REMBRANDT THE HOLY FAMILV, ST PETERSBURG PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED H.W. Janson, Form follows function- o-r does it? Modernist design themy and the histmy of art (The First Gerson Lecture, held on October 2, 1981) D. Freedberg, Iconoclasts and thei-r motives (The Second Gerson Lecture, held on October 7, 1983) C. H. Smyth, Repat-riation of art from the collecting jJoint in Munich afte-r WoTld Wa-r ff (The Third Gerson Lecture, held on March 13, 1986) A. Martindale, Hemes, ancesto-rs, Telatives and the biTth of the jJoTtmit (The Fourth Gerson Lecture, held on May 26, 1988) L. N ochlin, Bathtime: Reno iT, Cezanne, DaumieT and the p-ractices of bathing in nineteenth-century Fmnce (The Sixth Gerson Lecture, held on November 2 1, 1991) M. Warnke, Laudando Pmecipere, der Medicizyklus des Peter Paul Rubens (Der siebente Gerson Vortrag, am rS. November 1993 gehalten) EDITOR'S NOTE The 5th Gerson Lecture was held in 1989. Its final text was made available to the Gerson Lectures Foundation in 1991 . At that moment, an unhappy coincidence of circumstances made publication without further delay impossible. We regret the fact that we had to disappoint the supporters of ow- Foundation for such a long period. Now at last, we are able to publish this lecture, thanks to the generous sponsoring 'in kind' ofWaanders Uitgevers. The Fifth Gerson Lecture held in memoryofHorstGerson (1907-1978) in the aula of the University ofGroningen on the 16th ofNovember 1989 Egbert Haverkamp Begemann Rembrandt The Holy Family, St Petersburg Groningen T he Gerson Lectures Foundation 1995 l REMBRANOT The Holy Family, 1645 4 REMBRANDT THE HOLY FAMILY, ST PETERSBURG Horst Gerson was a remarkable art historian and a remarkable man. Of his qualities as an art historian I want to emphasise his courage in speaking his mind, and of his gifts as a human being his willingness to accept anyone without bias. Together these two characteristics inspired him to re-evaluate artists generally considered insignificant in all realms of Dutch painting. He recognised that many artists of Rembrandt's immediate circle were very talented indeed, and that they had been responsible fm many of the paintings that were considered Rembrandt's own works. Gerson was the first to have the courage to shatter the generally accepted image ofRembrandt, thereby generating disrespect and even anger. It is for me, therefore, a great pleasure to speak here in his honour, and to do so from the lectern where I saw Gerson give his inaugural lecture in 1965. When Professor Henk van Os invited me to give the Gerson lecture for 1g8g, he wondered whether in contrast to previous lectures I might like to concentrate on one specific painting.' I accepted the idea with pleasure, and suggested speaking about a painting by the artist who fascinated Gerson more than any other, and on a work of art that was central to other interests of Gerson as well. Rembrandt's Holy Family is one of the artist's paintings in the Hermitage (Fig.1) , and St Petersburg (then still Leningrad) played a significant role in Gerson's efforts to bring colleagues together. In the aftermath of the Second World War, reconnecting the historians of art was one of Gerson's goals. He transformed the Rijksbureau in The Hague into a centre for the study of the art of the Netherlands, and drew colleagues from all over, including Eastern Europe, into fruitful relationships. We know that scholarship can thrive only if opinions can be freely exchanged. Gerson made it happen, partly because of his visits to St Petersburg in the 1950s and 196os when contacts were still rare. Although Rembrandt's Holy Family recently became better known, largely because it was exhibited in Rotterdam ( 1985), New York and other cities in the United States ( 1988), it has not received the art historical-attention it deserves. 2 The painting, signed and dated 1645, is of average size - 117 x 91 cm. - com­ pared with his paintings of the same time. It is smaller than The Blinding of Samson of 1636 in Frankfurt but larger than The Holy Farnily of 1646 in Kassel. 5 ......... 