This collection brings together art historians, museum professionals, conservators, and conservation scientists whose work involves Rembrandt van Rijn and associated artists such as Gerrit Dou, Jan ...Lievens, and Ferdinand Bol. The range of subjects considered is wide: from the presentation of convincing evidence that Rembrandt and his contemporary Frans Hals rubbed elbows in the Amsterdam workshop of Hendrick Uylenburgh to critical reassessments of the role of printmaking in Rembrandt's studio, his competition with Lievens as a landscape painter, his reputation as a collector, and much more. Developed from a series of international conferences devoted to charting new directions in Rembrandt research, these essays illuminate the current state of Rembrandt studies and suggest avenues for future inquiry.
Rembrandt's Passion Series is the name given to five paintings of similar size and format executed over a six year time-frame, 1633-39. The works were commissioned by Frederick Hendrick, Prince of ...Orange and Stadtholder of the United Provinces, for his gallery at The Hague. Although each of the paintings depicts a traditional scene from the Passion of Christ, they do not form anything like a complete Passion Cycle. Seven years later, Hendrick ordered a further two works of the same size and format of subjects from the Nativity of Christ. Six of the seven paintings now hang in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. As the works were executed between Rembrandt's well-documented early Leiden period and his rapid rise to prominence as a portraitist in Amsterdam, the works have not attracted the scholarly attention they might, although the commission was undoubtedly the most prestigious of the young Rembrandt's career. Rembrandt's Passion Series is the first monograph to focus solely on this important group of paintings by the most famous artist of the Dutch Golden Age. In it, Simon McNamara traces the history of the commission by way of extant documentation, places the works in a seventeenth-century Dutch religious milieu, and shows how the series is both reflective of contemporary theological exegesis and embedded in theoretical artistic debates of the age. The book also highlights the extraordinary nature of the self-images seen in three of the paintings and discusses the legacy of the series in later graphic works by Rembrandt and in paintings by his pupils. In doing so, Rembrandt's Passion Series presents a series of unifying factors, both stylistically and thematically, for the works that allows the Passion Series to be properly, and finally, called a "series".
Although Rembrandt's study of the Bible has long been recognized as intense, his interest in secular literature has been relatively neglected. Yet Philips Angel (1641) praised Rembrandt for ..."diligently seeking out the knowledge of histories from old musty books." Amy Golahny elaborates on this observation, reconstructing Rembrandt's library on the evidence of the 1656 inventory and discerning anew how Rembrandt's reading of histories contributed to his creative process. Golahny places Rembrandt in the learned vernacular culture of seventeenth-century Holland and shows the painter to have been a pragmatic reader whose attention to historical texts strengthened his early rivalry with Rubens for visual drama and narrative erudition.
This book offers a new perspective on the art of the Dutch Golden Age by exploring the interaction between the gift's symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early ...modern Holland. Gifts of art were pervasive in seventeenth-century Europe and many Dutch artists, like their counterparts elsewhere, embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, art lovers, and other members of their social networks. Rembrandt also created distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange, and both Rembrandt and Vermeer engaged the ethics of the gift to identify their creative labor as motivated by what contemporaries called a "love of art," not materialistic gain. In the merchant republic's vibrant market for art, networks of gift relations and the anti-economic rhetoric of the gift mingled with the growing dimension of commerce, revealing a unique chapter in the interconnected history of gift giving and art making.
Giles Knox examines how El Greco, Velázquez, and Rembrandt, though a disparate group of artists, were connected by a new self-consciousness with respect to artistic tradition. In particular, Knox ...considers the relationship of these artists to the art of Renaissance Italy, and sets aside nationalist art histories in order to see the period as one of fruitful exchange. Across Europe during the seventeenth century, artists read Italian-inspired writings on art, and these texts informed how they contemplated their practice. Knox demonstrates how these three artists engaged dynamically with these writings, incorporating or rejecting the theoretical premises to which they were exposed. Additionally, this study significantly expands our understanding of how paintings can activate the sense of touch. Knox discusses how Velázquez and Rembrandt, though in quite different ways, sought to conjure for viewers thoughts about touching that resonated directly with the subject matter they depicted.
Die Studie untersucht die ironische Erzählweise Rembrandts und stellt dabei dessen Nachtwache ins Zentrum der Untersuchung. Zentral ist dabei die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der klassizistischen ...Kunsttheorie eines Franciscus Junius. The study analyzes Rembrandt's ironic narrative techniques, focusing on the artist's group portrait the Night Watch. Central to the inquiry is the artist's critical engagement with the classical art theory of Franciscus Junius.
