the Arts
21 maart 2006
Rembrandt Self-portraits
Self Portrait as a Young Man
c. 1628
22.5 x 18.6 cm.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Some extracts of articles on Rembrandt's self portraits:
Rembrandt's Self-Portraits
By Susan Fegley Osmond
..." It wasn't until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when scholars studied Rembrandt's oeuvre as a whole, that it was discovered how very many times the artist had portrayed himself. The number is still a matter of contention, but it seems he depicted himself in approximately forty to fifty extant paintings, about thirty-two etchings, and seven drawings. It is an output unique in history; most artists produce only a handful of self-portraits, if that. And why Rembrandt did this is one of the great mysteries of art history.
Most scholars up till about twenty years ago interpreted Rembrandt's remarkable series of self-portraits as a sort of visual diary, a forty-year exercise in self-examination. In a 1961 book, art historian Manuel Gasser wrote, "Over the years, Rembrandt's self-portraits increasingly became a means for gaining self-knowledge, and in the end took the form of an interior dialogue: a lonely old man communicating with himself while he painted."
Many of these traditional studies focused particularly on Rembrandt's late self-portraits, as they reveal this rigorous self-reflection most profoundly. In an influential 1948 monograph on the artist, Jacob Rosenberg wrote of the ceaseless and unsparing observation which [Rembrandt's self-portraits] reflect, showing a gradual change from outward description and characterisation to the most penetrating self-analysis and self-contemplation. ... Rembrandt seems to have felt that he had to know himself if he wished to penetrate the problem of man's inner life.
More recent scholarship has shed additional light on Rembrandt's early self-portrayals. Quite a few, it is argued, were tronies--head-and-shoulder studies in which the model plays a role or expresses a particular emotion. In the seventeenth century there was an avid market for such studies, which were considered a separate genre (although for an artist they also served as a storehouse of facial types and expressions for figures in history paintings). Thus, for example, we have four tiny etchings from 1630 that show Rembrandt, in turn, caught in fearful surprise, glowering with anger, smiling gamefully, and appearing to snarl--each expressed in lines that themselves embody the distinct emotions. Rembrandt may have used his own face because the model was cheap, but perhaps he was killing two birds with one stone. The art-buying public--which now included people from many walks of life, not only aristocratic or clerical patrons, as in the past--went for etchings of famous people, including artists. By using himself as the model for these and other studies, Rembrandt was making himself into a recognizable celebrity at the same time that he gave the public strikingly original and expressive tronies. The wide dissemination of these and other prints was important in establishing Rembrandt's reputation as an artist.
Meeting Market Demand?
... art historian Ernst van de Wetering sets forth a view that has gained a number of adherents over the past few decades. The "self-portraits" (there was no such term in the seventeenth century) could not have been made for the purpose of self-analysis, he claims, because the idea of self as "an independent I who lives and creates solely from within" is one that arose only in the Romantic era, after 1800. In the literature of Rembrandt's day, he contends, personality was seen primarily as being bound to certain immutable types discussed in classical sources. He cites Hans-Joachim Raupp, an early exponent of this demythologizing view: When an artist of Rembrandt's day painted a self-portrait, he "did not step into the mirror with questions and doubts, but with a carefully planned programme."
Van de Wetering takes pages to build up his argument, but basically he sees that Rembrandt's "programme" in these self-portraits was to make paintings for which there was a ready market. (He points out that a detailed inventory of Rembrandt's possessions made in 1656, when he faced bankruptcy, included no portrayals of the artist by himself.) In self-portraits, artists in Rembrandt's day and previous eras sometimes included a painting in the genre for which they were best known, as an example of their style. In the case of Rembrandt, he was most noted for his eccentricity of technique and for his tronies and depictions of one or a few figures. So, in making his self-portraits, which van de Wetering contends were probably all seen as tronies in their day, Rembrandt was making the kind of images art buyers expected of him, which had the added attraction of being depictions of their maker and exemplars of his unusual technique...."
T H E A R T S
January, 2000
for more info visit: http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/rembrandt_self_portraits.htm
Self Portrait
1669
63.5 x 57.8 cm.
