Rembrandt's Portraits Research Articles

Rembrandt's Ocular Pathologies.

This article aims to medically and artistically analyze various ophthalmological ailments documented in self-portraits of Rembrandt to determine if those ailments were medical conditions or stylistic and age-related changes. A systematic literature review using Pub Med and Google Scholar found 232 results from a search of "Rembrandt" and more than 5,000 results for "Rembrandt Aging." After extensive review of the literature, the authors found 17 relevant sources. These sources were then supplemented with historical books on Rembrandt and the aging processes of artists. Analytical observations with proportional measurements of anthropometrical landmarks (from self-portraits of Rembrandt at various ages) were studied, measured, analyzed, and compared using a standardized technique via MB ruler graphic software to assess age- or medically related changes. The ophthalmological problems cited in the literature related to Rembrandt's periorbital structures were found by the authors to be false. Signs of inappropriate aging and ailments, such as hyperthyroidism were deemed inaccurate by the authors based on absence of classical disease progression. Ophthalmological problems cited in the literature on Rembrandt's visual acuity were found to be stylistic changes or considered normal aging. Finally, the authors found that ophthalmological problems relating to Rembrandt's eye and orbital adnexa are unfitting because these problems were not seen in subsequent paintings. The authors believe that all the physical changes seen in Rembrandt's portraits represent natural age-related or stylistic changes, and do not represent signs or symptoms of diseases in the master.

Hemispheric bases for emotion and memory.

Hemispheric bases for emotion and memory.

Revealing rembrandt.

The power and significance of artwork in shaping human cognition is self-evident. The starting point for our empirical investigations is the view that the task of neuroscience is to integrate itself with other forms of knowledge, rather than to seek to supplant them. In our recent work, we examined a particular aspect of the appreciation of artwork using present-day functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Our results emphasized the continuity between viewing artwork and other human cognitive activities. We also showed that appreciation of a particular aspect of artwork, namely authenticity, depends upon the co-ordinated activity between the brain regions involved in multiple decision making and those responsible for processing visual information. The findings about brain function probably have no specific consequences for understanding how people respond to the art of Rembrandt in comparison with their response to other artworks. However, the use of images of Rembrandt's portraits, his most intimate and personal works, clearly had a significant impact upon our viewers, even though they have been spatially confined to the interior of an MRI scanner at the time of viewing. Neuroscientific studies of humans viewing artwork have the capacity to reveal the diversity of human cognitive responses that may be induced by external advice or context as people view artwork in a variety of frameworks and settings.

The effects of expert musical training on the perception of emotions in Bach’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin No. 1 in G Minor (BWV 1001).

