The Father’s Face

His relationship with Rubens. His strict Calvinist upbringing. His frenzied search for identity reflected in the almost maniacal representation of himself. His death in abject poverty with just two pictures next to him, The Return of the Prodigal Son and Simeon with the Christ Child

BY CRISTINA TERZAGHI

At the age of 14, when his name first appears in the roll books of Holland’s University of Leiden, Rembrandt van Rijn, a literature student living with his parents, may already have been dreaming of taking palette and brushes in hand. This, at least, is what the early biographers recount. The fact remains that his enthusiasm for letters was only very brief, and a few months later we find Rembrandt in the workshop of a painter. In 1620, Leiden was almost entirely Calvinist, but the iconoclastic surge in 1566 that had brought about the destruction of all images of Christ and the saints had calmed down by then, and the city was packed with paintings and populated by artists who were not lacking for work. In nearby Antwerp, one painter above all others had become so famous and honored as to be constantly employed in diplomatic missions between Spain, France, England, and Holland–his name was Rubens. Rembrandt thus began a career which could have led him to enjoy great fame, and in effect, at least at first, he did receive tributes and honors, but his fate was completely different from that of the “Apelles of our time,” as Rubens was called. Comparison with this gigantic figure was inevitable for anyone who engaged in painting in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century, and Rembrandt shared this fate with all his contemporary colleagues. From his boyhood he must have been watching the older artist furtively. Among his early works there is in fact a small Supper at Emmaus, which is very revealing about their relationship.
When Rubens went to Rome for the first time, he was not able to escape the fascination exercised by Caravaggio. In 1610, Rubens painted a picture of the episode of Christ appearing to his disciples in Emmaus, when He reveals his identity to them as He breaks the bread for supper. The work, a large altarpiece which is now in the Church of St. Eustache in Paris, represents Rubens’ tribute to the two very famous versions of the subject painted by Caravaggio between 1602 and 1606, and in particular the one now in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. In all the versions, the scene takes place around a richly appointed table with servants standing by watching, while the disciples, recognizing the Master, erupt in gestures of astonishment–supremely calibrated in Caravaggio and openly theatrical in Rubens.

The Supper at Emmaus
Rembrandt had never been out of the Netherlands. Italy probably did not hold any particular attraction for him. He was always substantially an anti-classicist. He would, however, have known Rubens’ Supper at Emmaus from engravings of the painting in Paris which were circulating in Leiden and Amsterdam in great numbers. Observing Rembrandt’s version, then, we are astounded at the great freedom of conception displayed in an artist so young. He was evidently fascinated not so much by the realistic and everyday aspect of the Gospel story–a dinner among friends, as Rubens and Caravaggio described it–as by the theme of vision (according to the reading given by Simon Schama in his fine biography of the artist recently published in English by Knopf). Rembrandt’s painting (now in Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André) does not dwell on a description of the details of the meal: fruit, bread, showy napkins, shining pewter utensils, transparent glasses, and so on. All the drama is concentrated on the astonished and frightened face of the disciple looking at Jesus, represented completely against the light, almost like a ghost who is about to vanish from the scene. Not yet twenty, Rembrandt furnishes here one of the most unsettling keys for unlocking the secrets of his art: the problem of the “I” faced with the mystery of existence. It is no coincidence that thirty or so self-portraits of the artist are known, without counting those inserted into paintings whose subject is something else. This is an almost maniacal representation of himself; a constant, frenzied search for his own true identity. He painted himself in various guises, and yet always alone. Brought up in a rigid Calvinist tradition, Rembrandt became a master of the representation of a solitary man whose pensive face reflects his questioning of the meaning of himself and his life, as is demonstrated, among others, by some outstanding depictions of St. Paul (the most philosophic of the apostles, according to the iconographic tradition) in prison, or Jeremiah foreseeing the destruction of Jerusalem. The Catholic Rubens was made of different stuff. When he reached Mantua, happy to be finally in Italy, he couldn’t help summoning his brother Philip and painting himself in the company of a lively group of friends. The hour comes to everyone of an encounter which sharpens and defines self-knowledge. For Rembrandt this was the day on which he married Saskia in Amsterdam, a tie which led him to leave Leiden for good, to depict himself as a young man in love, as in the splendid Self-portrait in the museum in Berlin, and finally, to include Saskia in one of the many representations of himself in the guise of the pleasure-loving prodigal son, the only self-portrait he shared with another person. Unfortunately, Saskia died young, after giving birth to their son Titus, whom Rembrandt portrayed with unutterable tenderness in the beautiful Portrait of Titus Studying in 1655.

