Schama : Rembrandt’s Eyes - The Quiddity

 

This is Chapter One  ("The Quiddity") of "Rembrandt's Eyes" by Simon Schama. Text in orange has been quoted from that text.  Text in green has been quoted from elsewhere.

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  Unlike art historians of a hundred years ago, Schama is not much interested in connecting Rembrandt to predecessors other than Rubens.  Unlike the art historians of today, he prefers to interpret rather than analyze a pictorial language. He works outside the academic discipline of  art history, and rarely refers to its texts.

Much of this book is biographical speculation, making it more like historical fiction than history.  All writers should try to be entertaining - but that seems to be Schama’s primary purpose. Many books have been written about Rembrandt - and  apparently Schama always needs to say something new - so often it is far fetched.

It's probably not possible to publish a book about an iconic artist that is not a  panegyric - yet we might note that Schama’s tribute is more about concept than visuality.

Constantin Huygens, the multi-talented courtier who kicked off Rembrandt’s career wrote that his paintings are beautiful.  Schama tells us that they are clever and expertly done.

 

As with all the art books studied on this blog, the primary focus will be on individual paintings.  Long passages of generalizations are left mostly unaddressed.

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Rembrandt (b. 1606), Self Portrait with Gorget, 1629

 

 

If I were collecting Rembrandt, this would be  far down the wish list - but still it already shows  some essence - or quiddity (as Schama puts it)  - of his work - and his character - even though the artist was only twenty three.

Schama points out that the martial gorget coincides with the never ending war between the Spanish crown and the Dutch Republic. This piece was painted in the same year that the Dutch finally conquered Hertogenbosch, only 60 miles from Rembrandt’s home in Leiden.

The delicate threads of lace resting upon the cold, gleaming steel is not far from the "iron fist in the velvet glove" of Napoleon.  It’s a good strategy for living:  be as soft as you can and hard as you must.

And so the face has both softness/sensuality and determination. The young man appears to be honest and ready to do stuff, though maybe too immature and boyish for any work that requires stamina.

I don’t think this character would make a good soldier. And he appears too self indulgent to work at a candy shop. He wants to live in a world of profundity and meaning - but he’s kinda full of himself.

 

Schama  has yet to explore the artist's childhood.  As the ninth child of a miller who could afford to send him to Latin school, he may have been pampered by the entire family, with no particular pressure to enter his father's business or any other.  Curiously, none of his large family is ever depicted - so far as we know.  But how do we know that some of those early "self portraits’  did not actually depict brothers or cousins?

Copy in The Hague (detail)

So here is the greatest trouper who never trod the boards playing Youngman Corporal, his I-mean-business gorget belied by the soft fringed collar falling over the studded metal, the slightly arched, broken eyebrow line (absent from the copy in The Hague), the deep set of the right eye, and the half-shadowed face, sabotaging the bravura, hinting at the vulnerability beneath the metal plate: the mortal meeting the martial. There is a touch too much humanity here to carry off the show. The light reveals a full, mobile mouth, the lips highlit as if nervously licked; large, liquid eyes; a great acreage of cheek and chin; and, planted in the center of his face, the least aquiline nose in seventeenth-century painting. And then there is the liefdelok, the lovelock trailing over his left shoulder. Huygens, who would never be accused of indulging in frivolous exhibitionism, had written a long poem satirizing the outlandish fashions affected by the young in The Hague: slashed breeches, over-the-shoulder capes, and flying knee ribbons." But flamboyantly long hair was being singled out by the Calvinist preachers as an especial abomination in the sight of the Lord. Rembrandt evidently paid none of this any heed. He must have taken great pains with his lovelock- also known from its origins in the French court as a cadenette- since of course it took immense care to produce the required effect of carelessness. The hair had to be cut asymmetrically, the top of the lock kept full while its body was thinned to taper along its length, ending in the gathered and separated strands. 

 And yet the picture is quite free of vain self-satisfaction. Rembrandt looks at himself in the glass, already committed to catching the awkward truth, trying to fix the point at which temerity is shadowed by trepidation, virile self-possession unmanned by pensive anxiety. He is Hamlet in Holland, an inward-outward persona, a poet in heavy metal, the embodiment of both the active and the contemplative life, someone whom Huygens was bound to commend.

