Responses To Rembrandt

1. To begin with -- 2. Human painter of the human condition -- 3. Rembrandt's Bible -- 4. Rembrandt's pictures -- 5. Rembrandt's meaning -- 6. Rembrandt's faith -- 7. Rembrandt's diary -- 8. To end with.

In 1968, a group of Dutch scholars known as the Rembrandt Research Project, feeling that the master's oeuvre was inflated, began to take Rembrandt to task. The group's members traveled around the world, subjecting Rembrandt to intense scrutiny: they x-rayed paintings; examined the rendering of lace, hands, and signatures; counted threads of warp and woof. Paintings long considered Rembrandts started to fall. Then, in 1984, one of the members of the Project suggested, in print, that The Polish Rider might be next. Perhaps this painting, "one of the world's masterpieces," wasn't a Rembrandt after all but the work of a lesser-known pupil, Willem Drost.

A revised survey of Rembrandt’s complete painted oeuvre. The question of which 17th-century paintings in Rembrandt’s style were actually painted by Rembrandt himself had already become an issue during his lifetime. It is an issue that is still hotly disputed among art historians today. The problem arose because Rembrandt had numerous pupils who learned the art of painting by imitating their master or by assisting him with his work as a portrait painter. He also left pieces unfinished, to be completed by others. The question is how to determine which works were from Rembrandt’s own hand. Can we, for example, define the criteria of quality that would allow us to distinguish the master’s work from that of his followers? Do we yet have methods of investigation that would deliver objective evidence of authenticity? To what extent do research techniques used in the physical sciences help? Or are we, after all, still dependent on the subjective, expert eye of the connoisseur? The book provides answers to these questions. Prof. Ernst van de Wetering, the author of our forthcoming book which deals with these questions, has been closely involved in all aspects of this research since 1968, the year the renowned Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) was founded. In particular, he played an important role in developing new criteria for authentication. Van de Wetering was also witness to the way the often overly zealous tendency to doubt the authenticity of Rembrandt’s paintings got out of hand. In this book he re-attributes to the master a substantial number of unjustly rejected Rembrandts. He also was closely involved in the (re)discovery of a considerable number of lost or completely unknown works by Rembrandt. The verdicts of earlier specialists – including the majority of members of the original RRP (up to 1989) – were based on connoisseurship: the self-confidence in one’s ability to recognise a specific artist’s style and ‘hand’. Over the years, Van de Wetering has carried out seminal research into 17th-century studio practice and ideas about art current in Rembrandt’s time. In this book he demonstrates the fallibility of traditional connoisseurship, especially in the case of Rembrandt, who was par excellence a searching artist. The methodological implications of this critical view are discussed in an introductory chapter which relates the history of the developments in this turbulent field of research. Van de Wetering’s account of his own involvement in it makes this book a lively and sometimes unexpectedly personal account. The catalogue section presents a chronologically ordered survey of Rembrandt’s entire painted oeuvre of 336 paintings, richly illustrated and annotated. For all the paintings re-attributed in this book, extensive commentaries have been included that provide a multi-facetted new insight into Rembrandt’s world and the world of art-historical research. Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited is the concluding sixth volume of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings (Volumes I-V; 1982, 1986, 1989, 2005, 2010). It can also be read as a revisionary critique of the first three Volumes published by the old RRP team up till 1989 and of Gerson’s influential survey of Rembrandt’s painted oeuvre of 1968/69. At the same time, the book is designed as an independent overview that can be used on the basis that anyone seeking more detailed information will be referred to the five previous (digital versions of the) Volumes and the detailed catalogues published in the meantime by the various museums with collections of Rembrandt paintings. This work of art history and art research should belong in the library of every serious art historical institute, university or museum.

Annotation Elizabeth A. Kaye specializes in communications as part of her coaching and consulting practice. She has edited Requirements for Certification since the 2000-01 edition.

John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artists. Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices.

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”.

As this collection makes clear, the paths to grasping the complexity of Caravaggio’s art are multiple and variable. Offering new or recently updated interpretations of the works of Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti, this book deals with all the major aspects of Caravaggio’s paintings: technique, creative process, religious context, innovations in pictorial genre and narrative, market strategies, biography, patronage, reception and new hermeneutical trends.