A reversal of fortune
The death of his wife was the cause of a series of misfortunes which reduced Rembrandt to ruin, blackmailed by a scheming maidservant. The most famous painter in Amsterdam was forced to search for ever-more miserable and uncomfortable housing in obscure suburbs of the city, amidst the virtually total indifference of the citizens for whose town hall he had painted a beautiful and misunderstood Conspiracy of Julius Civilis.
He painted to the end, dying in absolute poverty with two paintings next to him, probably painted without a precise commission: The Prodigal Son and Simeon with the Christ Child. No self-portraits this time, but instead two great figures of old men as protagonists: the merciful father of the Gospel parable and the faithful priest. If this was indeed his last work, it is not so strange to think that the words of Simeon also brought to an end Rembrandt’s exhausting search: “Now, Master, you are letting your servant go in peace as you promised, for my eyes have seen the salvation which you have made ready.”

On October 5, 1669, in a hovel on the outskirts of Amsterdam, a diligent notary drew up the inventory of the few miserable things that still belonged to the deceased Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, the greatest Dutch painter of the seventeenth century. Practically no trace remains in the notary’s document of the rich collection of antiques which the artist had owned in his lifetime and had been forced by a reversal of fortune to sell ten years earlier. The document does list a few household ornaments, some tools of his trade, and just two paintings, The Return of the Prodigal Son and Simeon with the Christ Child. This is the beginning of the history of The Return of the Prodigal Son, the canvas that Rembrandt, surprised by death, left partially unfinished and was probably completed by a student. It is astonishing, among other things, for its size: about eight feet high and six and a half feet wide, the format of paintings usually found in churches above the side altars. And yet no patron stepped forward to claim The Prodigal Son after the artist’s death. Thus he had painted it only for himself, choosing the subject that appealed to him, extremely unusual for a man who had spent his entire life working on commission. Rembrandt must have had a particular liking for this subject. This is shown by a canvas of 1636, depicting the pleasure-loving son in a tavern in the company of a beautiful woman and a tall glass of beer. The painting contains a meaningful detail: the buxom young maid is in reality his beloved wife Saskia, whom he had recently wed, while the merry cavalier is the painter himself, who in one of his rare moments of relaxation chose to portray himself in the guise of the dissolute son. A comparison of this painting with an etching made thirty years earlier, in which Rembrandt represents the moment of the son’s return to his father, reveals the artistic and human progress made by the painter and his own engagement with the Gospel episode. In the first version, the son and father are shown in profile, on the same plane, which is the threshold of the father’s house, while the older brother and the servants watch from inside. Rembrandt here shows a thoroughly theatrical embrace between the tattered and dirty young man and the richly dressed father lifting him up from the ground. The scene is charged with a stagy pathos, but in the end it is not completely convincing. Thirty years later, the artist imagines the episode in a completely different way; the scene eschews all anecdotal details that had made the son’s poverty the high point of the composition. Here instead, the absolute protagonist is the father enfolding in his arms the tattered young man, whose misery is totally absorbed in that embrace. Light floods the face of the old man whose eyes are lowered–a detail that renders the emotional tension of the moment like no other. In this simple gesture and in the hands that almost sink into the son’s shoulders, we can read all the redeemed pain of the young man whose face is buried in his father’s clothes, and whose drama is thus visible only on the father’s face. To paint this group, Rembrandt curiously had recourse to an engraving made some decades earlier. In it the artist portrayed St. Peter in a practically identical position as he healed a cripple crouching at his feet like the son in the painting in St. Petersburg. The mercy of the father must thus have seemed to the aged Rembrandt to be a true miracle. Reduced to poverty, having lost his wife, his beloved companion, and even his son, he, who at one time had thought of himself and portrayed himself as the young man who lives the high life, wasting his family fortune, must now have felt as never before the pain and joy of a father who finally has his lost son back, and the need for an embrace like the one in the Gospel parable. In the darkness of his room, Rembrandt closed his eyes then, having in front of him the hope of this mercy.
In Rembrandt’s famous painting, the prodigal son is the mirror of the Father. The Father’s face is full of pain for his son’s error, for his denial, full of a pain that flows out completely in forgiveness. And human beings can get this far. But the most spectacular and mysterious aspect is that the Father’s face is the mirror of the prodigal son. In Rembrandt’s painting, the Father’s position mirrors his son’s, his son’s pain reverberates through him, and thus also the desperation redeemed, the destruction prevented, the happiness about to be re-ignited, in the instant when it is about to be re-ignited, where goodness reigns supreme. Goodness triumphs in the prodigal son, because he weeps for the error he has made. But goodness also triumphs in the Father: this is the concept of mercy, which man cannot manage to comprehend, to express in words. The Father’s face is the mirror of the son. And the Father’s face is mercy, because it is pity for the one who has erred and is turned toward the one who returns.
(Father Giussani)