Rembrandt’s The Standard Bearer Noble, Petria; Van Loon, Annelies; Bikker, Jonathan
The Rijksmuseum bulletin,
06/2023, Volume:
71, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Petria Noble, along with Annelies van Loon and Jonathan Bikker, examined the paint application and composition in Rembrandt's The Standard Bearer and concluded that some pigments used for the costume ...have lost their colour; however, the white flag is as intended. It is also now clear how the artwork was restored in 1958.
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Current discussions of self‐knowledge focus on awareness of mental states, but a more ancient concern is with knowing one’s nature and with living well in light of that. Pursuit of this Socratic ...imperative has been associated with a tradition of self‐identification contributed to by Plato, Plotinus, Augustine and Descartes. Their ideas are distinguished and discussed, but another perspective is developed bringing together ideas from Aquinas and Wittgenstein: linking of the former’s understanding of propria and the latter’s account of criteria. The nation of natural signs is adverted to in relation to Reid suggesting a third component to this perspective.
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The aim of this paper is to present the productive interplay of connoisseurship and material analysis when dealing with drawings by Rembrandt – or previously attributed to him – in the collection of ...the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. This concerns the more precise determination of the drawing materials used and the reconstruction of the genesis of the drawings discussed. The material analysis allows us to decide whether and how Rembrandt’s inks can be used to determine authorship at all. The “material turn” in drawing studies thus intervenes in the discussion about authorship and opens up a broader production aesthetic perspective. No longer the “style” but rather the
becomes the decisive criterion for answering the question “Rembrandt, or not?”
'Art history's culminating moment, the years when the project of art history most perfectly realized its possibilities' almost arrived in 1893 with Alois Riegl's first book Questions of Style, ...according to an appetizing formulation in Christopher Wood's critically-acclaimed recent study, The History of Art History. Despite its promise for the project of art history, the Vienna school is ultimately found wanting, like so many other names and movements in Wood's capacious review, nor is any progress evident in his broader history of art history up to the present. As a corollary perspective, this paper proposes to move beyond what Riegl got wrong in order to emphasize the pertinence of what he got right for advancing art history today, specifically in his group portrait study and above all in relation to the riddle of Rembrandt's Staalmeesters. By bringing Riegl's close readings of mostly 'minor' paintings to bear on monuments of world art by Rembrandt, Riegl between 'applied' and 'high' art, or authorless works and one of the world's foremost authors, who was profoundly concerned with his tradition. These concrete examples also demonstrate how Riegl's elucidations of visual particulars are not in contrast to but rather derive from and inform his theory of the broader development of group portraiture. Riegl sought to explain the Kunstvollen or 'will of art' of Dutch group portraits, what they seek to do as art.5 His approach is preferable to and directly applicable to current interpretations, I submit, and can thus serve as a corrective or a means of 'Vienna schooling' Dutch art scholarship. Conversely, situating Riegl's group portrait study, as his last major work and potentially the culmination of his thought, in relation to subsequent approaches can yield new insights into his place within the history of art history, a 'Vienna school' perspective applied to the Vienna school itself. From such a synthetic or cumulative art historiography and history of art history, looking backward in order to move forward, we can more perfectly realize the project of art history.
The unprecedented inclusion of a Black maidservant in Rembrandt's The Visitation invokes the global reach of the new faith as expressed at the dawn of Christianity in the Gospel of Luke (1:39–56) and ...later reiterated by Erasmus and Jacobus Revius. The woman's African features and attire would have resonated with Dutch merchants around 1640, when the West India Company fully embarked on trade in enslaved people in Africa and the Atlantic. The maidservant raises moral, religious, and sociocultural questions concerning attitudes toward colonialism and enslavement that may have influenced Rembrandt and informed contemporary reception of the painting. By offering three hypothetical identities for the anonymous but presumably living model--either an enslaved or free woman from Rembrandt's neighborhood in Amsterdam--this essay joins a wave of scholarship that employs contextual evidence to redress the erasure of Black people from the historical record.
