400TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF REMBRANDT

Motif: Self-portrait with a Velvet Cap with Plume, 1638, etching, 134 x 103 mm. Graphic Collection of the National and University Library, Zagreb Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn is the greatest artist of the so called “golden era” of Dutch painting, a great master of the European Baroque whose painting and graphic opus has remained an unattained ideal, subject of incessant research and a stimulus to inexhaustible interpretations. The nature of his handwriting could have been imitated, but the unpredictability and intensity of the genius concentrated upon the spiritual, emotional and psychological depth – the form and the mise en scene – could have never been repeated. His handwriting of the chiaroscuro fluid encompasses the whole picture, emphasizing the meaning, movement, dramatic moment, while the relationship of the light and shade compresses the complex of sensations that could not be embraced with the naked eye, posing to the observer the demand for a repeated reading of the work. The complex compositions of biblical scenes, intimist mythology or the compressed portraits were built with the covering and uncovering of shades, taking shape in the light or shedding light from the dark. He could have taught his numerous students (forty of them have come from his workshop) the art of applying painting principles, but his intuition was not a medium that could have been transferred by teaching. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in the affluent bourgeois city of Leiden on July 15, 1606. He left the Leiden University following his father’s approval and, equipped by classical education, became a student in the workshop of the painter Swanenburgh at the age of fourteen. After some time spent in the Amsterdam workshop of the painter Pieter Lastman, the then nineteen-year-old Rembrandt established his atelier in Leiden together with Lastman’s student Jan Lievens. In 1633 he bought a house in Amsterdam where he died on October 4, 1669. His huge activity (comprising some 650 oil paintings and round 300 etchings and a huge opus of drawings) has been interpreted through four periods: the first, the Leiden period (up to 1631); the second, the early Amsterdam period; the third, the middle Amsterdam period (to 1650) and the fourth, late Amsterdam period (after 1650), this division being subject to continual revisions and emendations. The wide scope of Rembrandt’s topical repertoire affects all genres, from the historic, mythological and biblical all the way to landscapes, and among the numerous portraits and almost a hundred self-portraits (40 to 50 preserved paintings, round 32 etchings and seven drawings) one among many, the possibly essential interpretative determinant is being offered that points to self-awareness and the affirmation of the personality of the artist who annihilated and disregarded conventions. Rembrandt has overcome and prevailed over the idealization of art focused on the search for the perfect form by refusing to follow the custom of travelling to Italy after the period of schooling and study in the painters’ workshops in order to get to know the sources of the Renaissance and Early Baroque artistic models. He created his own vision in the compressed space of the Dutch interiors and in the midst of the landscape with its low horizons and its huge and high, lighted heaven’s screen. Having inherited the northern tradition, the everyday atmosphere in Rembrandt’s works gained mythical and biblical dimensions, and the agony of the Passion has been re-shaped into a drama of humanness. He was a lover of articles, draperies and gold that re-lived the mystery of the Epiphany under his painting brush. In the Amsterdam collections he was introduced to the great works of European and particularly Italian art and became a collector himself. His collection has been described in the sources as the “Kunstkammer” [Art chamber] of encyclopaedic contents, where, apart from the precious and rare objects, paintings and sculpture replicas, and particularly graphic sheets following the great masterpieces that he used to study carefully, turning them into a medium of his own inventions. Painting, graphics and drawing have been the three media of Rembrandt’s art where he transferred the code of the chiaroscuro speech with a deep differentiation of their languages. The speedy drawing notes with the pen – the eye that observes and memorizes – and the laid on shading that positions the chiaroscuro relations, all these were the mediators of the illusionism of the material and the suggestiveness of the scenes in the paintings of his free luminist brush, while the graphics, with their condensed and loosened line-like veins, had the role of permeable nets and dams to the light in the configuration of forms. Rembrandt’s etchings where the dry needle gradually started appearing were created in the period starting in the 30s of the 17th century, and their numerous etched states where the configuration of the chiaroscuro relations was changed had been subject of intelligent and shrewd analyses of the changes of the master’s handwriting and style. Rembrandt’s etched Self-portrait from the year 1636 – one of the rare ones of the master’s works to be kept in Croatia – originates from the decade when he, on the one hand, introduced himself as a modest contemporary of his Baptist community, and, on the other hand, as a self-aware person with the authority of the then already highly appreciated mastership, clad in clothes of a Renaissance literatus, courtier and artist that evoke the glorious models of Titian and Raphael (Castiglione, Ariosto). Rembrandt’s self-portraits are the argument of a complex personality that had never hidden the antinomy in the perception of his own nature. Moreover, he turned his own personality into a field of research and psychological insight, presenting himself once in the mimicry of aristocratic and artistic excellence, and the next time in the role of a modest citizen of Amsterdam. Margarita Sveštarov Šimat