Figure 2. Neutronactivation autoradiographic
image of Rembrandt's Bellona, 1633. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In
this image the activated phosphor atoms (fr om
bone black) and mercury atoms (fr om vermil
ion, used on the figure'S mouth) have mainly
blackened the film.
Figure 3. The image of the autoradiograph
in Fig. 2 is mainly determined by the radia
tion from the copper atoms (fr om the blue
green parts in the painting) and ag ain the
mercury of the vermilion.
blacks. Passages painted with mixtures of these pigments are subtle in their
tonal values and graduations. Whenever it was necessary to achieve strong,
bright colors (i.e., red, yellow, and blue robes), it is clear that the passage
concerned was executed within carefully delineated contours in accordance
with a fixed recipe, involving a specific layering or a fixed type of under
painting. This also explains why these colors are usually absent from flesh
color palettes depicted in studio scenes and self-portraits.
That artists worked in this way during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
can easily be discerned from the paintings themselves. But did this practice
continue into the Baroque period? In the case of Rembrandt, this is by no
means self-evident. There were already indications, however, that Rembrandt
must have used this method; it has been observed that he completed his
paintings systematically from background to fo reground, passage by passage,
on the basis of a monochromatic underpainting (20). This does not necessarily
imply, however, that he did this using a restricted palette. An important piece
of evidence fo r that practice is supplied by scientific studies. It was the failure
of a reconstruction project that, in fa ct, fo rmed the seed of the study presented
here. The preparation of a dummy Rembrandt using all the procedures of
Rembrandt's studio that were known at the time was unsuccessful because
the painting was executed using a complete palette. All the pigments that
were in use during the seventeenth century were present on the palette and
they were mixed on the same mixing surface, which was cleaned at intervals.
Autoradiographic investigation of the dummy made it clear that the proce
dure used resulted in all the pigments being present to a greater or lesser
degree all over the painting. By contrast, autoradiography of Rembrandt's
actual paintings resulted in surprisingly "clean" images (Figs. 2, 3) (21).
In Rembrandt's painting, certain pigments occur only within clearly demar
cated zones, not in the rest of the painting. This observation is additionally
confirmed by studies of paint samples from Rembrandt's paintings, which
time and again reveal that only a limited number of pigments were used in
a given passage. The mixtures fo und usually consist of two to fo ur different
pigments; mixtures of five-or, in very exceptional cases, six-pigments are
fo und only incidentally (e.g., in flesh passages). To achieve the typically Ba
roque tonal unity using such methods implies a highly developed level of
"management" in the use of colors and tones. It is therefore no coincidence
that artists began theorizing about the nature of this "management" during
the seventeenth century. This was made clear by Paul Taylor's study of the
term houding (roughly, "disposition") that appears regularly in seventeenth
century sources (22). Until some time into the sixteenth century, the picture
space was still structured simply as a fo reground with a background or campo,
a concept on which Jeroen Stumpel performed an important study (23). The
idea denoted by the term houding was a far more complex one, however.
Seventeenth-century writers used houding to denote the spatial coherence
created in the painting by the disposition of tones and colors. The viewer
could "walk" through this space in his imagination. In a formulation by Wil
lem Goeree (1668), houding is (24):... that which binds everything together in a Drawing or Painting, which
makes things move to the fr ont or back, and which causes everything fr om
the foreground to the middle ground and thence to the background to stand
in its proper place without appearing further away or closer, and without
seeming lighter or darker, than its distance warrants; so that everything
stands out, without confusion, from the things that adjoin and surround
it, and has an unambiguous position through the proper use of size and
color, and light and shadow; and so that the eye can naturally perceive the
intervening space, that distance between the bodies which is lift open and
empty, both near and far, as though one might go there on foot, and
everything stands in its proper place therein.
When one considers how a painter would have been intensively concerned
with obtaining a good houding while at the same time working with selectivevan de Wetering 201