Mauritshuis, The Hague
Extract from: the Art Bulletin
by Stephanie S. Dickey
...."Van de Wetering's essay ("The Multiple Functions of Rembrandt's Self-Portraits," pp. 10-37) begins with an analysis of Rembrandt's use of mirrors in the production of painted and etched self-portraits. Obviously, an artist can hardly paint himself without looking into a mirror, a fact whose implications may enrich the content of such works for a thoughtful viewer. Van de Wetering, however, focuses on the practical function of mirrors in the studio, avoiding altogether their complex metaphorical tradition (especially popular among painters in Rembrandt's hometown of Leiden) as signifiers of vanitas, vision, self-knowledge, and pictorial artifice. Following a careful description of Rembrandt's features (which ultimately fails to answer the question of whether the paintings were accurate likenesses), van de Wetering then launches his critique of previous scholarship. In his view, the notion of "self-portraiture" as we know it today is bound up with a conception of individual identity that did not exist until th e 19th century (p. 17). Passing reference is made to Renaissance humanism, but van de Wetering prefers to blame the Romantic age for what he perceives as a misguided view, still prevalent today, of Rembrandt's self-portraits as documents of a subjective quest for self-knowledge. Chapman's monograph is singled out as "anachronistic" in its assertion that Rembrandt's self-portraits signal a modern form of self-exploration (p. 19). Van de Wetering evidendy takes the English use of the term "modern" too literally, failing to observe that Chapman specifically locates Rembrandt within a conception of individual identity developed in the 17th century (not the 19th), which was demonstrated not only in painters' self-portraits but also in contemporaneous trends such as Cartesian philosophy and the rise of literary autobiography. Numerous recent publications in the field of cultural history have explored this aspect of early modern culture; among the most extensive is Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), which devotes a whole section to manifestations of "inwardness." Van de Wetering borrows from Joanna WoodsMarsden's Renaissance Self-Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) but fails to reference other important recent studies of Renaissance identity construction, notably Joseph Leo Koerner's Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Cited several times, however, is Hans-Joachim Raupp, Untersuchungen za K[ddot{u}]nstlerbildnis und K[ddot{u}]nstlerdarstellung in den Niederlanden im 17. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1984); van de Wetering prefers his description of identity formation in Rembrandt's time as grounded in typological convention (Christian, humanist, astrological, social, and pictorial) rather than individual subjectivity.
Remarkably, van de Wetering here brings in Michel de Montaigne, only to dismiss his autobiography as driven by classical influences and a search for "what unites him with the rest of mankind [rather] than what sets him apart" (p. 19). No reference is made to the rich literature on Montaigne's attempts to "paint himself' with words, a subgenre of the growing scholarly interest in links between visual and verbal self-fashioning. Association of Rembrandt with Montaigne, as well as authors closer to his own experience (such as John Donne and Constantijn Huygens), goes at least as far back as Werner Weisbach (Rembrandt [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1926], 79-90); more recently, Andrew Small's direct comparison (Essays in Self-Portraiture: A Comparison of Technique in the Self-Portraits of Montaigne and Rembrandt [New York: Peter Lang, 1996]) finds in both writer and artist the emulation of previous masters and a quest for fidelity to the essential nature of the model (the self) that reaches beneath mutable surface appearance.
vidently, in van de Wetering's view, self-awareness that is supported by or figured as typological convention cannot be introspective. One wonders what Rembrandt's fellow Amsterdammer, Ren[acute{e}] Descartes, would have made of this assumption, not to mention the numerous theorists (Karel van Mander, Franciscus Junius, John Bulwer, Charles Le Brun, Samuel van Hoogstraten) who advocated the study and depiction of physiognomy as an essential key to character. The difficulty here, in my view, is that individual self-scrutiny and objective categorization of human personality are not mutually exclusive. Both proceed from the same impulse: the wish to comprehend and control the workings of the human mind and heart. In the early modern period, the classification of bodily humors, facial features, emotional expression, and the like provided a typological framework within which to make sense of the bewildering variety of human behavior, much as Freudian and other psychological theories do today. Furthermore, literar y forms such as autobiography, poetry, diaries, and confessions test that Rembrandt's contemporaries were interested in applying this new knowledge to the understanding of their individual selves. One such document, the unpublished autobiography of Constantijn Huygens, contains a passage well known to Rembrandt specialists. Responding to criticism that Jan Lievens portrayed him with a "contemplative rendering of the face" that "detracts from the vivacity of [his] mind," Huygens justifies his sober countenance not by artistic convention but by personal emotive experience: "During this period I was involved in a serious family affair of some importance and, as is only to be expected, the cares which I endeavoured to keep to myself were clearly reflected in the expression of my face and eyes." [1]
Does all this prove that Rembrandt made self-portraits in order to understand himself better? In the sense that a man of the 1990s would do so, probably not. But that he might seek to understand himself as a microcosm of human subjectivity is another matter: the ample evidence for his contemporaries' fascination with external clues to interiority must at least make it possible that this was an interest he shared. After all, his was not a face to contemplate for its beauty. Van de Wetering, even while quoting van Mander's interpretation of the forehead as "the reflection of the thoughts, aye the book of the heart," concludes that Rembrandt habitually depicted himself with a frown simply because "he really must have had one" (p. 16). Yet if we agree that Rembrandt's somber expression is not a "'pasted-on' attribute," all the more reason to read it as a mark of inner character. Features like frowns become emblematic of states of mind for the good reason that they frequently accompany them in real life. And faces , as Joseph Leo Koerner has observed, "preserve the history of an individual's passions in the residual lines and creases that expression leaves behind." [2] In rigorously exploring the topography of what Filippo Baldinucci called "the ugly and plebeian face by which he was ill-favored," [3] Rembrandt inescapably investigates his own subjectivity. And in contemplating his works, we do the same.