The subject music and emotion has been relatively neglected in current musicology and music theory, compared with the huge attention granted music's formal and topical aspects (Spitzer, 2010). Leonard Meyer is the best known theorist to have studied musical emotion (Meyer, 1956; Spitzer, 2009). Nevertheless, his writings focused on undifferentiated core affect, as expressed by the tension and resolution melodic processes, rather than on plural, discrete categories. By contrast, such a plural approach to musical emotion is standard in the annals music perception and the psychology music. Conversely, psychological studies music and emotion rarely adopt an historical perspective; or engage with complete works art-music in analytical detail. Hence, in both respects, the present article comprises a fresh departure.A conceptual starting point for this study is the gap between emotions communicated (or intended to be expressed) by the composer and the emotions perceived by the listener. Whereas, in the music psychology literature, many studies have focused on listeners' perception emotion (e.g., Coutinho & Dibben, 2013; Fritz, Jentschke, Gosselin, Friederici, & Koelsch, 2009), on induction emotion (e.g., Bigand & Poulin-Charronnat, 2006; Coutinho & Cangelosi, 2011), and some on the interrelationship between the two (e.g., Evans & Schubert, 2008; Gabrielsson, 2002; Kallinen & Ravaja, 2006), much less has been written about the communicative level, partly because the fallacy- the misconception that an artwork necessarily expresses the feelings or intentions the artist (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946). (The classic refutation the intentional fallacy in music is the ostensibly happy symphonies, Nos. 39 and 41, that Mozart composed in the summer 1788, which was one the most difficult and unhappy periods his career [Abert, 2007, p. 1115]). A relevant comparison is Juslin's Brunswikian lens model communication, by which a performer encodes and a listener decodes emotions by means a set acoustic cues (Juslin & Timmers, 2010, pp. 471-73), although this model is orientated toward the performer rather than the composer.By emotional communication in music, we mean the composer's choices musical materials that he or she knows have a particular affective character, just as a painter selects colors or a sculptor a type marble. Philosopher Peter Kivy's felicitous term, of, is pertinent here: the music may be semiotically of an emotion, just as the apparently sad face a St Bernard dog may be expressive sadness (the dog is not necessarily sad itself), rather than transitively expressing the composer's personal emotion (Kivy, 1989). The composer manipulates the signs sadness: slow tempo and drooping melodies are just as semiotic as the sad face pulled by a trained actor. A pertinent comparison, in the history art, is Charles le Brun's late-17th century treatise, Caracteres des Passions, essentially a set templates for budding artists to represent the basic emotions, or passions (Le Brun, 2010). Each plate portrays a face contorted by the expression a different passion: Sorrow, Love, Sadness, Anger, and many others. Exactly analogous pedagogical exercises feature in baroque compositional treatises, such as Fridrich Erhard Niedt's Musicalische Handleitung 1706; and Johann David Heinichen's Der General-Bass in der Composition 1728 (Niedt, 1706; Heinichen, 1728; Lester, 1992). The student is presented with a melody or harmonic skeleton, and asked to clothe it in figurations appropriate to express texts differing affect. The step, then, from a le Brun plate to a Rembrandt portrait, or from a Heinichen exercise to a Bach aria, is fairly direct.This is where expert analytical knowledge can play a part: the analyst knows, through immersive study historical musical style, the character compositional materials for contemporary listeners-a character which was often highly conventionalised. …

Dentist, artist, pioneer: Orthodontic innovator Norman Kingsley and his Rembrandt portraits

Norman W. Kingsley (1829-1913) was one of the most inventive contributors to the early development of orthodontics and cleft palate therapy. Gifted not only in dentistry but also in art, he was a sculptor and painter of considerable renown in his day. The author reports the rediscovery of two Kingsley paintings--exacting copies of Rembrandt self-portraits. Kingsley created them by using pyrography, a rare and difficult wood-charring artistic technique that he helped perfect.

Hemispheric laterality measured in Rembrandt's portraits using pupil diameter and aesthetic verbal judgements

Eckhard Hess claimed that pupils dilate to pleasant images and constrict to unpleasant images. However, his work was confounded since his image's luminances and contrasts across conditions were inconsistent. We overcome this limitation and suggest a new, promising methodology for research in this area. We presented rightward or leftward facing male and female portraits by Rembrandt to observers in either their original or mirror-reversed position. Since emotional content may be expressed differently on each side of the face, we used Rembrandt's portraits since most of his males had their right-cheek exposed and females had their left-cheek exposed. This raises questions regarding the emotional and cognitive significance of such biased positioning. Simultaneously, we measured observers pupil size while asking observers to report how (dis)pleasing they found each image. We found that in viewing male portraits pupil diameter was a function of arousal. That is, larger pupil diameter occurred for images rated both low and high in pleasantness. We discuss these findings in regard to the perceived dominance of males and how emotional expressions may be driven by hemispheric laterality.

Human Cortical Activity Evoked by the Assignment of Authenticity when Viewing Works of Art

The expertise of others is a major social influence on our everyday decisions and actions. Many viewers of art, whether expert or naïve, are convinced that the full esthetic appreciation of an artwork depends upon the assurance that the work is genuine rather than fake. Rembrandt portraits provide an interesting image set for testing this idea, as there is a large number of them and recent scholarship has determined that quite a few fakes and copies exist. Use of this image set allowed us to separate the brain’s response to images of genuine and fake pictures from the brain’s response to external advice about the authenticity of the paintings. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, viewing of artworks assigned as “copy,” rather than “authentic,” evoked stronger responses in frontopolar cortex (FPC), and right precuneus, regardless of whether the portrait was actually genuine. Advice about authenticity had no direct effect on the cortical visual areas responsive to the paintings, but there was a significant psycho-physiological interaction between the FPC and the lateral occipital area, which suggests that these visual areas may be modulated by FPC. We propose that the activation of brain networks rather than a single cortical area in this paradigm supports the art scholars’ view that esthetic judgments are multi-faceted and multi-dimensional in nature.

