Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

Rembrandt’s younger contemporaries, Von Sandrart, Houbraken, Baldinucci, all wrote studies of his life. These were not motivated by a love of his pictures, but were rather an attempt to depict a curious instance, an example of “how not to go about it.” The list of his crimes was long, but the complaints against him were all strangely similar — along with his “ugly plebeian face” and the crooked letters of his signature, he was accused of what must surely follow from these basic flaws: a crooked sense of taste. A predilection for the creased, the wrinkled, and the dog-eared, the bedsore, the mark of a tightened belt on the skin, for anything that bore on it the imprint of life.

For his first biographers, Rembrandt’s unwillingness or inability to derive contentment from the best, the select, the exemplary — to know how “to distinguish and to choose from life the most beautiful of the beautiful” was a serious failing. It had to be explained in some way, best of all by his background, his education, and his resulting pigheadedness. The biographers (including Von Sandrart, who knew Rembrandt in life) also insist on his desire to model from nature, and as any event back then needed a precedent, they nod to Caravaggio, who was at the time the archsinner in this worship of nature.

I don’t know that it’s worth taking this too seriously: you don’t need much of a pretext if you’re bent on studying with nature, at her school of lifelong disintegration. However, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna there’s a work by Caravaggio that sends me straight back to Rembrandt, although the connection between them is a half rhyme at best. This work is “David with the Head of Goliath”: the fiery brightness of what stands out from the surrounding gloom only makes the arc of the composition more visible. The adolescent boy with his childishly plump cheeks balances the weight of the huge head of his vanquished foe. The color is already draining from the head, the jaw hangs slack, a tooth gleams in the light, and the eyes have neither light nor expression. The boy’s yellow trousers and white linen shirt are the same shades of color as the clothes in the famous 1658 self-portrait by Rembrandt, the cane in Rembrandt’s left hand is tipped with the same dull metal as the sword David rests across his shoulders. A yellow jerkin encloses Rembrandt’s chest like a cuirass and the folds of his shirt are escaping from under it, his heavy paunch is girdled with red, and the same red in the Caravaggio picture colors the strands of flesh that dangle from the dead man’s neck.

If you stare at David and his trophy for long enough, at the balance between the killer and the killed, the tender and the stiffening, the dimmed and the illuminated, between what you might simply call the rotting and the blooming, you discover that there is no difference between victor and vanquished. You might think that the whole and calculated construct of the painting is about this, but it is suddenly brought dramatically into focus when you realize that the living boy and the dead giant have the same face, that they are different stages of the same process, and a graphic example of all those “before and after” comparisons we are so used to seeing. It is thought that Goliath’s face is that of Caravaggio himself, and it becomes even more fascinating when you look across at the child and it occurs to you that it is in fact a double self-portrait.

At this moment the triangle (the two protagonists and you, the viewer) bends, breaks apart, becoming open-ended like a horseshoe: all the ages and changes in this face as it travels from beginning to end are compressed, hammered into its invisible curve. What I see is the literal expression of the classic perspective of “souls looking down at the body they have left behind.” The author (who offers for our view not a body, but bodies, the estranged and cooling corpus of a whole lived life) is in a strange place, equidistant from everything, and this position excludes him from any reckoning or choice. This might be the first example I know of an artist’s subject becoming not just the “I” as a result, but the “I” as a movement.

Art historians believe around eighty of Rembrandt’s self-portraits to be authentic (that is, attributed to Rembrandt, though occasionally with the assistance of members of his workshop), and fifty-five of these, or so I believe, are oil on canvas. This is a lot: a tenth of his whole prodigious output. Some of them are painted over other works in the absence of a ready canvas, forming a second layer of paint over the initial image. The already painted canvases were not necessarily Rembrandt’s own. This was recycling in its purest form and everything was reused — other people’s work, his own failed pictures and drafts, expressive little “tronies,” little genre paintings. Among the canvases were the portraits his patrons didn’t want. On their surfaces the artist himself appeared, his face momentary, one-off.

But only his face. The used canvases became a kind of drafting space or a sketchbook for the artist, where he could react fast, perhaps because his patrons paid for canvases or gave them to him for their own portraits. The self-portraits, arranged in a long line, examined consecutively, make a kind of catalog, a selection of snatched reflections, that very same following after nature. “After Nature,” as Sebald’s first book was called.

It seems that the speed with which an image was transferred to the canvas was important to Rembrandt. More important than other circumstances or obligations.

It once happened that his pet monkey died suddenly when he was halfway through painting a large portrait of a man, his wife and children. Having no other prepared canvas available he painted the dead monkey into the picture. The people objected strongly to this, not willing that their portraits should be arrayed alongside a disgusting dead ape. But no, he was so enamored of that study of the dead monkey that he chose to leave the picture unfinished and keep it as his own rather than please them by painting it out; and that is what happened. The picture in question eventually served as a partition for his students.

In the authoritative series A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings , published by the Rembrandt Research Project, the self-portraits are given their own thick volume. Despite this, one of the main purposes of the accompanying editorial is to warn the reader from seeing the portraits as a special category. We shouldn’t see them as a distinct project or subproject, a lyric diary lasting years, a Montaigne-style inquiry into the self.

The editor of the volume is engaged in a polemic against something even greater than the human tendency to retell the past with a contemporary vocabulary and to present Rembrandt’s works as a quest for identity (or a search for an interior reality, opening up the space for introspection). This is not about a conflict of methodology, nor the extent to which we can eradicate the sin of anachronism — a sin inherent in any attempt to read a text that has moved a good way along the timescale. It’s more likely that his is just one more attempt to kick against the pricks , to preserve the dignity of the past, and the rights of knowledge — the first of which is an immunity to ready-made concepts and imported frames of reference. There is no longer any escape from these: the agitated search for connection is in the air itself, the air a society breathes in an age of decline in the absence of common lines and unambiguous answers.

When the foundations of our day-to-day life subside and shift, hindering any attempt at systematic interpretation, we begin to search out handrails, and to welcome even the merest hint of structure. You begin to see order in any sequentiality, trusting chance and coincidence as if they demonstrated an intrinsic connection between things. There are a number of texts dedicated to Rembrandt’s project, and each of them says more about us than it does about him, just like the first biographies. And yet there is something vaguely troubling about the optics that make us see the self-portraits as if through a microscope, the “interior world of their author” magnified, each movement of spirit, dark corner of the soul, or grief-marking laid bare for the purposes of study. I can’t help thinking that the meaning of the many-headed multitude of sketched Rembrandts (their actual face value ) is in fact in limiting them to exteriority, to the Aristotelean imprint of today. This is enough in any case: they give far more than we ask of them.