Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age: masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum
For the Dutch, the 17th century was truly a golden time: the high point and the defining era of their national history.
The 17th century was a time of enormous cultural energy in Europe, largely generated by the collision of the scientific revolution with the dramatic renewal of religious feeling brought about by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. It was a time of great thinkers and artists, of vastly expanded intellectual and physical horizons, but also of conflict, including religious wars and even the witch-hunts which betrayed the anxiety of a world whose old certainties were everywhere failing.
For the Dutch in particular — and as we are reminded in the title of this exhibition from the Rijksmuseum — this was truly the golden century, the high point and the defining era of their national history. Free of the rule of Catholic Spain, the largely Protestant northern provinces of The Netherlands became enormously prosperous and economically dynamic, soon dominating maritime trade around the world, especially in Southeast Asia, where they established colonies to control the spice business, and on the China coast, where they became the main carriers even for the Chinese market.
In Java, they built or rebuilt the city of Batavia, today Jakarta, still the closest outpost of European civilisation when Sydney was founded in 1788. Several paintings in the exhibition include views of the city as it once was, with a canal that led past a citadel so that merchant ships could presumably dock in the heart of the city, as they could in the Grand Canal in Venice.
They were the first Europeans to walk on Australian soil, in the first decade of the century, and within two generations they had mapped the whole of the west coast of the continent and most of the north and south; the east coast had to wait for James Cook’s great voyages a hundred years later. One of the important maps of this period, Joan Blaeu’s Nova Archipelagi Orientalis Tabula (1663), representing Southeast Asia and Australia, and which the National Library in Canberra acquired in 2013, has just been put on exhibition after a lengthy period of restoration.
The Dutch were rightly proud of such maps, and they appear in the background of many paintings of the time — there is thus a map of Holland in Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, and indeed maps appear in more than a quarter of his compositions. Among other things they were symbols of national pride, in their unprecedented international trade networks and in their political independence and possession of their homeland. This was also a reason they loved landscape painting, and it explains the very different aesthetic of Dutch landscape compared with the tradition that had arisen in Italy and was brought to its zenith by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, both living in Rome.
The classical landscape was inspired by countryside in the vicinity of Rome, but it was not in any sense a national landscape; it aspired rather to a universal and timeless vision of the life of nature. Dutch landscape, in contrast, tended to be based on the accurate representations of real places and expressed pride not only in political independence but also in the qualities of industry, resourcefulness, social and economic co-operation that were necessary to protect their low-lying country from storms and flooding as well as from political threats.
Thus landscapes, as well as other genres of painting, were common even in modest houses, as is clear from countless Dutch paintings of interiors. Here, for example, we see a group of tailors sitting cross-legged at work in a room with a large landscape on the wall. The Dutch clearly loved pictures, and that love seems to have been shared by all classes, not only the wealthy.
The Italians loved pictures, too, as much as — if not more than — the Netherlanders. Yet the comparison immediately reveals the extent of the difference between the cultural worlds of Italy and Holland. For one thing, modern Italian art had always been dominated by ambitious religious subjects, executed by the greatest masters, from Giotto to Raphael or Michelangelo, on a considerable scale and addressing a large collective public, like a whole congregation.
Protestant religiosity, mindful of the second commandment that Christians had generally managed to overlook, disapproved of most and in extreme cases all religious art, especially in churches: countless paintings and sculptures were destroyed by reformist zealots in the 16th and 17th centuries. The result was that there was no demand in Holland for the large altarpieces and narrative or allegorical fresco cycles that were the staple of a great artistic career in Italy.
Great Italian art also was inspired by non-religious subjects drawn from history and mythology. But the other really distinctive thing about the Italian tradition was its humanist inspiration, the way it rediscovered the classical conception of the ideal body as a metaphor for human dignity; for it was the humanist, ideal body that supplied the figures that compose Renaissance and baroque narrative painting. Much of the greatest Italian art arises from this synthesis of religious feeling and humanism.
The Dutch did not share this vision of the human body as beautiful and noble. They were interested in individuals and thus developed an extraordinary tradition of portraiture, but they had no interest in the body in general. That is why there are virtually no nudes and, when they do appear, they are ugly and graceless. The Protestant body, ridden with guilt, is never beautiful.
