Rembrandt's influences
Roger Kimball on a recent breathtaking exhibition in New York In Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot famously criticised
our tendency to insist, when we 'praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, espe- cially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be iso- lated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
The same argument goes for other arts. Perhaps the chief virtue of Eliot's essay was to remind us of how superficial and artisti- cally limiting the Romantic cult of novelty can be. The pretence that the traditional is the enemy rather than the presupposition of originality devalues art's chief source of pertinence: its continuity with the past. Anyone looking for evidence of this does not have far to seek. A quick glance around our culture shows that the avant-garde assault on tradition has long since degener- ated into a sclerotic orthodoxy. What established taste-makers now herald as cut- ting-edge turns out time and again to be a stale remainder of past impotence. It is one of history's ironies that Romantic fervour regularly declines into antic murmurs. Most of the really invigorating action in the art world today is a quiet affair. It takes place not at the Tate — sorry, Tates — Whitechapel, or Hayward Gallery. It tends to involve not the latest thing, but perma- nent things. Permanent things can be new; they can be old, but their relevance is mea- sured not by the buzz they create but by silences they inspire.
I thought about this when visiting Rem- brandt and the Venetian Influence at Salan- der-O'Reilly Gallieries in New York (until 18 November). It is a small show, a baker's dozen of great paintings: a handful of Rembrandts — including the Metropoli- tan's magnificent 'Flora' (c.1654) — a `Lamentation' from Rembrandt's studio, three Titians, four Tintorettos and a Veronese. Lawrence Salander opens the catalogue with the Eliotian observation that 'somehow over the course of time it has become pejorative in the discussion of art to be influenced'. The purpose of this exhibition, he writes, is to challenge that assumption, `to illustrate that even at the highest level . . . artists have looked hard at other artists' work and taken what they needed to improve'.
Some things bear repeating. The fact that the mature Rembrandt was deeply influenced by 16th-century Venetian paint- ing — especially by Titian and Giorgione — wasn't new when Kenneth Clark pub- lished his classic study Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance in 1966. But many things that are not new are nonetheless noteworthy, and this exhibition is one of them.
Rembrandt never went to Italy. But Italy came to the prosperous art bourse of Ams- terdam in the form of what Clark described as 'almost unbelievable quantities' of paint- ings, drawings, etchings and prints. Many collectors benefited from the large supply. Some, including Rembrandt, over-benefit- Flora, by Rembrandt ed. His bottomless appetite for collecting art clearly contributed to his bankruptcy in the 1650s. An inventory of his possessions drawn up for the proceedings includes paintings ascribed to Raphael, Giorgione, Palma Vecchio, Jacopo Bassano, and many prints, including an album devoted almost entirely to Titian's work.
The Venetian influence pulses through Rembrandt's mature work; one sees it in poses, attitudes, gestures and overall effects. The catalogue for this show draws our attention to many parallels, including between Titian's famous 'Portrait of a Man' (so-called 'Ariosto'), c.1512, and Rcmbrandt's 1640 'Self-Portrait', both of which are in the National Gallery in Lon- don. You probably know the paintings. Both present a sitting figure in profile whose head has turned to meet the viewer's gaze; both employ the motif of a jutting right elbow, from which a quilted sleeve overhangs a wall or banister, thus protrud- ing from the confines of the picture plane to poach subtly on the viewer's space.
One sees also Titian's influence when comparing Rembrandt's Danae' (1636) and Titian's 'Venus and Cupid' (c.1550) or Rembrandt's 'The Slaughtered Ox' (1655) and Titian's 'The Flaying of Marsyas' (c.1570-75). (Although 'The Flaying of Marsyas' was in Amsterdam in 1655, it is not certain that Rembrandt saw it; what is certain is that he intuited its pictorial lessons.) And of course Rembrandt's great `Flora' is a direct homage to Titian's paint- ing of that symbol of fecundity in 1520.
But if one had to sum up what Rem- brandt took from Titian in a single word, one might hazard the imperative 'Simplify!' As Vasari noted, Titian's late works were `carried out in bold strokes, broadly applied in great patches in such a manner that they cannot be looked at closely but from a distance appear perfect'. Rem- brandt absorbed and emulated these painterly economies. One contemporary observed that, when seen up close, Rem- brandt's paintings 'looked as though the paint had been smeared on with a bricklay- er's trowel'. Rembrandt was perfectly aware of this. It is said that when visitors to his studio peered too closely at his work, he would pull them away, warning them that they wouldn't be able to stand the smell of the paint. We might conjecture that what Rembrandt couldn't stand was the specta- cle of his art being scrutinised rather than looked at. Inspecting the head of an urchin for lice requires one sort of attention; a painting requires a very different sort of acuity.
And that, perhaps, is the deeper lesson of this small but breathtaking exhibition. If the ostensible purpose was to put in a good word for 'tradition and the individual tal- ent', the lasting reward is to have provided us with the opportunity for witnessing that talent unfold in the overt acts of homage that characterise the humble confidence of true mastery.
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