Few artists ever profit from overly awed responses, but there are those—Raphael, for instance, or Rothko—whose work contains an element that cries out for, and is somehow amplified by, idealisation. Rembrandt is the opposite. He had an almost animal thirst for the real, complemented by a maverick disregard for accepted conventions of visual beauty. In painting, in drawing and in printmaking, no artist has ever expressed more naturalness, which is why none is diminished quite as much by genius talk, by the kind of piety that short-circuits true feeling.
This is why, when I think of Rembrandt, I try to remember the drawings and etchings that, for centuries, many wished he had never made: the Woman Making Water and Defecating, for instance, or The French Bed, or the Monk in a Cornfield. "Une horreur artistique" was how the first of these, a simple depiction of a woman squatting outdoors, was described in a catalogue of Rembrandt's graphic work published in 1890. Even today, most surveys of Rembrandt omit all mention of it, as well as of prints such as Monk in a Cornfield, which shows a monk copulating vigorously with a nun.
Faced with Rembrandt's depictions of naked women got up as goddesses or biblical heroines, the poet Andries Pels (1631-81) wrote, with evident revulsion: "When he would paint a naked woman, as sometimes happened, he chose no Greek Venus as his model, but a washerwoman or peat-treader from a barn… Flabby breasts, wrenched hands, yes, even the marks of corset lacings on the stomach… must all be followed, or nature was not satisfied."
But such pictures, along with Rembrandt's The Rat Catcher, The Pancake Woman and his old man pissing into the soil are inseparable, in the end, from his more famous subjects—Dr Tulp and the students in his anatomy class, Jesus being lowered from the cross, and David playing the harp for Saul. Relieving oneself into the dirt and being lowered from the cross are all of a piece, Rembrandt keeps on reminding us, and we would do well to meditate on the fact. Piety be damned.
Unfortunately, an anniversary is a time when hagiography tends to triumph over cooler consideration. This year, the 400th since Rembrandt's birth, the Netherlands is hosting what amounts to a Rembrandt love-in: exhibitions, activities and gimmicks, all blessed by the Dutch tourism industry. The exhibitions are too numerous to list but I have counted at least 15 of them.
The 300th anniversary of Rembrandt's death was celebrated 37 years ago with a comparable spate of exhibitions and publications. Reviewing nine new books for the New York Review of Books at the time, Ernst Gombrich noticed an excess of genius talk in much of the writing, but also its inevitable by-product—some energetic debunking. None of it seemed to have much bearing on the Rembrandt Gombrich knew. But the debunking had a big effect on Rembrandt scholarship over the next three and a half decades, for at its pointy end was an updating of the standard edition of Rembrandt's paintings which relegated 56 out of 630 paintings to an appendix of "unacceptable pictures." And the updated catalogue cast doubt on the authorship of many others. In the intervening years, scores of scholars, many under the aegis of the Rembrandt Research Project, have been caught up in questions of attribution and connoisseurship, despite Gombrich's warnings about the limits of both.
Who can say where exactly these decades of ever-intensifying scrutiny have got us? It is fascinating to learn that variants of Rembrandt's self-portraits painted by others "are often more 'Rembrandtesque' than Rembrandt's own self-portraits." But what, finally, are you to do with such information when actually looking at Rembrandt's work? The point is Rembrandt, though not averse to other kinds of showing off, simply wasn't interested in the delights of attractively applied paint or in the seductions of virtuosity. Instead, he is interested in specifics. Nothing goes unnoticed. No detail is too small if it helps to convey the significance of that moment, the immediacy of this sitter.
"Rembrandt is in the details," wrote the art critic Peter Schjeldahl. "The quality for which he is inevitably praised, 'humanity,' is too nebulous. 'Personality' is more like it. Intimate with both subject and viewer, he dissolves emotional distances." Tracing the development of Rem-brandt's oeuvre, what is perhaps most fascinating is the gradual shift that took place in the way he approached the business of dissolving these distances. The shift is easiest to trace in the drawings, but it comes through in the paintings as well. Early in his career, Rembrandt was taken up with dramatic gestures and extremes of facial expression. In characteristic baroque fashion, his figures seemed to create space by the energy of their own actions. As he got older, however, he began to dispense with these more theatrical gestures and to concentrate instead on the smallest nuances of expression.
The art historian David Rosand has shown how this change is reflected in the very marks Rembrandt made with his pen. Active diagonal thrusts and sweeping curves were gradually replaced by a more tectonic faceting of form. Rembrandt's lines became more respectful of the anchoring right angles of the picture plane. His circling pen, which once carved out space dynamically, was replaced by a sense of geometry that was nearly devoid of curves.
At the same time, the way Rembrandt's figures came to occupy this new kind of space changed profoundly, and here Rosand is so good that he needs to be quoted at length. Rembrandt's later protagonists, he writes, "seem reticent, reluctant to break the limits of their own enclosing contours, to violate the boundaries that define their central cores… Their subdued yet deeply affecting gestures are quite minimal; movement is no longer of the full arm but more usually of the hand alone… the most precise inflections of emotion are conveyed almost exclusively by the body, by the slight tilt of the head or shifting of weight—achieved by a single modifying stroke of the pen… Space is emotionally charged not by the grand gesture addressed to the multitude but rather by these quietly inflected, tentative efforts at personal, intimate contact. Proximity itself, expectant, latent with imminent possibility, acquires a weighted poignancy. Movement does not come easily; to realise itself, to give outward expression to inner feeling, it seems at times to have to overcome enormous inertia, psychic as well as physical."
What is the series of self-portraits, after all, if not a gradual coming to terms with the inertia, both psychic and physical, that stems from occupying the same body over so many years? These are paintings deeply involved in what it feels like to be approaching the end of something.
From so many of Rembrandt's late portraits, you get a sense of the drama of life draining from the features of his sitters' faces. Combined with an extraordinary feeling of duration—of what it might be like to sit and be studied, sympathetically, over many long hours—this sense of drama and artifice quietly leaking away accounts for the sensation of truth that comes off Rembrandt's portraits. Schjeldahl was right: Rembrandt did dissolve emotional distances in a way that no other artist has ever matched. But he also—heartbreakingly—insisted on those distances. The sensation of truth in his greatest work derives in part from his finely calibrated awareness of the distance that separates us from each other, even given the greatest intimacy, the deepest reserves of sympathy.