"Self-possession unmanned by pensive anxiety" ?

Yes - I feel that too —- he is indeed "Hamlet in Holland" — except that he’s nowhere near being a prince of the Royal blood.  Rembrandt has taken the pictorial effects used to dignify saints and kings —- and applied it to display his own striving,  enigmatic self. No wonder he continues to appeal to our modern age.

Rembrandt , Artist in his Studio, 1626

This somewhat earlier piece (the artist was 20 years old) feels like a New Yorker cartoon to me — we just need to guess the  clever caption.

A saucer-eyed, baby-faced artist dressed in ponderous, over-sized robes stares directly at the viewer as he clutches a handful of brushes and confronts an enormous, portentous canvas. (This piece itself is only 9x12 inches - about the size of a sheet of copy paper) 

To me it says something like "Behold little ole me - the great painter."

So it feels cute - as well as ambitious.  That panel that he faces is made to feel quite important — great things are supposed to appear on it. Our little artist seems aware that there is something very special about himself - even if nobody could tell by looking at him in his squalid studio.

Rembrandt was giving his full attention to the matter of painting, and in particular to a small patch of plaster in a corner of his walk-up studio. At the point where the wall met the upright beam of the doorjamb, projecting into the room, plaster had begun to flake and lift, exposing a triangle of rosy brick. It was the Rhine-water damp that did it; the oily green river which exhaled its cold mists out over the canals, insinuating itself through the cracks and shutters of the gabled alley houses. In the grander residences of well-to-do burghers, professors and cloth merchants- -that stretched along the Houtstraat and the Rapenburg, the invading clamminess was met, resisted, and, if all else failed, obscured by rows of ceramic tiles beginning at the foot of the wall and climbing upward as means and taste dictated. If means were modest, the householder could make a serial strip-of children's games or proverbs- to which further items could be added as fortune allowed. If he were already fortunate, an entire picture of a great vase of flowers, an East Indiaman in full sail, or the portrait of William the Silent could be constructed from brilliantly colored pieces.  But Rembrandt's studio was bare of any of these conveniences. Unhindered, the damp had eaten its way into the plaster, engendering blooms of mold, blistering the surface, opening cracks and fissures in corners where the moisture collected. 

Rembrandt liked this. From the beginning, he was powerfully drawn to ruin; the poetry of imperfection. He enjoyed tracing the marks left by the bite of worldly experience: the pits and pocks, the red-rimmed eyes and scabby skin which gave the human countenance a mottled richness. The piebald, the scrofulous, the stained, and the encrusted were matters for close and loving inspection; irregularities to run through his fingering gaze. Other than the Holy Scripture, he cared for no book as well as the book of decay, its truths written in the furrows scored on the brows of old men and women; in the sagging timbers of decrepit barns; the lichenous masonry of derelict buildings; in the mangy fur of a valetudinarian lion. And he was a compulsive peeler, itching to open the casing of things and people, to winkle out the content packed within. He liked to toy with the poignant discrepancies between outsides and insides, the brittle husk and the vulnerable core.

I appreciate Schama detailing the great care that Rembrandt gives to decrepitude. There were many Renaissance artists, like Botticelli, who heroically denied  the laws of entropy.

At first sight, the picture looks like the virtuoso flaunting his stuff: the bravura rendering of material surfaces, not just that plasterwork but the coarse-grained planking of the floor with its own web of cracks, stains, and scuff marks; the dull iron hardware on the door. But even as we discount the painting as a brag, a flourish, something cunning begins to register. The painter has chosen to show off his mastery of art through the description of the materials of which it is constituted. With that anvil-like grindstone so prominent, we can almost see him making paint. 

