Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [42]
Comparing an early and late self-portrait shows the change from fine detail to bolder strokes. In the first, done when Rembrandt was about 23, he used Caravaggesque lighting, with one side of the face in deep shadow. He paid as much attention to superficial costume detail (see the rivets on his iron collar) as to character traits. In the later self-portrait, when Rembrandt was 54, the inner man was the focus, conveyed through freer application of paint.
Rembrandt, “Self-Portrait,” c. 1629-30, Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Rembrandt, “Self-Portrait,” 1660, MMA, NY.
VERMEER: MASTER OF LIGHT. Called the “Sphinx of Delft” because of the mystery about his life, the painter Johannes Vermeer (1632 — 75) is now considered second only to Rembrandt among Dutch artists. He remained in his native city of Delft until he died bankrupt at the age of 43, leaving a widow and eleven children. His surviving paintings are few, only thirty-five to forty. Perhaps he never painted more, for no painter until Ingres worked so deliberately.
And no painter except perhaps van Eyck was as skillful as Vermeer in his masterful use of light. While other artists used a gray/ green/brown palette, Vermeer’s colors were brighter, purer, and glowed with an intensity unknown before.
Besides his handling of color and light, Vermeer’s perfectly balanced compositions of rectangular shapes lend serenity and stability to his paintings. A typical canvas portrays a neat, spare room lit from a window on the left and a figure engrossed in a simple domestic task. But what elevates his subjects above the banal is his keen representation of visual reality, colors perfectly true to the eye, and the soft light that fills the room with radiance. His pictures contain no central anecdote, passion, or event. The soft, buttery — almost palpable — light roaming over various surfaces is his true subject.
Vermeer used a “camera obscura” to aid his accuracy in drawing. This was a dark box with a pinhole opening that could project an image of an object or scene to be traced on a sheet of paper. Yet Vermeer did not merely copy the outlines of a projected scene. His handling of paint was also revolutionary. Although in reproduction the brushstrokes appear smooth and detailed, Vermeer often applied paint in dabs and pricks so that the raised surface of a point of paint reflected more light, giving vibrancy and a sense of rough, three-dimensional texture. His technique was close to the pointillism of the Impressionists. One critic described his paint surface as “crushed pearls melted together. ”
Vermeer, “The Kitchenmaid,” c.1658, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Vermeer’s true subject was light and its effect on color and form.
In “The Kitchenmaid,” his method of defining forms not by lines but by beads of light was evident, especially around the rim of the milk pitcher, a mosaic of paint daubs. Vermeer was also a master of varying the intensity of color in relation to an object’s distance from the light source. The crusty bread picks up the strongest light and reflects it, through precise touches of impasto (or thickly applied paint). Almost too attentive to detail, Vermeer, to avoid monotony on the whitewashed wall, even adds stains, holes, and a nail. The composition is so balanced and cohesive that removing just one of the elements would threaten its stability. Although the painting is devoid of dramatic incident, the maid’s utter absorption in her task gives her work an air of majesty. As one critic said of Vermeer, “No Dutch painter ever honored woman as he did.”
WHO WERE THE OLD MASTERS?
Besides the group portrait on the Dutch Masters cigar box, is there any agreement on