Painting Darkness: Bruegel and Rembrandt

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My initial idea was to write about grisaille, that strange old custom of painting without colour, using only various shades of brown, or alternatively, of grey.

But then to add to that deprivation, another one, of light, and choose painters who try to paint the dark or in the dark, at night in which colour naturally disappears, so it is no longer just an artist’s trick but rendering a large area of reality commonly cut off from painting. This could be a huge undertaking, so I narrowed it to just two paintings by two of the greatest artists, Bruegel and Rembrandt, painting almost a century apart but both using the voluntary restrictions of a colourless world to provoke viewers to more intense scrutiny, like an intelligent version of the harder looking forced on someone stuck in a dark room and becoming slowly used to the new conditions.

Wallace Stevens says somewhere that good poems defeat the efforts of intelligence almost successfully. This comes as close to an explanation of my love of obscurity in art as anything I’ve ever heard or thought.

There’s something doubly perverse in setting out to collect and write about outstanding cases of obscurity in art—to share their unrecognised beauties, yes, but also, inevitably, to clarify them and end up making them less obscure, as if—horrid conventionality—the final goal in thinking about anything were always to make something clearer. Easy to accept that poetry doesn’t usually make things clearer, but prose is different–is it really acceptable to write an essay with the aim of making something un-clear?

Certain painters, Rembrandt above all, are drawn to depicting night and darkness while at the same time telling stories. And there’s a wonderful little Bruegel that takes place at night in a large room, half of which is packed with people (the crowd in the left background) you don’t even see at first. In some sense you never see them, they are so indistinct and so inessential to the main event, the Death of the Virgin lying in bed, the main piece of furniture in a room cluttered with others, and a stray figure or two, like a young man asleep beside the fire, often mistaken for St John, who usually has an important role in this traditional scene.

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The great events here are the various candles and the fire, most of them scattered rationally but also pointlessly, as far as illuminating the main event goes. The brightest candle is outshone by a light which encompasses and dwarfs it and has no visible cause, the radiance of the about-to-be corpse that critics connect with the imminent appearance of Christ, which hasn’t happened yet but is spelled out in conventional sources.

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So the painting shows a supernatural event on the verge of happening, but is also entirely (almost entirely?) explicable as an episode in the story of Light, how it travels and stops just short of a certain desired goal, how it sets out bravely and that is the end of that. How the destruction of certain modest lengths of wood has the incidental effect of putting a cat to sleep and showing human onlookers a big expanse of floor, the most collected view available of the context in which the great event is going to occur.

The most enigmatic element in the whole obscure scene is one of the painter’s slyest tricks. Someone has rigged up a little theatrical display for an audience of one, or maybe two or three. At the end of Mary’s bed propped on a cushion is a very early emblem of Christ’s crucifixion, a little model of His Body on the cross.

The picture simulates eyes getting used to the dark, and that is a metaphor for something wider or more universal, the search for knowledge. The experience of deciphering (almost successfully)–which is also what we do with any work of art, obscure or not—puts lots in play, as if much remains undecided, so it becomes a testing ground for something like experimental thinking.

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Rembrandt puts much more in play than Bruegel—when you look closely, the elements of this picture of Christ’s Entombment in Glasgow do not look like anything that you’ve seen in reality before.

It’s making a fresh point about itself as a fiction, and it becomes a multiple reality. It’s at least two different things at once, a set of marks and a human story, a divergence extreme enough to make a chasm in perception, provoking an excitement that waited to be rediscovered by Cezanne.

The Glasgow Entombment creates insistent doubts we don’t find it easy to settle: are we standing in, or looking across the hollow of the grave? The level area the group has gathered in seems to drop off abruptly into a dark space we can’t fathom. How big is this void? It’s impossible to tell.

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I’ve just noticed today how the sensation of Christ’s weight pulling the shroud he is wrapped in down towards the earth is created – by two strong, wide, mainly black strokes drawn through and along the bottom of the pale sheet, which has a strong white highlight at its near edge, the largest area of pure white in the picture. Mary’s lap and Joseph of Arimathea’s forehead are the only other spots of white, and the forehead is markedly less intense.