So how modest is this trade-card exercise in self-promotion? The words that Rembrandt means to bring to mind when we peer at the rough little rectangle are the same that recur when we look at his earliest face paintings, the tronies, featuring his shock of hair and rock-star stubble: Zonder pretentie, "unpretentious," both in what is being depicted and the way it's being depicted. But it gradually dawns on us that we are being pleasantly had. The panel is, in fact, brimming with pretensions: from the incongruous grandeur of the painter's elaborate blue and gold costume to the currant eyes planted in the gingerbread face. For all the ostensible stinginess of its pictorial language and the slightness of its dimensions, The Artist in His Studio is as big a painting as anything Rembrandt ever did. Just as his earliest self-portrait etchings are postage-stamp minuscule in size but wickedly grandstanding in effect, this picture should also be thought of as Rembrandt's Little Big Picture: a grandiloquent letter of introduction, nothing short of a pronouncement on the nature of Painting itself. To pack all this meaning into an unassuming frame was a typical conceit of his gen-eration. Make the largest possible utterance within the least possible space and you make a knotty little emblem; a mind-teaser, awaiting the work of wit to unravel its message. A picture full of evidence of the dexterity of Rembrandt's hand turns out, then, on closer inspection to be a demonstration of his shockingly original mind. For Rembrandt was seldom simple. He just took pride in looking plain. And if this was ever shown to Constan-tijn Huygens, one wonders just who was scrutinizing whom. Take a look at this, the cocky up-and-comer might have said in the provoking manner of the riddle-master, eyebrows arched beneath his felt hat. Now what do you see? Not much? Well, only everything you'll ever want to know about me.

Schama continues to wax eloquent on the brilliance of both the artist and the courtier who would soon jump start his career.

As Schama notes, however, there is no evidence that Rembrandt ever  showed this piece to Huygens.

Putting Rembrandt into his historical context, he has, so far, written  nearly as many words about Huygens, but rather than examine what Huygens actually wrote, he has based their artist/patron interaction on a self portrait that Huygens never mentioned

We do know that he showed the following  piece — because Huygens wrote that it compares to “all the beauty that has been produced through the ages.”

Rembrandt, Repentant Judas Returning the Silver, 1629, 31 " x 40"

Huygens even offered an interpretation:

 The gesture of that one despairing Judas . . ., that one maddened Judas, screaming, begging for forgiveness but devoid of hope, all traces of hope erased from his face; his gaze wild, his hair torn out by the roots, his garments rent, his arms contorted, his hands clenched until they bleed…Huygens

Having seen images of Rembrandt’s work for over fifty years, this one hardly overwhelms me. But I can understand how Huygens would be astonished. Both the subject and the handling were new to him.

I’m guessing that other biographers have examined this piece quite thoroughly — all the more reason for Schama to ignore it. 

Indeed, Schama’s chapter on Rembrandt’s "quiddity" does not discuss any of his early history or religious paintings. He was certainly notable for the  proliferation of self portraits - but he only made 80 of them as paintings or etchings — while he made a total of 300-600 paintings and 400 etchings. 

 

By way of contrast, there are some artists, like Chuck Close, who are best known for self portrait.

Here is a Chicago artist who pretty much only paints self portraits

Pieter Lastman, The Good Samaritan, 1615-20

While we’re at it - how might we account for the singular qualities of Rembrandt’s style as it first emerged in Judas.

The dramatic envelopment of figures within shadows did not come from his teachers, like Lastman, shown above.  Lastman is more like a choreographer.  He puts figures into a pose and then builds a set to accommodate them.  Rembrandt is more like a dreamer.  He starts with a swirling , passionate energy, and then he tries to populate it.

Jan Pynas, Raising of Lazarus, 1615

 

This is the closest thing to Rembrandt that I could find, painted by the brother of another one of Rembrandt's teachers.   As with Rembrandt, it seems that some of those shadow shapes were put in before figures were incorporated into them.

Yet unlike Judas, and many of a Rembrandt’s religious paintings, this piece feels devotional. It provokes an emotion of love for Jesus. It’s not just a dramatic episode.

 

 

St. Apollinaire, Ravenna, 6th C.

 

By the way, here’s the only earlier treatment of Judas Repentant that I could find.

It appears to depict a delivery boy, not a guilt driven, damned soul.

But that’s OK — it was built into a house of worship, a place of prayerful contemplation.

I’ve actually been there. That church interior certainly feels quiet and profound.

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In this chapter, Schama introduces the two principal themes of his book:

1. Rembrandt’s obsession with Rubens

Huygens stated that he was looking for a Protestant Rubens when he found Rembrandt and Lievens.  Rembrandt bought a Rubens for his own collection. Everything else on this theme is conjecture - including the assertion "Rembrandt was haunted by the older master"

2. Rembrandt’s special attention to the eyes.

We’ll see how he develops this theme.  Will he focus on how the parts of the  eye are drawn - or on how the eyes connect to the graphic energy of the painting as a whole.