The diagnosis of art: Scleroderma in Paul Klee – and Rembrandt's scholar?

Paul Klee (1879–1940) was born in Munchenbuchsee, near Bern in Switzerland. From 1898 he studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck and graduated with a degree in fine art in 1901. In Munich he became associated with the art group known as Der Blaue Reiter, which included Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Munter, Alfred Kubin, August Macke and Franz Marc, and contributed 17 pictures to their second exhibition in 1912. A 1919 exhibition gave him worldwide fame, and he taught painting at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar from 1921 and then in Dessau, when it moved there in 1925. He went to teach in the Dusseldorf Academy in 1931, but in 1933 was forced out by the Nazis, who described him as ‘a Galician Jew’ and ‘a cultural Bolshevik’ and demanded that he prove his Aryan ancestry. ‘Even if I were a Jew,’ Klee wrote, ‘ it would not alter my own worth nor that of my work one iota. My own point of view is that a Jew and a foreigner is of no less intrinsic value than a German and a native.’1 He painted his fraught self-portrait, Von der Liste gestrichen (Struck off the list), and returned to Bern. In 1937 Klee was bracketed with Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Oscar Kokoschka, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Piet Mondrian in a reactionary Munich exhibition of ‘entartete Kunst’ (degenerate art), a term that encompassed Bauhaus and cubism, Dada and expressionism, Fauvism, impressionism and surrealism. Others whose work was not included in the exhibition, but who were also regarded as degenerate, included Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger and Joan Miro, whose paintings the Nazis burned. Klee's response to being compared to the mentally ill was the insurrectionary painting Revolution des Viaductes (1937). In 1935 Klee started to suffer from scleroderma, with fatigue, a skin rash, difficulty in swallowing, shortness of breath on exertion and pain in the joints of his hands.2 His productivity suffered, and his fingers became so affected by the disease that he could hardly paint at all. A photograph of 1939 shows some of the features of the disease (Figure 1). His style became on the whole simpler, less colourful, and dominated by thick black lines. Paintings from this last period depict the agonies that he suffered during this time. Tod und Feuer (Figure 2) is an excellent example. The painting is dominated by a face that foretells his imminent death, in German tod. The mouth has the shape of a letter T, the right eye is an O, and the left eye and nose together make a D. The red flames emerging from the head symbolize the burning features of the disease and the grey area beneath symbolizes the perhaps welcome prospect of release. Figure 1 Paul Klee in 1939 Figure 2 Paul Klee's Tod und Feuer (1940) (Oil and tempera on jute, 46.7 x 44.6 cm; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland) Tod und Feuer also features as the name of a track on an album by the Swiss Jazz Orchestra (2007), whose other tracks are also named from paintings by Klee – Rosenwind, Ubermut, Buste eines Kindes, Ad Parnassum, Der Seiltanzer, Paukenspieler and Individualisierte Hohenmessung der Lagen, the painting that is featured on the cover. Klee's epitaph is poignant: ‘Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fassbar. Denn ich wohne grad so gut bei den Toten, wie bei den Ungeborenen. Etwas naher dem Herzen der Schopfung als ublich. Und noch lange nicht nahe genug.’ ‘I cannot be trapped in the here and now. For I consort as much with the dead as with the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough.’ He wrote these words for the catalogue of an exhibition at the Galerie Goltz, Munich in 1920. They presage the torment of his final years. Scleroderma was first described by Carlo Curzio of Naples in 1753.3 Bishop Francisco Domonte, depicted in Bartolome Esteban Murillo's painting of Archangel Raphael, which dates from 1680, has been suggested to have had scleroderma or even systemic sclerosis,4 although the features are hard to discern. But now look closely at Rembrandt's Portrait of a Scholar from 1631 ( Figure 3). His nose is pinched, his mouth tight, his face pale with a malar flush; his hands are puffy and the joints on his right thumb are distinctly swollen. Did he too have scleroderma? Figure 3 Rembrandt's Portrait of a Scholar (1631). (Oil on canvas, 104 x 92 cm; The Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia)