Van de Wetering posits a strong market for Rembrandt's self-portraits among 17th-century art lovers ("liefhebbers van de kunst"), educated connoisseurs for whom the subject matter of a painting could be less important than aesthetic refinement and artistic skill, and the famous name attached to a work more conducive to purchase than the intrinsic properties of the object itself. In proposing that "Rembrandt's fame ... must have been an important motive for his large output of self-portraits" (p. 28), he seems to be suggesting that Rembrandt produced these works to supply a market for celebrity likenesses, despite the acknowledged facts that artists who were more famous, such as Peter Paul Rubens, painted far fewer self-portraits, and that documents for the collecting of Rembrandt self-portraits are scarce. Furthermore, collections honoring artists as uomini illustri (discussed also by Manuth, pp. 46-56), were not, as far as we know, numerous enough to create a market all by themselves. While van de Wetering i s right to suggest that self-portraits could be an effective tool for self-promotion, it seems likely that Rembrandt's self-portraits, notably his etchings, were circulated to build his reputation as much as to capitalize on it. In some cases, they may have served as gifts of friendship, a practice also supported by humanist tradition. Perhaps Rembrandt's self-portraits are so rarely documented as objects of economic value because, at least in some cases, they were treasured, instead, as personal tokens.
Van de Wetering concludes with an observation that he considers "the central hypothesis" of his argument: that artists' portraits "provided the purchaser with both the portrait of a celebrated artist and a display of the mastery that had made him famous in the first place" (p. 30). Here, pragmatic observation has brought him round to the familiar philosophical notion that "every painter paints himself" and, ironically, to Svetlana Alpers's theoretical conception of Rembrandt as a pictor economicus whose "works are commodities distinguished from others by being identified as his ... in making them, he in turn commodifies himself." [4] As demonstrations of his technique, Rembrandt's frequent self-portraits do make intriguing signposts along the dramatic trajectory of his stylistic evolution. Yet their subject matter, with its own ingenious progress, demands equal attention.
Van de Wetering ultimately concedes that factors such as costume, pose, and attributes can make statements, if not about individual identity, at least about the nature and practice of art. The pictorial traditions and sartorial means by which these statements are constructed form the subjects of the second and third essays. Like the catalogue entries, they are linked to van de Wetering's essay by cross-references, some overlap in content, and a consistently antitheoretical approach...."
June, 2000
Posted by willy at 11:13 am to 45 - Painter | the Arts | Comments (0)
Mainthe Arts
30 november 2004
Petrarca
Francesco Petrarca by Andrea del Castagno
From the Cycle of Famous Men and Women. c. 1450.
Detached fresco 247 x 153 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy
Francesco Petrarca (1304-74) is an Italian poet and scholar. He was born into the family of an exiled Florentine notary, who settled in Arezzo in 1302. In 1312 the family moved to Avignon, and later to Bologna, where young Francesco enthusiastically studied the classics. After his father’s death Petrarch returned to Avignon (1326).
He became a churchman. It was at this period (1327) that he first met Laura (possibly Laure de Noves, married in 1325 to Hugo de Sade; she died, the mother of eleven children, in 1348). She inspired him with a passion that has become proverbial for its constancy and purity.
Posted by willy at 09:29 pm to 44 - Poet | the Arts | Comments (0)
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Dante
Portrait of Dante. c.1495. by Alessandro Botticelli
Tempera on canvas. Private collection, Geneva, Switzerland.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote over 14.000 verses describing his visionary journey through the kingdoms of Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio) and Paradise (Paradiso), Divina Commedia. The epic is divided into 100 cantos: 34 for Hell and 33 each for Purgatory and Paradise. Dante is at first guided on his journey by the classical poet Virgil, but in Paradise he is led by his muse, Beatrice. During his journey Dante meets a large number of nameless people, and also famous personalities from the past and his own age. Every one of them has received the place he deserves as a result of the offences or merits of his life.
Posted by willy at 08:56 pm to 44 - Poet | the Arts | Comments (0)
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Vermeer's Art of Painting
The Art of Painting c.1666-1673 by Jan Vermeer van Delft
Oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria
Posted by willy at 09:59 am to 45 - Painter | the Arts | Comments (0)