Rubens, Hero and Leander,  c. 1604

Here’s the Rubens that Rembrandt collected.

Not really typical, is it ?

Perhaps authorship was not really all that important to Rembrandt.

Rembrandt, Christ in a Storm  on the Sea of Galilee, 1633

Perhaps it inspired this piece - which is not really typical of Rembrandt either.

Rembrandt, self portrait c. 1630

This is one of the three pieces that Huygens bought on behalf of the Stadtholder

who immediately gifted them to the Duke of Ancrum

a courtier of the English king, Charles I

to whom they were then given.

Coincidentally, Rubens, at that time, was a special envoy

from the King of Spain to the King of England

with the obvious intent of ending the alliance between the Dutch and the English.

So we might surmise that it was intended to impress Charles I

who already owned this self portrait by Rubens :

 

Rubens, self portrait, 1623

What was Huygens thinking?

The comparison between the two hardly flatters Dutch culture,

and the Rembrandt Project has even suggested that it

was painted by a student.

This is, of course, a matter of ongoing debate, especially for the current owner . Curiously, Schama does not declare that this was the piece given to Ancrum, even though his book includes a monochrome reproduction.  And one might note that there is a three hundred year gap in provenance.

Rembrandt, self portrait, c. 1630

Here’s a much stronger variation from the same period.

Rembrandt, self portrait 1629

If Huygens eyed  this piece as I do,

this one might have been chosen for the Prince of Orange.

(and Schama’s hook included a full color reproduction)

It has a courtly elegance.

As Schama notes, Rembrandt gave himself a gold chain

similar to the one on the Rubens self portrait -

except that it was not gifted by some great prince

and presumably was costume jewelry.

It’s qualities are at the same high level of the 1631  ‘Old Man with Gold Chain"

 in the Art Institute of Chicago:

Love this painting!

Gerard Von Honthorst, portrait of Fredrick Hendrix, Duke of Orange, 1631

Rembrandt,  portrait Amalia Von Solms, 1632

 

 

Honthorst presents a man of solid determination

but compared to Rembrandt’s soulful portrait of his wife,

it’s no more than a catalog of well rendered detail.

Van Dyck, portrait of Frederick Hendrix,  1631-2

And here’s another variation of the duke’s portrait done about the same time.

Schama calls it “breathtakingly beautiful”, though to me it feels like the face has been grafted onto a nice suit of armor.  This man is not a soldier - he's attending a costume party.

Rembrandt, self portrait in felt hat, 1631 (image flipped horizontally)

 

 

 

Rubens, self portrait

 

Schama asserts that in this  piece , Rembrandt "grafted his own image" onto the Rubens self portrait shown above - but if so - it could only be as a spoof.  The young man appears silly rather than the sharp eyed and elegant "gentleman intellectual"

There over a dozen states of this etching.

Schama attributes that to the artist’s obsession with Rubens,

but I think he was just obsessed with his appearance.

Here’s another self-portrait from the same year.

Endlessly fascinated with his own face,

he might well be called a narcissist. 

(as well as a wonderful draftsman)

 

Rubens, Descent from the Cross, 1612-14

Engraving by Lucas Vorsterman, 1620

Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross, 1634 (Petersburg)

Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross, 1633. (Munich)

Schama briefly notes that Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross was  "directly taken" from an engraving of Rubens’ painting in Antwerp.  He doesn’t mention which engraving or which Rembrandt Decent - but both variants are so different from Rubens,  it doesn’t seem to make much difference.  

Somewhere in Wikipedia we’re told that Rembrandt was commissioned to paint reduced sized versions of the Rubens Passion cycle - as a Reformation version of the event. So it’s not like it was Rembrandt’s choice to imitate Rubens.

Comparison is difficult because the Rubens piece is so monumental in size -  5x higher than the Rembrandts.

The Rubens does seem more about cosmic triumph - while the Rembrandt seems more about suffering and endurance.

Neither of them, however, appeal to me as much as this iconic piece from two centuries earlier;

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Rosier Van der Weyden, 1435

It feels, at once, more deeply personal and more sacred.

And much less bombastic.

Christ is neither a dead man (Rembrandt) nor a dead superhero (Rubens).

He’s a swooning spirit.