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Fascinating how detail begins to be lost the further you go from the centre, but it’s not as simple as that.   Those to the left of Christ are less sharply defined, defined in fact by a different method, which is only partly accounted for by their being caught in the glare of the lamp or candle.   The tall man behind the kneeling woman (not everyone accepts that she is Christ’s mother) is seen in almost the same register as the servant holding the shroud, who is much more clearly defined. It’s almost as if it’s our attention which determines how characters will be shown. You move in different directions, up to the right of the central group, for example, and the mode of consciousness represented by the picture changes. Fascinating too how the indistinct crowd follows an almost invisible slope – the whole subject occupies a diagonal slash caught in a more pervasive darkness.  The rising trajectory of this indistinct extension is unaccountably pleasing, as are smaller tunnels of darkness behind the kneeling woman/ Mary and in front of the figure holding Christ’s feet.

rembrandt entombment sketch hi res slope R.jpegExploring the picture is again analogous to getting used to seeing in the dark. It can be a long process, working out various relations in this composition, which intrigues us so much because it is so unclear.   It’s another subject showing, like the Death of the Virgin, people gathered round a prone figure, a quintessentially static subject.

Christ has sunk to near the bottom of the space and dragged the rest with him. All the movement is downward, yet the light suggests otherwise, as if it is on the point of bursting out, and radiates upward, not downward.   Magical how far left the subject has moved, the picture is radically asymmetrical, unless you see it as a light half on the left balanced by a dark half on the right, but this equality doesn’t exist. The left is far stronger, no halves.

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In Bruegel’s Death of the Virgin supernatural light has created a strangely perfect little room within the room, with top and bottom defined by their corners, and clear back and side walls, the two front walls removed, and partly indicated by bunched and dangling bed curtains. Just as weirdly asymmetrical as Rembrandt’s Entombment, with a wider range of definition in things represented, among which you cautiously pick your way, as usual in Bruegel, an inventory enhanced here by the struggle with continuing gloom.

The connection between Mary and the little crucifix is at the heart of the picture, and forms the top and bottom of a larger cross, whose arms are defined in living form by Peter and the female attendant, like a deliberate mistranslation of the crucifixion subject.   Christ is shown perversely lying on a comfortable bed in the form of a plump pillow. This is impressionistically rendered, with bold abbreviations (where are His hands?). As the exemplary Courtauld catalogue of 2016 points out, His feet have retreated until they are just two small blobs, the tiniest individuality paint can have. This crucifix is such a strange detail that you have a momentary fear you could have overlooked it.

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If this is the threshold of a visionary moment, as some people think, then the sleeping figure may be important—what looks like a stupor is actually the disguise for a private vision, and an essential thread links the about-to-be ecstatically-raised Virgin and the young person lost in his vision, or not—could his oblivion be the dumb version of an out-of-body state, as common as sleep and at the furthest remove from the action, like a planet at the edge of its solar system?

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The table and chair between him and the bed do indeed seem the impediments of an earthbound not a visionary mode. He is the furthest and not the nearest sharer of the great moment, on a par with the cat. I don’t like this interpretation, though, and would rather see him as human ordinariness getting on with daily life, harmlessly, and regardless of the earthshaking Assumption about to happen.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Death of the Virgin, c 1562-65, 36.9 x 55.5 cm, Bearsted Collection, Upton House, Warwickshire (The National Trust)

Rembrandt, The Entombment Sketch, late 1630s-early 1640s, revised mid 1650s, 32.2 x 40.5 cm, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow

Curators in Glasgow have made a point of naming The Entombment a sketch and not a grisaille, because it incorporates reddish earth tones (unlike most grisailles), because it was named that way when Rembrandt had to sell it to pay his debts, because it hung for twenty years on a wall in his house and he kept reworking it (as extensive technical examination has shown). The figures on the left in the bolder mode of the 1650s are the strongest signs of the reworking, but new highlights and deletions are evident throughout. The painting is a striking instance of Rembrandt’s constant rethinking of his own ideas.


