Last Post: Report on Rembrandt

When I mentioned that we had got into the Rembrandt show at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I said I'd report on it later. Well, I didn't get around to it while we were in Amsterdam, and now that we're at home again I'm pretty busy with other things, so I have made little progress. However, as a final post for this spring's travel, here are a few thoughts.

This year, every city, museum or other entity with a plausible connection to Leonardo da Vinci (the town of Vinci, the Uffizi and the Louvre museums, to name but three) is taking advantage of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's birth in 1519 and mounting shows of Leonardo's work. Even the small Verrocchio show at the Strozzi Palace in Florence, which I wrote about earlier, highlighted the small terra cotta Madonna and Child that is newly attributed to Leonardo, who worked in Verrocchio's atelier, while the Ambrosian Library in Milan was featuring Leonardo's Atlantic Codex.

Similarly, museums around the world are taking advantage of the 350th anniversary of the death of Rembrandt van Rijn to hold blockbuster shows, and the biggest shows (there will be a total of three by the time this year is over) are at the Rijksmuseum, which has the most comprehensive collection of Rembrandt work. The show we saw, "Alle Rembrandts," closes on June 10, to be followed in the fall by an exhibition combining Rembrandt and Velázquez and a summer show entitled "Long Live Rembrandt."

"Alle Rembrandts" is a massive show, with 22 paintings, 60 drawings and 300 prints, and they're all by Rembrandt-- no "workshop of," no "formerly attributed to," no "circle of."Everything is by the master, and it's amazing. Because I took courses in etching and intaglio back in the 1990s, I have some appreciation for the difficulty of, for example, successfully achieving really dark blacks, such as in this extremely dark etching (the darkest he ever made, which I've manipulated in hopes of making it decipherable here),

and of making beautiful lines with drypoint, as in this landscape, where the background is drawn so delicately the lines hardly show at this resolution. So the 300 prints were particularly fascinating to me;

but I was also impressed by the wall texts repeatedly pointing out Rembrandt's fascination with the lives of poor and common people and his many sketches and studies of them. I also enjoyed the pair of full-length portraits of a wealthy Flemish couple, he with enormous rosettes on his shoes (at right above). If you have the chance to go to Amsterdam in the next month, you'll have a treat. The show with Velázquez will doubtless be illuminating as well.