Rembrandt was renowned for his masterful use of light and dark contrasts, and the precise proportions in his paintings and etchings. Now a British artist claims the 17th century painter likely used combinations of mirrors and lenses to project images onto a drawing surface to create them—especially his famous self-portraits. It’s the latest volley in a longstanding debate about the possible use of optical aids by Renaissance artists.

“The evidence suggests [Rembrandt] used lenses,” said Francis O’Neill, lead author of a new paper in the Journal of Optical Physics. “The similarity of his images to projections, in their lighting and soft focus, along with the use of lens technology by his peers and fellow artists, and the contemporary literature on the subject, all support this.”

O’Neill had just completed his foundational art courses several years ago when he decided to spend a month in Europe, visiting all the big galleries. He was particularly impressed with the works of Rembrandt, especially the small, jewel-like self portraits. They were so detailed, with such rich textures and well-controlled proportions, that O’Neill couldn’t help wondering how Rembrandt had managed the feat.

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Back in England, he happened upon a BBC program about David Hockney’s book, Secret Knowledge. Hockney had broached a controversial theory that some early Renaissance painters, including the 15th century Dutch Master Jan van Eyck, used optical devices to achieve certain ultra-realistic effects in their paintings, particularly when it came to perspective.

Hockney partnered with University of Arizona optics professor Charles Falco to analyze key measurable distortions in early paintings he saw as providing strong evidence for his theory.

For instance, in Lorenzo Lotto’s late Italian Renaissance painting Husband and Wife (circa 1543), the geometric keyhole pattern of the carpet loses focus as it recedes into the painting, and there are two vanishing points in the detail of the fabric’s border. Had linear perspective been used, the pattern would have receded in a straight line. Instead, there is a kink in the pattern, which then continues in a slightly different direction.

Hockney and Falco see this as evidence that Lotto used a lens to project and trace the pattern of the cloth, but then found he could not keep it all in focus at the same time. So he refocused the lens to complete the back portion of the cloth, changing the vanishing point.

It proved to be a controversial thesis, and the debate is ongoing. But Hockney didn’t think such methods would work in the case of self-portraits. The artists of the Baroque era who used optical aids would have relied on a camera obscura effect, requiring the subject of a painting to be in a brightly lit room, with the artist sitting in a dark room. This would be impossible for a self portrait—how could the artist be in both light and dark rooms at the same time? O’Neill eventually realized it was possible to see projections on metallic surfaces, and that Rembrandt had done some of his earlier etchings on copper plates.

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So O’Neill bought a cheap ladies’ compact mirror—the kind with both a curved and flat mirror—and found he could, indeed, project an image of his face onto a crinkly sheet of aluminum while hovering in a doorway to partially shade himself from sunlight. “As I started to understand how it worked, it was easy to do the etching type of projections on copper, because copper is very reflective,” he told Gizmodo.

Like Hockney, he enlisted the aid of an optics expert to further test his hypothesis: physicist Sofia Palazza Corner, who co-authored the paper. They figured out five possible setups by which Renaissance artists might have made projections for tracing, using different combinations of mirrors and lenses.

A thorough review of 17th century literary sources revealed that Rembrandt likely would have known about such lenses and experimented with them. Small pocket mirrors and spectacles first appeared towards the end of the 13th century. Hockney reasoned Van Eyck and his contemporaries most likely owned such “mirror lenses” and might have used them in their work.

The use of such a setup would also explain the unusual off-center focus of the eyes in Rembrandt’s self portraits. “It’s impossible to make a self portrait [in that pre-photography age] if you’re not looking at a flat mirror,” said O’Neill. “Whereas this system always requires you to look just slightly to the side, because that’s where the [projected] image is.”

One of the fiercest critics of Hockney’s and Falco’s thesis has been David Stork, who somewhat predictably pops up in the New York Times article about O’Neill’s paper citing brush strokes as counter evidence.

“If the artist is painting over it with downward strokes, then when you take the paintings and turn it right side up, all those brushstrokes would go upward,” he told the New York Times. “But in every Rembrandt, not a single brushstroke goes in that direction.”