The Entombment, infrared reflectogram, showing bold black strokes defining forms

Rembrandt’s prints

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Rembrandt is one of those rare artists like Michelangelo, Picasso and very few others who breaks the bounds and goes beyond all rivals in three different mediums. His achievements in the cold, dull realm of printmaking are perhaps the most astonishing of all.  He found there ranges of tone so varied and extensive it is like colour, a world so full of shades you can’t feel there’s anything missing, and so to talk of black-and-white seems almost obtuse.

6a b85 lazarus AN00022150_001_l.jpgOne of the earliest etchings in the little exhibition of his prints and drawings now at the British Museum, a large, showy Raising of Lazarus, made me wonder how he (or anyone else) could ever go beyond it. The lighting effects are so startling, the gestures though exaggerated so confident and so clearly set off from one another. A single action becomes a whole series of them. The later Rembrandt might cringe at the idea of making the main figure three times the size of the others, but we’re not having such thoughts now, caught up in marveling at the richness of light and dark tones jostling each other so energetically.

g 13 25 b177 lazarus small AN00037930_001_l copy 2.jpgTen years later he does the raising of Lazarus more quietly but with greater intensity, on a smaller plate with a reduced tonal range. Gestures are less dramatic, if they show up at all. Facial features are almost too small to pick out, but the tilts of the little figures’ heads are powerfully expressive instead, thrust forward, drawn back, lowered, turning aside—all these and more are employed in this small print. Christ isn’t even looking directly at Lazarus but slightly downward, pondering.*  Has anyone ever done a human group with such attention to the varied states of everyone in it?

This is a modest example, yet yields so much, modest but radical in the allotment of space, bolder than the early Lazarus in its use of blank spaces—all the active figures are confined in the lower left-hand quadrant; Lazarus is almost pushed out of the picture. Two blank spaces run almost the whole length of the scene; it is one big grave.

We want to claim that Rembrandt outgrew his obtrusive early virtuosity, and he did leave behind the showy Baroque kind, but he never ceased some form of virtuoistic display, though, as Artaud said of van Gogh, he was by the end in a different region from normal human perception, a place where he didn’t perhaps expect anyone to follow, doubtless a strange way to talk about two of the most popular artists in the whole history of art.

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Even in the more thoughtless Baroque phase Rembrandt is capable of great delicacy and quiet richness, as in this sensuous nude, given a mythological twist by the shadowy rapist lurching out of the shadow, Jupiter and Antiope. Rembrandt was prone to make jokes of classical subjects—who could ever guess that the embarrassed middle-aged nude dipping her feet in a pond was Diana at the bath? But Jupiter is hardly there in the present picture, an afterthought, Rembrandt’s way of acknowledging a vestigial embarrassment at catching his model asleep, after what activity, not before? Yet the figure is raised by the classical reference and her languor could not be bettered. In a way hard to explain, the idea of Jupiter gives us permission to savour a wonderfully lengthened moment.

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Certain subjects recur in Rembrandt, one of them an encounter between a young man and an old one, like this father and his prodigal son no longer young. Why is this awkward meeting so beautiful, framed on one side by emptiness and on the other by unwanted bystanders kept at bay by narrow stairs which effectively confine them? There is no shortage of feeling, rather an excess, and the complex platform sets them off as on an altar. The space is like an allegory of their situation, which they have surmounted, at least for the present.

I have just realised that the lead figure on the right is carrying shoes and a coat, bringing them for the semi-naked prodigal, a dose of everyday reality, just what this artist revels in: in every twist of the father’s sleeve, in the creases in the stone steps, in three different arched openings, in headgear and shoes and every one of the endlessly varied lines cut by the graving tool.

e 9 18 b139 joseph telling dreams AN00022531_001_l copy 2.jpgAnother young man holding a whole cohort of old ones entranced with his tales, like Christ among the doctors, but this time Joseph recounting his dreams to the other prisoners, a subject easier to give a comic twist, in part by clothing them all in Egyptian finery. It is an exercise in filling up space, and he does it most ingeniously, including a bedroom setting as in Genesis, a kitchen visible in a slit at the edge and a dog obliviously licking itself. Joseph is the brilliant invention of a novelist, a little businessman who is believable as the soon-to-be administrator of the whole Egyptian harvest.