2 REMBRANDT Baby sleefJing in a Cradle, c. 1 645 T he painting is in relatively good condition. The background and some dark areas, such as the costume of Joseph have been somewhat overpainted, but the lighter parts of the painting have not been seriously affected by re touching or darkenin g o f p aint. At present the contrasts in the painting are more striking than they were originally, partly because of the general dai-kening of dark pig­ ments and the retouching of the background, and also because varnish and grime have been removed from the light but not from the dark areas. Fundamental for an understanding of the painting is th e relationship between the reli gio us subject and everyday, generally known experiences. Rembrandt's efforts to convey the interest of his Virgin Mary in the C hrist Child as the care of any mother for the child she loves captivates everybody, as it did Fragonard when he freely copied this sectio n of the painting.3 That Rembrandt based his young mother o n observation may be sensed but cannot be proved. T his close link with reality seems confirmed, however, by Rembrandt's study of a baby in a cradle, so 6 3 REMBRANDT Holy Family with j1ainted Fmme and CuTtain, 1646 similar to that in the painting, and sketched in black chalk, a m edium he used almost exclusively for studies from life (Fig. 2) .'1Joseph, in the background, seems familiar to any Western audience as a carpenter because he carries out his craft just like any carpenter would. On the other hand, Rembrandt emphasises a group of angels descending from the upper left corner in an uncommon m anner. The question is whether the observations oflife Rembrandt emphasised h ave primary significance, and whether they relegate the religious or historical features to a secondary position, or whether Rembrandt used f eatures such as the relation­ ship between mo ther and child or the viewer's familiarity with the crib or the carpenter to represent the religious subject more compellingly and to expand its meaning. Recently, Wolfgang Kemp focused attention on the possible reasons under­ lying the juncture of these aspects in Rembrandt's Holy Family of 1646 in Kassel (Fig.g) . He emphasises three reasons: tradition, Protestantism, and patronage.5 7 .t' ' i J 4 REMBRAN D Tl T J.e Holy Fam-ily, c. 1645 8 Certainly such causes can be detected separately or jointly in some of Rembrandt's wOI-ks. However, we do not know anything about a commission for this work, and speculations in that respect run the risk of creating a deus ex rnachina to explain certain of the artist's concepts. Whatever effect Protestantism may have had on this painting seems intangible. Tradition, however, did shape some of its features, as we will see. To consider the relationship between the observation of everyday life and the definition of religious concepts as presented by Rembrandt in this painting, first other works by the artist might be examined. Among them , the drawing in Bayonne, although directly related to the painting, is not particularly helpful (Fig.4) 6 It is one of Rembrandt's few compositional studies for paintings, a sort of lay-out for the picture in which the three most important elements are placed next to each other o n the two­ dimensional surface without the suggestion of depth and with little detail. The most important ideas, however, are the same as those in the painting. Of great importance for a better understanding of Rembrandt's combining th e reli gious theme with elements observed from life, on the other hand, is the drawing from the Clarke Coll ection in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge that he probably made in the early 1640s (Fig.5).7 In this drawing, Rembrandt absorbed a number of traditional motifs, interpreting them in a fresh and lively manner.Joseph, prominent in the foreground and convincingly asleep, was often included in representations of the Holy Family. His slumber expressed fatigue as much as remoteness. We find him, for example, in Di.irer's drawing of the worldly Mary in her elegant surroundings,8 sitting at a table, asleep next to a pint of beer, and again in the famous painting by Orazio Gen tileschi in the Louvre, where he is shown lying down.9 Closer to home, Rubens included him sleeping near a tree in th e background of The Rest on the Flight intoEgyjJt of 1632/33 in the Prado, which is easier to see in the print after the painting made by Christoffe1Jegher.' 0 The sleeping Mary together with the sleeping Christ Child also belong to a long trad­ ition, of which Caravaggio's Rest on the Flight in the Galleria Doria is one of the high points.'' Remarkable, however, is that Rembrandt appears to be the only artist to represent all three members of the Holy Family asleep toge the r, as Sheila Schwartz has determined in a study she made of the iconography of the Rest on the Flight.'" I do not believe that there is a Mariological concept that would explain why the whole Holy Family has fall en asleep, or could have fa llen asleep ­ and thus be exposed to the dangers of the world. It is rather Rembrandt's person­ al interpretation (the drawing also contains a number of putti in the upper left, to be discussed later in connection with the angels in the Hermitage pain tin g) .