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT THINGS Bayly, Simon
Angelaki : journal of theoretical humanities,
10/2021, Volume:
26, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This essay explores the centrality and ambiguity surrounding the thing in recent attempts to articulate an object-oriented politics. Attempting to reconnect seemingly divergent ways in which the ...thing has been theorized – as object, as assembly, as the Freudo-Lacanian Ding – the discussion analyses the persistence of libidinally charged scenes of “naked” human encounter within efforts to orient politics around objects. Subtending a Western conception of assembly as the ideal modern political form, this persistent political object is described as the meeting, a social genre that has received little sustained philosophical attention but which shapes the everyday experience of the political. The meeting as an emotionally ambivalent scene of collective sensual encounter is articulated as a space of anti-politics in which political work is both done and undone. The essay concludes by illustrating the political dynamics of meeting within the emergence of European capitalism through the brief analysis of a painting by Rembrandt.
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Glittering in the darkness Barnett, Richard
The Lancet,
11/2014, Volume:
384, Issue:
9956
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
There are moments in this exhibition when Rembrandt's version of Altersstil catches you in the small of your back. Young Girl at a Window has the qualities of a fading memory: blurry and dark in some ...passages, sharply lit in others, a compelling exposition of Rembrandt's gift for evoking not particular moods, but the luminous mystery of inner life.
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Identifying, comparing, and matching watermarks in pre-machine-made papers has occupied scholars of prints and drawings for some time. One popular but arduous approach is to overlay, either manually ...or digitally, an image of the watermark in question with its presumed match from a known source. For example, a newly discovered watermark in a Rembrandt print might be compared to a similar one reproduced in Erik Hinterding’s Rembrandt as an Etcher (2006). Such an overlay can confirm the pair as identical, i.e., as moldmates, or reveal their differences. But creating an accurate overlay for two images with different scales, orientations, or resolutions using standard image-manipulation tools can be time consuming and, ultimately, unsuccessful. Part One of this article describes advances in the emerging field of computational art history, specifically the development of digital image processing software, that can be used to semi-automatically create a reliable animated overlay of two watermarks, regardless of their relative “comparability.” Watermarks found in the prints of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) are used in three case studies to demonstrate the efficacy of user-generated overlay videos. Part Two discusses how searching for identical watermarks, i.e., moldmates, can be enhanced through the application of a new suite of software programs that exploit the data calculated during the creation of user-generated animated overlays. This novel watermark identification procedure allows for rapid, confident watermark searches with minimal user effort, given the existence of a pre-marked library of watermarks. Using a pre-marked library of Foolscap with Five-Pointed Collar watermarks, four case studies present different categories of previously undocumented matches 1) among Rembrandt’s prints; 2) between prints by Rembrandt and another artist, in this case Jan Gillisz van Vliet (1600/10–1668); and 3) between selected Rembrandt prints and contemporaneous Dutch historical documents.
Art historians have used repro-photography as a tool since the mid-nineteenth century, often without critically addressing limits of the technical medium. Today, when photo-documentary material is ...used in automated analysis, image production errors produced by limits of the medium may be built into machine learning, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This article focuses on the uses of photographic reproductions of the works of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), including visual analysis of photographs, technical analysis of the “Rembrandt portrait” style, and projects that employ reproductions in the architecture of neural networks—these all define the new cultural shift generative reproduction brings to visual documentation. The article advocates for a critical approach to photo-documentation in the arts.
Erik Hinterding's classification and chronological arrangement of hundreds of distinct watermarks in Rembrandt's prints has resulted in a deeper understanding of the artist's production methods and ...his artistic development as a prolific etcher. This article explains the decision-tree-based approach to rapid identification of watermarks in Rembrandt's etchings that is under development at Cornell University and uses it to identify the watermarks and watermark fragments in seven Rembrandt prints in The Frick Collection in New York.
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