Biography of art. Light and shadow of Rembrandt

About the book
Successful at the beginning of his life, and lonely, bankrupt and forgotten by everyone at the end of his journey, Rembrandt created some of the most powerful and psychologically insightful works in the world of art. The wealth and ruin, love and sorrow that have fallen to his lot, glory and misunderstanding, illness and death of his wife and children - nothing distracted the painter from internal vision and unique handling of light, where the background and figures merge into a single whole, which, according to Delacrois"s opinion , serves as a sign of perfection. The paintings created by the ingenious master of chiaroscuro opened new ways for artists of his era and became examples of new art.

Pascal Bonaph will lead us through the world of Rembrandt"s creations. Pictures, drawings, engravings: early work on the themes of the sacred story, custom portraits and other works, portraits of loved ones, landscapes, self -portraits. The path of the artist of the human soul to uncompromising art in 180 documents.

For whom this book
For everyone who is interested in art and wants to know the main great masters.

For lovers of Dutch painting and creativity of Rembrandt.

From the author
Rembrandt studied works that he would never see, and painted a city where he would not visit. He copied Leonardo"s" Secret Entries, painted the species of London and rural landscapes of Italy. He needed to dream and at the same time see everything that was surrounded, to capture the pose of Saskia with a child in his arms, a heavy gait of a peasant couple, the appearance of a charlatan and a street trading with a pancake, the views of models.

***
Rembrandt never stopped writing. The family lived in the lower floor. In the upper, he arranged a workshop. In one of the two rooms located nearby, paintings and folders with engravings were stored, the second was littered with weapons, fabrics and wonders. Finally, at the very top, another workshop, students worked in it. They prepared a mixture of wax and resins to cover copper sheets or copied the paintings of Rembrandt, which he corrected after that.

What did these paintings become? These are not copies and not repetitions. It did not care for anyone, authenticity did not matter. The main thing is to write.

***
Customers paid not for genius, but for what they wanted to find out and found out: for portraits "similar" to the model. Rembrandt wrote their personality, secret and metamorphosis. Flink, Bol, Bakker and other former students began to like more than him. One Rembrandt wanted only painting and sought to experience all her power.

***
What other model, more affordable than himself, could have Rembrandt to try everything? But he wrote self -portraits in such an abundance not only because he studied the expression on the face or technical means. For him, these consistent images equally search, statement, prayer, scream. It is impossible to say exactly how much Rembrandt left self -portraits. About a hundred ... copies made by his students, or those that he himself, perhaps, corrected, "fakes" times of Rembrandt, various versions of the same portrait that he could write, interfere with a final and reliable catalog.

***
Rembrandt gravels more than a hundred times and writes his own portrait. No other artist has done so much yet. He wrote himself alarmed, cheerful, good -natured, confident, self -confident, daring, disappointed. He drew the age, from which his face was puffed, wilted, covered with wrinkles, disfigured. He does not care. His portraits did not serve the similarity. In rags or discharged, they invariably looked for an answer all in the same loneliness that Rembrandt, perhaps, desperately wanted to contrast elusive confidence.

Self -portraits that he gravated, painted and wrote, never talked about his life. But they talked about the desire to become the painting itself. His portraits are experiments, through his appearance he studied expression, to hold on to the manner. He made a catalog of expressions of his own person. His portraits are evidence, repeating the composition of Titian or Raphael, he claimed that he knew the masters whose works are considered the standards of painting. His portraits are prayers, he wrote himself a sinner, helped to erect a cross on which Christ lies, or a prodigal son.

***
What is attributed to Rembrandt really belongs to him. The chiaroscuro is undoubtedly a natural and necessary form for his impressions and ideas. Others used the chiaroscuro, but no one did it as sequentially and inventively as he. She is the most mysterious, obscure, most complete lack of failure, omissions and surprises, which only exists in the picturesque language of artists. And therefore, it remains more than any other form of deep feelings and thoughts. It is light, airy, foggy and modest, shares its charm with what is hidden, awakens curiosity, adds attractiveness to moral beauty and charm to speculative constructions. Finally, it is inseparable from feeling, excitement, uncertainty, uncertainty and infinity, dreams and ideal. - And that"s why it, as it should be, remains a poetic and natural atmosphere, in which the genius of Rembrandt invariably lives.

Eugene Fromanten. Old masters

About the author
Pascal Bonaph is a writer and art historian, scholarship holder Villa Medici. Lecturer of the History of Art at the University of Paris VIII-Sen-Deni, General Secretary of the International Center for Arts. The author of many essays on art, self -portraits specialist. One of his books Rembrandt, AutoPortraits ("Rembrandt, Self -portraits") received the Charles Blanca Award, the Eli Fora prize and the Gutenberg award for the best book of 1985. The curator and organizer of exhibitions held in France and abroad