Not surprisingly, both O’Neill and Falco dismiss Stork’s critiques. O’Neill, as an artist himself, scoffs at the notion that brush strokes should all go in one direction. Furthermore, he and Falco both point out that is highly unlikely that Renaissance artists would have created full paintings by tracing the projections with a paintbrush.

Rather, for portraits, an artist would probably have used the projection to capture just the critical details—the corners of the eyes and mouth, points of perspective, blocks of color—then turned the painting right side up to complete it without projection. “Even if an artist did a good amount of painting directly from the projections, when he turned it over to finish it a lot of work still remains to be done at that point,” Falco told Gizmodo. “So early brush strokes almost certainly would end up being covered by later ones.”

O’Neill’s work has certainly gained gained Falco’s approval. “The optical setups the authors propose are reasonable ones and could certainly work in the way described,” he said. “It’s not surprising that the lead author of the paper is an artist, not an art historian, since artists are immersed in matters of technique, and so are particularly open to making findings like this.”

As for O’Neill, he said, “I think we’ve got proof beyond reasonable doubt.”

[Journal of Optical Physics]

The Morgan Library and Museum is showing Rembrandt’s Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver and an assortment of etchings and preparatory studies in an exhibit it has titled Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece. Part of a private collection in Great Britain, it’s a rare treat for Judas to be exhibited, and rarer still for it to be in the United States. It’s well worth a trip to the Morgan.

Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver was painted in 1629 when Rembrandt was twenty-three years old. The title of the exhibit is based on the premise that this is the first painting by Rembrandt that demonstrates the traits that we associate with his mature style, such as the strong use of chiaroscuro and the expressive use of light. For me, the exhibit resonates with Rembrandt’s great humanity and the power of his visual expression achieved through composition and light. The studies for Judas that are included in the show testify to the deliberateness with which Rembrandt designed his paintings.

Rembrandt portrays a penitent Judas on his knees before the high priests in the temple. His hands are tightly clasped in a pleading gesture, his clothes torn open and his breast exposed, his scalp bleeds from tearing out his hair, his facial expression one of unimaginable woe and deep suffering. The thirty pieces of silver lay on the floor before him where he cast them. Judas’s eyes seem shut in agony, tears escaping them as he inclines his head toward the money that symbolizes his guilt. He is the very picture of remorse. The temple elders react with disgust, curiosity, shock, and perhaps from two at the very back, a little sympathy. The high priest looks away and holds his hand out in revulsion. To the left of the composition, a temple elder is seated in the foreground, his back to the viewer silhouetted by the light falling on the table in front of him. On that table is a large open book, presumably the Hebrew Bible, on which the strongest light of the painting falls. A cast shadow from this figure extends across the entire foreground. Just behind this cast shadow are the thirty pieces of silver in a pool of light. Moving left to right across the composition we come to Judas. He is not the brightest point in the painting; the strongest contrast brings our eye to the open book. However, the book is the beginning of a curvilinear flow that takes our eye from it along the bent backs of the two elders leaning forward to the standing elder with the tall hat, down along the high priest’s outstretched hand and then down along Judas’s back. The cast shadow in the foreground brings us back to the book where we start the visual journey again. Two large columns, one heavily decorated, provide some vertical stability.

To the far right we glimpse two men coming up a dimly lit stairwell. One of the figures appears older and bent as if the climb is a strain. Possibly, he is leaning forward to catch a glimpse of the drama going on ahead of him. The angle of his bent back creates an implied diagonal line to where Judas’s brown robe hangs off his arm, neatly knitting together the composition. That bent back manages to simultaneously create a compositional device that also lends human verisimilitude to the image.

Rembrandt designed the painting with radial balance. All the curvilinear lines flow to Judas. Most painters make the focal point the brightest point in the image, but Judas is half in darkness. Rembrandt is subtle and was perhaps using the light symbolically as well as expressively. The bible is the metaphorical source of light. Is the silhouetted elder in the foreground a barrier that partially excludes Judas from that divine light, or a simple pictorial device? Rembrandt designed the architecture of his image in blocks of light and dark, but he is able to manipulate the design for both visual and conceptual purposes. He used similar lighting scenario for The Supper at Emmaus painted during the same period. Rembrandt painted Christ silhouetted by a light that conceals his identity, though more from the viewer than his disciple. In both cases, the light has a strong visual impact, and also a narrative and thematic implication as well.

