Rembrandt
www.wikipedia.org/Rembrandt

The Syndics of the Clothmakers' Guild

In the Rembrandt painting The Syndics of the Clothmakers’ Guild the syndics are around a table. Their gaze and gestures are directed toward someone outside the picture, possibly a questioner.

For instance, in the Syndics, the man who is rising has a sharp Van Dyke beard and a sharp nose. His collar and the peak of his hat are cropped. His fingers are pointed, as is his whole hand. Thus the entity of this man is infiltrated with feelings stimulated by our notions of that which sharp, cropped, and pointed. In contrast, the seated figure, third form the left, has a broad face, broad collar, and broad sideburns. The seated figure second from the right seems gentler. His collar curved, hanging long and graceful.  The cropped and sharp form sets in the context of the rising man and in the larger context of the entire painting evoke feelings of the cropped and sharp that enter into a matrix of concepts and feelings that we use in our response to the painting.

Rembrandt’s arrangement of geometric shapes also indirectly help portray character through thief reflection of human experience. An example is seen in the portrayal of the act of speech and the gesture of the broad-faced man. His hand is cupped in the direction of his body; the peak of his hat is elongated as if to further the notions of direction and extension, which are readily harmonized with an act of speech. The design of the man contributes to a convincing image of an individual projecting substance, directness, and equanimity in speech an intention.

The Jewish Bride
From The Publication Mind & Image

Since I have previously mentioned the idea of spirit connected with sex, the reader may feel that I am obsessed with this concern.  Most of us have persistent thoughts about sex.  The depth and complexity of our associations concerning our reproductive process confirms that for us, sex is among nature’s most salient facts. Expressing our conscious and unconscious feelings about sex consumes much of our energy in life as in art.

 


click to enlarge

While the collage I am discussing may lack expressive clarity in regard to this theme, I can explain something of my concern by describing a familiar masterpiece by Rembrandt that treats sexual themes with great power and tact.  Because the painting is also a particularly rich study of the cross-referencing of cues and contexts, I have taken my analysis into some detail. 

I remember viewing Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride while overhearing a man who commented that by placing the  husband’s hand on his wife’s breast, Rembrandt had violated all public propriety.  This man evidently missed the nonsexual meanings that Rembrandt brings to focus in this painting.  The husband touches the breast with decision, but without pressure.  The wife’s fingers overlap the husband’s fingers, forming an important focal pint of a picture that projects feelings of extreme tenderness and trust.  The husband’s other arm embraces, protects and comforts the wife.  The swelling proportions of his richly-textured robe impart fullness, power and grandeur, while the robe’s color exudes warmth.  The radiant sleeve is perhaps the most powerful of all Rembrandt’s painted statements that utilize chiaroscuro.  This sleeve is like some glorious cosmic event in which the amalgamation of golden light, golden substance and golden bits of impasto – carefully organized yet freely composed – suggests the idea of an infinity.  The deep background space contributes to the illusion that the expanding sleeve emerges into being before our eyes.  We can be reminded of an orbiting galaxy.  I have a feeling that manifests as a proposition.  It is as if from within this vast, spatialized universe all of the previously mentioned human values have emerged.  Plato characterized Eros as the powerful drive toward union of our selves with objects and ideas that are bearers of values – forms of nature and culture – directed toward the good and true, and yet connected to the libidinal, sexual quality of love as it moves toward the higher form of agape.  This wider context of Eros is I believe, a subject of expression in The Jewish Bride, and the archetype I attempt to touch upon in my collage.
      
Rembrandt never saw a photograph of a galaxy, nor are there literal celestial images in the sleeve.  But it is indisputable that he has developed a symbol of many in one and one in many that we can process into an infinity symbolizing a universe.  Both the awe we feel from the scale and depth of the sleeve and the good feeling from the golden substance, red warmth and light can be processed into thoughts that we use to qualify other elements throughout the painting.  In like manner, amplitude in the bulges of the man’s sleeve, his doublet under the sleeve, and the woman’s bustle can be felt as they contribute to positive feelings of swelling, power and fullness.  It is these effects that expand into our other feelings – for example, the feelings of tenderness and trust. 

The robes and hairstyles of husband and wife seem redolent of both Biblical and contemporary references.  Their faces look like the faces of real people, a possible composite of Dutch and Jewish features softened by a temperance drawn from Rembrandt’s imagination.  They could be faces of Rembrandt’s contemporaries, except that the eyes are passive, staring unfocused into space, linking the personas behind them to the idea.  Their feet do not show, enabling their bodies to emerge from deep space as figures that are both iconic and corporeal.  This allows the mind to integrate a sense of the physical, of ideality, warmth, infinity, tenderness, Judaic-Christian overtones, and Rembrandt’s famous projection of psychological character into multidirectional but consistent gestalt. 

In The Jewish Bride, Rembrandt’s knowledge, imagination and technical prowess reach a level that is rarely achieved.  One detail – the two hands touching – underscores the power and subtlety of Rembrandt’s imagination and the potential of the symbol-making mind.  The thumb and forefinger of the wife’s hand touching the husband’s play several roles.  The slenderness and relatively relaxed position of the wife’s fingers express feminine receptivity and tenderness in the contrast to the size and thrusting assertiveness of the husband’s thumb.  The orchestration of tenderness in the woman’s fingers and the firm but restrained hand of the man contributes to a feeling of responsibility that we recognize in the couple’s relationship.  The contours of the wife’s fingers fall within canons of European painting that provide a link to Raphael and the classical tradition.  The husband’s extended thumb seems forceful and erect, but Rembrandt has glazed over its longest front increment with a warm, subdued red, which markedly shortens its length and masks its assertiveness.  In this way it can be read as a unit partly submerged in a class of less-defined objects included in the background.  The shortened thumb, shaped and highlighted to harmonize with the bold highlights of the sleeve, becomes less forceful and more in harmony with the gentle fingers of the woman. 

In the Jewish Bride, we take in enough information from the painting itself to determine the artist’s complex intentions.  Whitehead uses the term “superject” to refer to the process by which we utilize already deeply harmonized meanings to direct our synthesis of diverse information.  In the case of Rembrandt, the sexual is qualified by tenderness, trust and the other references that I have pointed out.  Kenneth Clark calls The Jewish Bride an image of “grownup love.”  That could be a term for the pervading superject, although “grownup love” does not account for Rembrandt’s handling of deep space and the multiplicity of suggestive objects in the robes and beads.  To me this handling has something to do with the cosmos and infinity.  I would say the overview, or superject, is a composite of tenderness, trust, married love and responsibility emerging from an ordered and beneficent universe. 

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