The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-10)

E6 PG EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022

Art

BY SEBASTIAN SMEE

R

embrandt van Rijn was

f amous, wealthy and gener-

ally in clover when he paint-

ed this majestic portrait that’s

now at the Norton Simon Museum

in Pasadena, Calif. It is, of course, a

self-portrait — a painting of the

“ugly and plebeian face by which

he was ill-favored,” as one early

Rembrandt chronicler, Filippo

Baldinucci, rather brutally put it.

I don’t know. With his black

beret, his gold chain (a clear mark-

er of prestige), and one hand neat-

ly slid inside his coat, I think he

looks pretty dashing. The pose —

clearly an Important Person’s Pose

— is likely a nod to Raphael’s

portrait of Baldassare Castiglione,

now in the Louvre. Rembrandt

had seen the Raphael when it

went to auction in Amsterdam. He

made a pen-and-ink sketch, and

proceeded to base several self-por-

traits on it, emulating the pose,

the black beret and the picture’s

general aura, which combines au-

thority with throat-catching ten-

derness.

There’s a slight irony in the

connection, since Castiglione

(1478-1529), a Renaissance diplo-

mat and courtier, wrote “The Book

of the Courtier,” which is pretty

much the last word in etiquette.

Enormously influential, it offered

a guide to a new, humanist form of

moral urbanity rooted in classical

education.

Rembrandt, especially in his

pomp, might have aspired to

match Castiglione’s model. But it

is not how others saw him. Baldi-

nucci (an Italian who never met

Rembrandt and was way off the

mark in many of his judgments)

described the Dutchman as “a

temperamental man” who

“ despised everyone” while

Joachim von Sandrart, another

early biographer, said Rembrandt

was “a most hardworking and in-

defatigable man” who, unfortu-

nately, didn’t know “how to keep

his station, and always associated

with the lower orders.”

These early reports were writ-

ten after Rembrandt’s death,

when Dutch art was reverting to

classical values: nature idealized,

decorum upheld, vulgarity dis-

dained. Rembrandt’s career rep-

resented a threat to all this. He

was seen, in the words of the art

historian Charles Ford, as “classi-

cism’s ‘other’: the self-made, self-

validating, craft-based painter for

profit.”

What’s more, he painted ugly

flesh, flabby bodies, unbeautiful

faces. He etched women urinating

and defecating among trees, rat

catchers, and monks fornicating

in cornfields. He saw “each sitter,”

wrote Kenneth Clark, “as an indi-

vidual human soul whose weak-

nesses and imperfections must

not be disguised, because they are

the raw material of grace.”

And of course, he turned this

same sensibility on himself. The

Norton Simon self-portrait is, on a

technical level, incredibly refined.

The costume, the jewelry, the dec-

orous pose are all conveyed with

superb dexterity, dazzling finesse.

But there, as always, is Rem-

brandt’s “raw” face, which all

those accoutrements set off, draw-

ing us in, like the cool smell of a

deep well as one approaches its

lip.

Up close, you can see how Rem-

brandt’s application of wet paint

over dry creates a texture, or

scumble, uncannily close to

h uman skin, with its pores and

subcutaneous blood vessels. Both

the red around his cheekbones

and the darker, green-tinged hue

of his shaved beard feel astonish-

ingly lifelike, as do the sagging

corners of his eyelids and his

wispy eyebrow hair.

When a portrait is that much

better than everything around it

(almost always the case with a

Rembrandt) its authority seduces

you into projecting states of mind

onto the subject’s expression.

What is Rembrandt here? Self-

assured? Vulnerable? He could be

almost imperceptibly wincing. Or

is it that he’s concealing a skeptic’s

amusement? (That minutely

raised eyebrow.)

But it might be better to aban-

don this fool’s errand. We might

abandon, too, the wafty, senti-

mental notion that Rembrandt is

“baring his soul.” (Who can even

agree on what that means?)

For me, Rembrandt’s self-

p ortrait is a case of maximum

aesthetic force and maximum em-

bodied awareness exerted in the

cause of maximum epistemologi-

cal uncertainty. The artist, in

o ther words, is asserting the

fierce, bewildering fact of his own

living presence and telling us,

with every power at his disposal,

that we’ll never, ever know him.

Rembrandt’s self-portrait

doesn’t let you in as much

as it makes you wonder

NORTON SIMON FOUNDATION

Rembrandt van Rijn (b. 1806)

Self-Portrait, c. 1636-1638

At the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif.

A series featuring art critic Sebastian Smee’s favorite works

in permanent collections across the United States

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