Rembrandt plays the fine rendered details like a melody over the rhythm of the larger chiaroscuro structure. The painting is only about 31 x 40 inches. The heads are relatively small, and the amount of detail he paints in the turban of the high priest is absolutely stunning. We may think of Rembrandt as a painter of painterly life-size portraits, but this exhibition demonstrates he was a master miniaturist as well. Also in the exhibit is his etching and drypoint Self Portrait in a Cap, Wide Eyed and Open Mouthed from 1630. I know this piece well from reproduction, but I had no idea it was only about 2 by 1? inches. It is simply stunning. I think my expression looking at it must have mirrored his own.

Also in the exhibition is an etching Christ Disputing with the Doctors/Small Plate. It’s about 4 x 3 inches and has a remarkably similar composition to Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver. Hanging nearby is the Hundred Guilder Print. They demonstrate how Rembrandt sets his stage with light. Light and drama are hallmarks of Baroque painting, echoes of Caravaggio’s innovations spreading throughout Europe. What makes Rembrandt unique is he sees not only the dramatic visual possibilities of light, but he also understands the expressive potential. It was years after Judas before he fully realizes that potential, but the beginnings are there. The amount of emotional intensity expressed by Judas reveals Rembrandt the psychologist, the painter of the soul. Also in the exhibit are two states of his etching Christ Presented to the People from 1655. In the eighth state of the plate, Rembrandt removes the crowd in the foreground we see the first state and replaces them with two massive arches above the dungeon windows. This simplifies the foreground, putting far more of the dramatic emphasis on Christ. Rembrandt clearly designed his compositions with a keen awareness of the abstract arrangement of the shapes and values, but is equally aware of the narrative and dramatic implications of their placement.

The subject of Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver is another indication that Rembrandt is an unusual artist. It is a scene rarely depicted in art. Why did he choose it? Judas is not portrayed with disgust, hatred, or antipathy of any sort. He is not the villain. Rembrandt makes us feel sympathy for the sinner, one of the most reviled individuals in Christianity. It is a profound meditation on forgiveness and remorse created by an artist who lived in a time of both deep faith and sectarian warfare. The Crucifixion scene is usually the big subject for portraying the forgiveness of God. Rembrandt confronts people of faith with quite another scene, and the challenge of living by the words of their savior. Can they forgive the remorseful Judas?

Rembrandt was only twenty-three. It’s a very complex image on every level for such a young artist. He was far more educated than the typical artist of that period, and it comes through in a work like Judas. He designed his painting with a big idea in mind and found the visual language to serve that idea. It is not only the quality of painting and design that comes through in this work; it is the quality of his mind and the nature of his heart.

Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece continues through September 18, 2016 at the Morgan Library & Museum.

The Screaming Child

A Remarkable Rembrandt Wash Drawing

The toddler is absolutely furious. Livid with impotent rage, he is being removed indoors from his games and friends by his resolute mother. Whether he was misbehaving, or it was beginning to rain, or it was just time for dinner, we will never know. But we do know his anger. With arms thrashing and legs kicking hard enough to knock one of his little shoes flying, he clenches the fingers of his left hand in a gesture usually reserved for crucifixion scenes, and lets out an ear-piercing scream.

We feel for his mother. Brow knit, with her body centered and her weight moving forward, she does what mothers have to do, and have always had to do, and the child’s tantrum will be no match for her resolution. She will prevail.

But in the meantime, she has to suffer the criticism of a sententious elder who, standing just inside the doorway, shakes her finger and offers advice as to how things were done in her day. And to top it all off, the child’s friends and/or siblings are assembled in the doorway, cackling at this humiliating affront, and perhaps as well at the fact that the toddler’s dress, in the course of his struggle with his mother, has gotten lifted up and has exposed his nakedness.