For the same reason, the erotic pleasure of Italian art is unthinkable: there can be subtle images of interaction between men and women, as in some of Vermeer’s paintings, but sexuality is usually buffoonish or vulgar. Even Rembrandt’s etching of a couple in bed together, while artistically remarkable, is clumsy and pathetic rather than in any way seductive or erotic.
Dutch art is thus crucially limited in these respects, but it compensates by its insatiable interest in the visible world. Landscape has already been mentioned, and still life is a genre that is virtually created, in its mature form, at this time. Themes of mortality, the passing of time and the vanity of earthly things are unmistakeable in several of these pictures, but it is facile to conclude that the genre can be reduced to the memento mori or the vanitas theme.
In reality, the reflection on mortality arises out of a more primary response of appetite and pleasure in the world of the senses — whether delight in the luxuriance of flowers, the harmonies of musical instruments or the smells and flavours of food.
At the heart of the genre of still life is a fascination with the way that exquisitely refined visual depiction also can evoke in us echoes and memories of all the other senses. And that is why complex still-life compositions are often conceived as images of the five senses.
But that pleasure forces us to meditate on how fleeting and even illusory the world of the senses is. And because all of those sensations and pleasures pertain to the desires and appetites of the finite individual, indeed to the sensations and instincts of the body, the corollary of any reflection on ephemeral pleasure is a recognition of the ephemeral self.
Vermeer’s beautiful Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, already mentioned, forces us to reflect on such questions of genre because, as the representation of an anonymous figure, it is not really a portrait but a kind of narrative picture, infused, however, with a way of looking at the world that is akin to that of still life. Vermeer’s paintings, indeed, not only embody an extraordinary attention to the world of appearance but often, as in this case, have attention itself as their central theme.
Much has been speculated about Vermeer’s use of instruments such as the camera obscura, but without always understanding these tools adequately. The striking perspectives of his pictures, especially the bold foregrounds that create depth, are essentially the result of fixing the eye’s viewpoint and preventing it from refocusing on things situated at different distances, forcing it in effect to see everything further off projected on to the plane of the foreground.
This what film directors or cameramen do when they look a location through a lens, and we can do it in a more rudimentary way by framing a view with our fingers or using a viewfinder to flatten objects in space into a composition. As I argued recently, Vermeer could have followed the instructions published by Jean Dubreuil in La Perspective pratique (1642), using a small viewfinder to keep the position of the eye constant and tracing the scene on a sheet of glass.
There are some fine portraits in the exhibition, most often representing their sitters in the characteristic black suits and white collars or lace that befitted the austere tastes of Protestant culture but were in no sense economical, since the processes of dying wool jet black and bleaching linen snow-white were long and costly. The most bravura treatment of the black and white costume is in the small and exquisite self-portrait of Karel Dujardin. Nearby is a fine picture of Maria van Oosterwijck, which could easily be mistaken for a self-portrait, for the sitter is a painter and holds a palette, as so often in self-portraits, loaded with the colours in which the picture has been painted.
The exhibition is elegantly laid out and designed, and a central room is devoted to Rembrandt. There is a fine selection of etchings and drypoints, including several famous images as well as the great Sacrifice of Isaac, but also effectively chosen to represent the use of different techniques as well as the remarkable changes that Rembrandt could make between states: look at the reworked The Three Crosses, for example, where among many other changes one of the foreground figures disappears and a figure on horseback on the left is replaced with a rearing riderless horse in the storm of black light that pours down on the scene.
Both Rembrandt’s early virtuoso style and his late roughly painted manner are represented, but the room is easily dominated by his Self-portrait (1661). Rembrandt painted a greater number of self-portraits than the whole extant oeuvre of Vermeer — not to mention the many etched studies of his own features — and this corpus represents the greatest and most searching study of the self and its various poses and disguises in the history of art.
By this time of this painting, however, after his virtual bankruptcy and many other personal trials, there is no more room for acting. There is simply a man looking at his own features, worn by age and suffering but miraculously translated, through an unprecedented mastery of the materiality of oil paint, into a simulacrum that still speaks to us viscerally centuries after the disappearance of the artist.
Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Until February 18.
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