centuries. By relating several works of Rembrandt to their visual sources their actual subjects can be established. They often were created by the process of selection from large historical compositions, as Tumpel has shown. Rembrandt concentrated however on such through which basic human emotional and ethical frames of mind could be expressed, and which were called in the 1957 study encompassing themes (Rahmenthemen). Problems of iconographic categories especially of genre versus history and allegory in Rembrandt's art are further discussed. Although Rembrandt shared with his contemporaries the common emblematic language of signs, in his late works a silent expression of human feelings and thoughts is achieved.