c. 2005 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ The apogee of Protestant plastic arts has come to the National Gallery of Art, in the form of 17 religious paintings and 24 prints by Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669).
Though painted barely 100 years after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door, these works are eons away from the bluenose euphoria _ from pornography prosecutions to gay marriage bans _ sweeping the capital.
This is art _ wonderfully profound, full of deep human feeling. Rembrandt is today recognized as one of the greatest painters of all time, perhaps the only Old Master born north of the Alps who is equal as a household name to the Renaissance triumvirate of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo.
Yet unlike those three, he was not patronized by the Catholic Church. He was instead a private businessman, selling his work through Amsterdam dealers and running, during his rising youthful days, a popular art school in his large house.
Like most of the Christian evangelicals who support the president, Rembrandt was a Protestant. Indeed, he was responsible for inventing something that is almost an oxymoron: great Calvinist art.
“Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits,” which opened 10 days after George W. Bush’s second inaugural, on the surface would seem to be the perfect show to please the president’s supporters. Holland in Rembrandt’s time was a haven not only for the puritanical Dutch Reformed Church but for dozens of other Protestant sects, from the Baptists to the Mennonites (of whom Rembrandt may have been one; we really don’t know), all of whom were persecuted by Catholic superpowers of the day like France and Spain, and all of whom fled through Dutch ports to New York (then New Amsterdam), where they flourish to this day.
The magnificent Rembrandt portraits on display in the National Gallery have never been shown together since they were painted, in the 1650s and ’60s, just before the artist’s death. Most show a single figure, either an apostle or a member of the Holy Family, looming out of a penumbra of Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro, with understated identifying attributes (a scallop shell for St. James, a knife for St. Bartholomew to indicate he was flayed, a sword for St. Paul, because his head was chopped off).
Protestantism isn’t big on saints, of course, but Rembrandt chose to do pictures of apostles whose stories were emphasized by early Protestant preachers, mostly the evangelists, particularly Paul.
Paul is the key here, represented in three paintings. The apostle is a favorite of fundamentalists for his emphasis on God’s grace over religious law and his certain belief in the supremacy of an individual’s relationship to God.
Yet Rembrandt’s “Self Portrait as the Apostle Paul” (1661) is anything but certain. He turns to us with a pop-eyed, quizzical look, holding his book as if presenting it for us to read, or to give our own commentary.
It isn’t just his glance that is uncertain, but Rembrandt’s whole manner of painting. Each of these pictures dissolves on close examination into a flurry of brushstrokes and a scatter of light, which seem almost resolved into significant form when you stand 15 or 20 feet away, but blur any closer. So the emotional impact of these brooding, gnarly, physically imposing pictures slides like a trombone, letting us glimpse their meaning at a certain distance but denying any greater specific understanding up close.
Rembrandt did not invent the convention of portraying Christianity’s great themes with common, often bruised or dirty everyday people as models. The Italian baroque artist Caravaggio originated that, along with the overall dark pictorial tone split by shape-defining beams of light.
Rembrandt did, however, take fallibility and humility as his chief religious subjects throughout his life, and these pictures are of poor, rugged men, skeptics who came to faith only through the hard knocks of bewildering experience.
Catholics have always seen the good as beautiful, and that is why their holy-card imagery of the saints and Christ has generally tended to show muscular athletes or potent, well-lit grandees in sumptuous, pastel-colored garments. Here in America, contemporary Protestant religious illustration follows the same trend, depicting Christ as a handsome young man in spotless robes, often moving among similarly healthy-looking suburbanites with neatly trimmed hair and sharply pressed Dockers.
For Rembrandt and the early Protestants, God’s greatest mystery was his love for humanity, symbolized by his willingness to share our fate and form in the person of his son. Paintings like “Apostle Bartholomew” (1661), seen holding his chin in one hand and an almost incidental little box-cutter in the other, are barely disguised portraits, this one showing a short-haired man with a bristly mustache who looks at us with a kind of exhausted melancholy. You can almost smell his bad breath.
Rembrandt did not paint the outward show of biblical events. That would be mere entertainment, which is how Calvinists defined most of the gaudy decoration of medieval and Renaissance churches, and why they tore out and burned most of it throughout northern Europe.
Rembrandt painted ideas, like liturgical inspiration (the subject of both the 1657 “The Apostle Paul” and “The Evangelist Matthew and the Angel,” painted in 1661 with Rembrandt’s son, Titus, posing as the wingless angel whispering in the saint’s ear), or the mystery of free will (arguably the subject of his “Self Portrait as St. Paul”).
The emotional life of the mind, Rembrandt’s most enduring subject, will not submit to dogmatic certainty. Like sin itself, it is an ever-changing thing, suspended between human frailty and social convention, and as abstract as a De Kooning.
Many of America’s latter-day Puritans seem anxious to express an almost Abrahamic conviction, as the president’s Catholic ally, failed Illinois Senate candidate Alan Keyes, did this month when he publicly disowned his lesbian daughter.
Bush himself never seems so sure, supporting a ban on gay marriage in public but carefully getting a message of compassion out through “secretly” taped comments made to a former Protestant minister and family friend.
How like Rembrandt that now-you-see-him/now-you-don’t quality is. The artist was indeed a capitalist (his students wrote about competing with one another to paint the most realistic gold coin on the floor of the studio, in order to get the old man to bend over and try to pick it up). Most of what we know of his life comes not from personal letters or memoirs but from financial papers, chiefly the record of his bankruptcy sale in 1657.
Although Rembrandt was world-famous during his lifetime, and his paintings were immediately perceived as very valuable, he lost almost everything after his first wife, Saskia, died in 1642. Rembrandt had a good income, but most of the seed capital for the school came through Saskia, whose family had encumbered her will so Rembrandt could not remarry without losing access to her dowry.
That’s where sex enters the picture. Geertje Dircks (1610-1650) entered Rembrandt’s household as a wet nurse for Titus when his mother died, and ended up as Rembrandt’s common-law wife until she fell seriously ill in 1647. Hendrickje Stoffels (1626-1663) was hired to help Geertje around the house when she fell sick, and by 1652 Hendrickje was pregnant. The Dutch Reformed Church condemned Stoffels, saying she “lived in sin like a whore” with the artist. They did not censure Rembrandt.
But the damage was done. Can you imagine a 17th century Calvinist wanting to study at an art school where the professor keeps house with not one but two serving girls at once?
That sounds way liberal.
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“Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits”
Where: The National Gallery of Art, Constitution Avenue between Third and Seventh streets NW, Washington, D.C.
When: Through May 1. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays; 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sundays
How much: Free. Call (202) 737-4215.
MO/JL END BISCHOFF
(Dan Bischoff is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)