The wanderings of Rembrandt's Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh

The wanderings of Rembrandt's Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh

Gender's effect on the hemispheric laterality of Rembrandt's portraits

In 64% of Rembrandt's female portraits the poser's left-cheek faces the viewer. However, this occurs in only 33% of his male portraits. This asymmetry is consistent with viewers rating Rembrandt's left-cheeked male portraits as likely to be avoided, which may reflect that aggressive displays of dominance are governed by the contralateral right-hemisphere, while rating left-cheeked female faces as likely to be approached may indicate sexual attractiveness. Rembrandt's exposed-cheek gender difference paints both sexual selection and dominance as being governed by the right cerebral hemisphere.

Gender's effect on the hemispheric laterality of Rembrandt's portraits

Gender's effect on the hemispheric laterality of Rembrandt's portraits

Rembrandt's Portraits: Approach or Avoid?

In 74% of Rembrandt's female portraits, the subject's left cheek faces the viewer. However, this occurs in only 26% of his male portraits. This asymmetry is consistent with viewers' assessment of Rembrandt's left-cheeked male portraits as preferably avoided, which may indicate that aggressive dominance is governed by the contralateral right hemisphere of the brain, while the rating of left-cheeked female faces as preferably approached may indicate sexual attractiveness. Rembrandt's exposed-cheek gender difference suggests that both sexual selection and dominance are governed by the more emotionally oriented right cerebral hemisphere.

When dominance and sex are both right

we have found that the left side of faces displayed in rembrandt's portraits capture how humans rank male dominance, helping to coordinate avoidance behaviors among asymmetric individuals. moreover, the left side of faces may also coordinate approach responses, like attractiveness, in human females. therefore, adding sexual selection to dominance paints a more realistic picture of what the contralateral right hemisphere is doing.

Portrait of Doris Ulmann

SPECIAL FEATURE Portrait of Doris Ulmann Leatha Kendrick Doris Ulmann (1882-1934) was born and educated in New York City. Trained as a teacher at the school of the Ethical Culture Society, Doris was in Law School at Columbia University, when in 1914 she visited a photography class taught by Clarence White, a famous pictorialist photographer. Abruptly she left Columbia to enter the newly founded White School of Photography in New York and soon discovered her talent for portraiture and embarked on what was to be her life's work. By the mid-1920s she was in demand as a studio portrait photographer, and, by the end of the decade, she had published three volumes of portraits. Picasso claimed that he was quoting Leonardo da Vinci when he asserted, "the painter always paints himself." Ulmann's portraits reveal at least as much about who she is as they do about the people she photographed. Though Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, Thomas Wolfe, Paul Robeson, Albert Einstein, and many other famous people were glad to sit for her, Ulmann was drawn to people on the margins of society. In the late 1920s she began to leave her comfortable Park Avenue apartment more and more regularly, looking for groups of people whose rural way of life she feared was quickly passing away. Her first published Appalachian photographs appeared in June 1928 in Scribner's magazine. In the last two years of her life she began documenting rural artisans in the Appalachians for Allen Eaton's landmark study, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, published in 1937, three years after her death. It is no accident that Doris Ulmann took on such a project: her father amassed great wealth as a textile importer. An immigrant from Bavaria, Bernhard Ulmann was an idealistic man who took personal interest in his workers and contributed to the Ethical Culture Society, a socially liberal organization that championed individual worth regardless of ethnic or economic background. His daughter's New York portraits were masterful. Her Appalachian subjects were alive. Doris lived an unconventional life—divorcing her husband and traveling with male friends, hiring John Jacob Niles as her personal assistant partly because she liked having him around and partly because she had a habit of supporting artists in any way she could, whether it was by taking their portraits or collaborating on books or sending them money from time to time. Making Niles her assistant offered her not only a strong back to carry her heavy photographic gear but also a chance to support an artist who was collecting traditional mountain music. Wherever they went together, she saw to it that Niles had a chance to perform his music and to collect ballads. Even if she were able to photograph interesting artisans, she did not consider their trips a success if Niles did not find significant music to collect. Though Doris Ulmann is remembered for her photographs, she was also an important part of the music that Niles collected and transformed in his performances. Without her financial support, he would not have been able to do this work. Some argue that Ulmann's photographs play into the perpetuation of racial and regional stereotypes. The portraits reveal not only her respect for the people she photographed but also her romanticizing of them to a certain degree. By excluding the popular culture of the time, the most up-to-date—and thus, eventually dated—consumer goods, Ulmann's photographs achieve a timelessness. Is she implying that the mountain people live somehow outside time? Partly. Does this mean that they were out of touch with modern culture? Some of them were. But the fact that Ulmann's photographs show old mountain men holding newspapers and books, as well as hand tools, undercuts the idea that she felt these people were out of touch with the larger world. Her portraits partake of the timelessness of all great art: in the same sense that Rembrandt's portraits do not become "dated," neither do Ulmann's photographs. In this sense, the timelessness of her portraits rebukes stereotyping. Doris Ulmann was a gentle person who believed in the dignity of manual labor and in the innate beauty...