This scene, familiar to anyone who has ever raised children, was recorded in 1635 by Rembrandt, using his favorite bistre ink applied with both pen and brush. Rembrandt and his wife Saskia had just had a first child of their own, Rumbartus, who survived only for two months, so children were very much on the artist’s mind. As a matter of fact, so many of the drawings that Rembrandt produced during the later 1630s were of mothers and children, that one of his collectors, Jan van de Cappelle, assembled an album of over 135 drawings depicting the Lives of Women and Children by Rembrandt.1

Done on a piece of paper about 8 x 6 in., the drawing was probably executed in a matter of minutes. Up close, it is a flurry of lines, scratches, and a few simple washes of tone, but stand back and there are five human beings in a setting involved in a timeless drama. The visual information is delivered with a swiftness and vigor that is breathtaking. Look at the figure of the elder. The position of the head in relation to the shoulder lets you know that she is crouching down, insinuating herself between the head of the child and the head of the mother-, a visual equivalent of interfering. As your eye moves down the line of the right shoulder, Rembrandt’s pen stops and slightly hooks the line under to make a notation of where the shoulder ends and the upper arm begins. Continuing down, the sequentially cascading curved lines give you the flow of the folds of the drapery, but notice how he doesn’t neglect to give you several horizontal elliptical lines, denoting the cylindrical quality of the form of the arm underneath.

All of the lines in the drawing are infused with information. Look at all of the mouths, and see how simply and quickly Rembrandt establishes their facial expressions. With an upturned stroke of the pen, one character smirks; with a shorter diagonal stroke, another one’s mouth gets set in determination; and with a broad, fat horizontal mark, there is a gaping rictus.

With another few summary indications, Rembrandt frames the scene in a doorway, and positions the mother and child on center stage. A broad wash of shadow throws the other two children into the recess along with the shadow that the mother casts on the wall. Rembrandt makes you feel the weight of the child, because some of the darkest darks in the drawing surround his body, and darks are one of the ways we have to denote weight. You feel the mother’s strength because Rembrandt has reinforced the position of her feet with strong lines, and has anchored her body to the ground with a strong cast shadow. The mother needs her weight established, because the child’s arms and legs thrash about at different angles, like the spokes of a wheel that is about to start spinning.

Rembrandt drew a lot. We have over 1400 of his drawings extant, and there were certainly many more. You do not get to be this good without reams of paper behind you. You get the feeling that Rembrandt, like Leonardo before him, carried paper and pen around with him wherever he went-, that he was the man on the street with the sketchbook. In an age before the photograph, with none of the constant barrage of reproduced images from books, newspapers, magazines, billboards, television, and film, visual artists had to capture their own references. Part of studio practice was the building of an inventory of studies which could serve as references for subsequent paintings. Our child’s face will reappear later that year on the terrified boy in The Rape of Ganymede, this time, the insistent mother being metamorphosed into the libidinous Zeus in the form of a giant eagle.2 But to Rembrandt, who always strove for the emotional reality of every subject, the observation of a child being carried away, was certainly to be of value, be it for a Ganymede or a Massacre of the Innocents.

This drawing is a miracle. There is so much knowledge and feeling in every line and touch. How could Rembrandt have drawn all this so quickly? It happens too fast to think everything through on a conscious level. He is making crucial split--second decisions as he goes along. While he was studying the mother’s face, trying to get her exact expression, he must have seen the shoe go flying out of the corner of his eye, and remembered it for later, because the shoe would have hit the floor before he could even have gotten his pen out of the inkwell. A lesser artist wouldn’t have noticed it, or having noticed it, wouldn’t have felt its importance and would have left it out.

A drawing like this involves seeing, reacting, and remembering. With the pen in continual movement, the drawing embodies a seamless coordination of hand, eye, mind, and heart. The result is a statement that comes out of time, across time, a message to us of continuity and sympathy from the seventeenth century.

Notes

1. For a discussion of this and other Rembrandt drawings in their larger art-historical context, see Julia Lloyd Williams, Rembrandt’s Women, the catalog for one of the most moving Rembrandt shows I have ever seen.  (New York: Prestel, 2001): 129–-33.
2. Kenneth Clark, An Introduction to Rembrandt (London: John Murray, 1978): 44–-6.

