AR102: ART HISTORY 2

Humanity With Flaws Forgiven

By: Michael Kimmelman

The New York Times, January 28, 2005

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HE woman, hand to chest, leans a little forward, head turned and tilted, lips slightly parted, liquid eyes gazing into the ether. She is dressed in a dark, fur-lined cloak that reveals a peek-a-boo white chemise; a robe sewn with gold is draped over her right shoulder and it glints, like the gold fillet in her hair. Her round, pretty face is a little puffy and sad, and she seems oblivious of us. But she is no doubt alert to the painter, her lover, whose gifts are so surpassing that simply by virtue of being the object of his devotion she looks divine.

This is a portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt's companion. In the little Rembrandt show opening Sunday here at the National Gallery, the picture is tentatively identified (with a question mark after the title) as ''The Sorrowing Virgin.''

The Sorrowing Virgin, 1660

Had he been a poet instead of a painter, Rembrandt would have seduced countless women with his love sonnets. Every lover would have believed him when he wrote yet another poem that swore undying devotion to her unrivaled feet and peerless earlobes.

His portraits convey pretty much the same message, after all. Each one says: ''Here, stripped bare, is the true essence of this person, the depth of his or her soul in paint. Have you ever met anyone so authentic and remarkable?'' Painting after painting makes that point. Rembrandt's touch was itself about his own individuality, suggesting the inimitability of his genius (never mind that his style was imitable enough for assistants and followers to flummox future generations of experts, and delight those who mischievously enjoy seeing other people's gold turn out to be brass).

Not everybody would want to be painted by Rembrandt—launched into posterity in such an eloquent brown fog, bearing the weight of the world on one's shoulders, looking watery-eyed and wrinkled. But it's flattering to think of yourself as the sort of person, spiritually speaking, that Rembrandt concocted: soulful, substantial. Every Dutch burgher became a saint in his hands. My favorite Rembrandt portraits may be a pair of pictures in London, the ones of Jacob Trip and his wife, Margaretha de Geer, at the National Gallery there. Trip was a Dordrecht mining honcho and an arms dealer, rich as Croesus. In his portrait, he looks like the aged Moses leaning on a cane instead of a staff.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., the curator of this focused gem of an exhibition, contemplated including the Trip portrait, which was painted sometime around 1661. It would have joined 17 other works from the 1650's and 1660's, pictures late in Rembrandt's career (he died in 1669, at 63), which have mystified scholars.

They are paintings of Jesus, Mary and assorted evangelists, apostles and monks. Or some are. Others may be. Some look like ''portraits histories,'' commissioned portraits in which Rembrandt decked out his hoity-toity patrons as holy men and women. Some are clearly not commissioned portraits but models. We know this because the same face appears in different pictures, here as a St. Bartholomew, there as a St. Paul.

Portraits like the one of Stoffels are more ambiguous: an ''Apostle Bartholomew'' is so titled because the alert, heavy-lidded, mustachioed man with his hand to his chin staring melancholically at us, clasps a knife, the symbol of Bartholomew's martyrdom. But at one time this same painting was called ''Rembrandt's Cook,'' then ''The Assassin.''

Apostle Bartholomew, 1661

Cook, assassin, lover or the Virgin Mary? The first question is why Rembrandt, reared a Protestant, whose religious beliefs nonetheless remain largely unknown, would have painted saints and apostles at all. In Protestant Holland, Catholic religious orders and monasteries were banned. Reformationists regarded saints as needless intermediaries in the quest for salvation. For whom did Rembrandt paint these pictures? For himself? Did he have Catholic patrons, perhaps, outside Holland?

It's clear he was going through a bad patch at the time. The church condemned his relationship with Stoffels when she bore him a child out of wedlock in 1654. Debts forced him to auction off his house, his personal effects, his art collection, even his wife's grave. His style of painting also fell out of fashion in Amsterdam; young artists were deserting his brand of expressiveness. It's hard to know how much trouble Rembrandt really was in, whether he sheltered income from creditors, whether he still had assistants. He was commissioned to paint not just Trip's portrait but also the ''Syndics of the Drapers' Guild,'' so he was not without opportunities.

But in various ways, Rembrandt's difficulties might have caused him to identify with saints and apostles. His self-portrait as St. Paul, Mr. Wheelock speculates, is ''about the supremacy of grace over law'' and the notion of ''the great but flawed man who, saved by God's grace, reveals the power of the Christian faith to those struggling with their own human limitations.'' Rembrandt's Paul is not a sturdy and forbidding pillar of righteousness but a scruffy, ordinary old man, hapless, weak-chinned and quizzical, gazing at or just past us with arched eyebrows, crumpled brow, a big, fleshy nose and wild tufts of hair escaping from his turban: a humble Paul, on whom God happens to shines the bright, consoling light of grace.

Rembrandt's 1661 Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul

Perhaps Mr. Wheelock is right. It's as if Rembrandt, at odds with the law now, were saying the only law that matters ultimately is divine law. He's also admitting in this picture, ''I'm not perfect.''

The flawed humanity of his saints is the heart of the art, and what gives it spiritual truth. Plain sight suggests that some of the paintings might have been linked as a series because they're the same size. But others differ; their touch varies wildly—so much so that people might well wonder whether Rembrandt even did them all.

I prefer to flip the question: could any other artist have painted with such affective variety? Rembrandt by this stage knew how to do everything: how to scuff and scratch and scribble, where to leave passages rough, where to smoothen, how to telegraph forms, to hint at volumes, to paint thin and dry or thick and pasty. In a version of ''Apostle Paul,'' this one with a bearded model sitting before a table, hand to brow, rapt in thought, Rembrandt painted flesh tones as a thin layer over a warm primary. Then he suggested eyes, nose and beard without drawing any sharp contours, letting light sculpture the hair, skin and bone, a different tack from the one he took for ''Bartholomew'' or Stoffels or himself.

The Apostle Paul, c.1657

What's constant is the human aspect. It's what Rembrandt focuses our eyes on: on St. James's meaty hands; on Simon's long, rugged face, like a lumberjack's, brooding, his thumb casually hooked over the handle of the cross saw that is the instrument of his martyrdom; on the sad eyes of the man with the reddish mustache and bushy beard, a portrait that used to be called ''A Jewish Rabbi.''

Rembrandt's power was to show us ourselves in these portraits of holy men and women. Which is to say, the divine in us.