Fourier Transform Infrared Microscopic Imaging of an Embedded Paint Cross-Section

Fourier transform infrared imaging is presented as a new analytical approach in the study of paint cross-sections. Analytical FT-IR reflection imaging provides the spatially resolved acquisition of infrared spectra with a resolution of about 7 μm. The technique reveals detailed information on the organic functional group distribution in the individual layers of embedded paint cross-sections and is used complementary to visual microscopy and scanning electron microscopy/energy dispersed X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX). This method was applied to a paint cross-section of Rembrandt's Portrait of a Standing Man (1639). FT-IR imaging of this cross-section identified and localized different compounds present in the layers of this sample. Identification of these compounds based on their infrared spectra is confirmed by results from art historical and conservation literature. Special attention was given to a discoloration that was observed in large parts of the described painting. This discoloration was clearly visible in the paint cross-section. A hypothesis on the nature of the discolored paint layer is formulated based on the FT-IR imaging results.

Sprechende Bildnisse. Bemerkungen zu einigen Portrats von Rembrandt

The article discusses some portraits by Rembrandt in connection with theories of rhetoric. Point of departure is the posthumous portrait of J. C. Silvius which is compared to the artist's portraits of C. Claesz. Anslo and with his earlier portrait of Silvius. The analysis focuses on formal and decorous problems connected with the representation of speech in portraits, including a discussion of Vondel's famous four lines on Anslo's portrait as well as on other examples of the tradition they belong to. In comparison with Rembrandt's portrait of Jan Asselyn the means of characterization to be derived from rhetorical actio is discussed.

Hemispheric asymmetries and gender influence Rembrandt's portrait orientations

For centuries painters have predominantly painted portraits with the model's left-cheek facing the viewer. This has been even more prevalent with females (≈68%) than males (≈56%). Numerous portraits painted by Rembrandt typify this unexplained phenomenon. In a preliminary experiment, subjects judged 24 emotional and social character traits in 20 portraits by Rembrandt. A factor analysis revealed that females with their left cheek exposed were judged to be much less socially appealing than less commonly painted right-cheeked females. Conversely, the more commonly painted right-cheeked males were judged to be more socially appealing than either left-cheeked males or females facing either direction. It is hypothesized that hemispheric asymmetries regulating emotional facial displays of approach and avoidance influenced the side of the face Rembrandt's models exposed due to prevailing social norms. A second experiment had different subjects judge a different collection of 20 portraits by Rembrandt and their mirror images. Mirror-reversed images produced the same pattern of results as their original orientation counterparts. Consequently, hemispheric asymmetries that specify the emotional expression on each side of the face are posited to account for the obtained results.

Verdwenen tekeningen en het gebruik van afwisbare tekenplankjes en 'tafeletten'

Verdwenen tekeningen en het gebruik van afwisbare tekenplankjes en 'tafeletten'

Rembrandt's Portrait of a Pole and His Horse

Rembrandt's Portrait of a Pole and His Horse