   Goya, Rembrandt and R. Crumb all part of Seattle Art Museum exhibit

   The Graphic Masters exhibit — featuring the works of Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Goya, Picasso, R. Crumb — is open through Aug. 28 at SAM.
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   By Michael Upchurch
   Special to The Seattle Times

   When a Seattle-area art collector purchased a first edition of Francisco Goya’s print cycle, “Los Caprichos,” last year and agreed to lend it to the Seattle Art Museum, SAM curator Chiyo Ishikawa knew she had a cornerstone on which to build a major exhibit.

   In “Graphic Masters: Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Goya, Picasso, R. Crumb,” she focuses on six towering peaks from the graphic-arts mountain range and gives each artist ample room to be himself. (The one exception: Rembrandt, represented by just six prints.) The pleasure of this finely mounted show — and there’s plenty of pleasure to be had — is in seeing how distinctive different artists’ voices can be using only lines and shading (the definition of “graphic art,” whether it’s printmaking or pen and pencil put to paper).

   Albrecht Dürer’s cycle of woodcuts, “The Large Passion” — on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art — takes viewers through the stages of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection in painstaking detail. Within the cycle, there’s a compositional evolution at work. The first seven woodcuts, created in 1497-1499, are jampacked with action; the last four, created 1510-1511, are airier, showing an Italian influence on the German artist after his travels there. (Note: Dürer’s most famous engraving, “Knight, Death and the Devil,” from 1513, is also on display.)
   Exhibition review
   “Graphic Masters: Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Goya, Picasso, R. Crumb”

   10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Mondays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays, through Aug. 28. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., Seattle; $12.95-$19.95 (206-654-3100 or www.seattleartmuseum.org).

   William Hogarth’s “The Harlot’s Progress” (1732) and “The Rake’s Progress” (1735) depict innocents heading for debauched ruin. Hogarth’s take on the nefarious types corrupting them is so cutting and his etching-and-engraving technique is so virtuosic that you can’t help delighting in these moralistic tales of doom.

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   “Los Caprichos,” however, is the riveting heart of the show. Its 80 prints, first published in 1799, make you feel you’re plumbing the unconscious of a whole nation: Inquisition-era Spain.

   Goya combined different methods — etching, aquatint, drypoint — to create these extraordinary images. In them, the everyday world is closely observed, turned upside and used as a springboard into hallucinatory realms.

   Fate is pictured as a satyr slinging his victim around in “Ups and Downs.” Donkeys ride their masters in “You Who Cannot.” Amiable demons fondly groom each other in “They Spruce Themselves Up.” An older witch gives a younger witch broom-riding lessons in “Pretty Teacher!”

   In several images, key figures are “spot-lit” while their companions occupy gray limbos. The sheer variety of ways that Goya contorts and configures his human and phantasmagorical subjects is exhilarating.

   Two prints of “You Will Not Escape” — one from the 1799 edition, one from a SAM-owned 10th edition — make clear how much more crisp and kinetic energy the first printing was, and how lucky we are to get a look at it.

   The “Vollard Suite” of Pablo Picasso — consisting mostly of etchings — is more scattershot in style and quality, but includes some masterpieces. The mood ranges from sexual bedlam to peaceful pagan idyll. In “Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman” (1933), fairy-tale enchantment and erotic menace grow indistinguishable. “Boy and Sleeping Woman by Candlelight” is more innocently intimate.

   R. Crumb, the legendary comic-book artist of the 1960s, is represented by his unlikely 2009 project: “The Book of Genesis.” (“All 50 Chapters,” the title page shouts. “Nothing Left Out!”)

   In 207 ink drawings on paper, Crumb takes you on a wild and gritty word-for-word tour of the first book of the Old Testament. A surly God, sporting an ankle-length beard, chides and punishes his human creations. Battles, banishments, begettings and betrayals are the name of the game.

   Crumb’s handling of the post-flood exit from Noah’s Ark and his depiction of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt leave you in no doubt that he belongs in this august company.
   Michael Upchurch: www.michaelupchurch author.com