Rembrandt’s “divine” engravings at the Reformation Museum in Geneva
Published: Sunday, Dec 24th 2023, 10:30
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An exhibition at the newly renovated International Museum of the Reformation (MIR) in Geneva is dedicated to the biblical engravings of Rembrandt (1607-1669) until next March. He is considered one of the few great Protestant painters alongside Van Gogh and Mondrian.
Following its two-year closure for renovation work, the MIR is hoping to attract more visitors again with more temporary exhibitions and conferences. "Two of them came all the way from Brussels to visit this exhibition dedicated to Rembrandt," museum director Gabriel de Montmollin told the Keystone-SDA news agency.
Among the 70 engravings, which are on display until March 17, is the last portrait Rembrandt engraved of himself: "He depicts himself as he is and not as he would like to see himself. The Dutch painter is also often seen as an actor in his own engravings," explained the director.
In the 17th century - after the Renaissance (14th to 17th century) - religious painting or engraving was no longer the main activity of artists. Of Rembrandt's 314 etchings, 89 are religious and most are biblically inspired.
Several etchings from one picture
"He did them neither for himself nor for the church, but to earn a living," says de Montmollin. Highly regarded as a painter during his lifetime, he was able to achieve several sales of a single picture with etchings.
As a great collector of prints - he owned almost 4,000 of them - but also of objects that came from the Dutch trading posts in the colonies, he had great financial needs.
"He is a very embodied character who has quite an active love life. For example, he lived with his housekeeper after the death of his wife, which brought him into conflict with the reformed church of his time."
And this closeness to life as it really is can also be seen in his works: "If you take the engraving of Adam and Eve, for example, they are not idealized young people, but ageing figures: he gives the viewers of his time the ability to project themselves," continues the Neuchâtel native.
A diverse clientele
Calvinism, which was the official religion in the United Provinces at Rembrandt's time, rejected the visual representation of the Bible. However, although this prohibition was strictly enforced in churches, religious art collections were not banned, according to the exhibition catalog.
"So there is a privatization of the use of biblical motifs, which leaves a much wider field of inspiration, unlike the Catholic period, when biblical representation was very codified," recalls the director of the MIR.
Rembrandt had a diverse clientele consisting of Reformed, but also Jews and Catholics, as the Reformed made up only 20 percent of the Dutch population at the time. So he offered nativity figures and virgins with child to a Catholic audience. But he humanized and desecrated them in such a way that Protestant buyers were also satisfied.
A birth with two oxen
Rembrandt also depicted biblical scenes that had never been depicted before in the history of art. For example, he painted the birth of Christ with two oxen (and not the usual one with a donkey and an ox) because the donkey was never mentioned in the Bible, except in some apocryphal texts.
Rembrandt based his prints on three Bibles: the Latin "Vulgate", the first Bible to be translated into Dutch - based on the Olivetan Bible, i.e. the first Bible to be translated into French in Neuchâtel in 1535 - and the Stände Bible.
The MIR displays each of these editions, as well as all the first editions of the Bibles in French, German, English, Italian and Dutch, in its permanent exhibition on a history of the Reformation.
Although the Reformation rejected images - "What the Protestants disputed was the superstition associated with images" - they had an important educational significance. Barely a century after the Reformation, only ten percent of the population could read. Among them were many women, whom Rembrandt depicted with a book in their hands.
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