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I suppose this counts as a comic scene too, though making light of the fate of humanity in this present world seems shallow in the extreme, yet what result do you expect to follow from leaving the spiritual destination of the world to the sagacity of inexperienced newlyweds?  Rembrandt is an unstoppable storyteller and Eve is one of his best inventions, her frailty signaled by letting the snake-dragon loom over her, by her bowed shoulders and a head drawn in like a tortoise, by her wonderfully trustful and mistrustful expression: she is used to listening to Adam yet she can’t accept what she is hearing. But it’s the vulnerability of those hips and knees, something that makes this an extremely lovable creature who can’t be blamed for what she has done. The couple are wonderfully lit in a big keyhole of light which is about to close in on them, and on the frolicking elephant, tiny in the distance.

h 17 34 b210 jerome w stump AN00038466_001_l copy 2.jpgRembrandt did old men repeatedly, St Jerome most often. He also had a strange fondness for old stumps which he saw (or anyway showed) as sheltering diverse forms of life and as in that way sponsors of youth. The outlandish disproportion between the saint and his tree expresses a truth but also functions as a kind of camouflage: the wise man disappears in the undergrowth and his lion knows to do the same.

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The best of all his renderings of his favourite saint puts Jerome in a wide landscape, not in flat Holland but precipitous Italy. It’s the gentlest, richest vision, of a long serpentine ridge with the lion standing, curved, on the turning point where it swoops downward, man and beast, stillness and movement, action and contemplation, yet of course the lion doesn’t move either, just expresses movement with the swerve of his body. The saint vanishes or hovers like a mirage, conveying that there aren’t any saints or lions in Italy, except if you think there are, or while you think there are.

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The highlight of the exhibition was the pairing of different stages of the same print which showed how flexible or molten Rembrandt’s idea of his subjects became, increasingly as he got older. The most startling transformation was performed on one of his largest prints, a rendering of the Crucifixion known as The Three Crosses which began as Rembrandt’s most complex crowd scene, with the turmoil of two dozen figures forming a hollow circle around the three crosses, something like Bruegel’s in Vienna, but seen from much nearer. At first it was done in drypoint, a technique Rembrandt increasingly favoured, which creates powerful but blurry effects because the this tool works more like a gouger than a sharp pen. So there’s something rich but impressionistic about the rendering of figures, and he concentrates on the architecture of the scene, controlled by strong lighting which makes an apse-like structure that incorporates all the figures into a single vertical space, with an effect murky and tumultuous at once.

j 21 47 245 three crosses later 2.jpgThen Rembrandt went to work on it, erasing some elements, like one of the two prominent figures in the foreground running away, and adding others, like the tall figure on horseback wearing a strange three tier-headdress like something out of Uccello. The right-hand thief has become a black smudge and the dense right-hand group a blur.  Strangest of all he has added strong diagonal scorings leading out of the picture toward both lower corners, matching the rays coming down from above in the top half of the picture, so that now you have a single explosion caused by the crucifixion, as if there’s been a great discharge of energy, an electrical phenomenon we would say if that were not pure anachronism in the age of Rembrandt.

Now a universal darkness has fallen on the whole scene except for a couple of weird flickers to the left of Christ. The air has been sucked out of the world along with the light, leaving it flattened and shrunken by the diagonal forces pulling downward, a space unreal, visionary, as if we’ve retreated into a mental realm, hugging the suffering depicted to ourselves more intimately.

Darkness had always had a strong aesthetic appeal for Rembrandt, particularly in prints. Colour disappears as darkness falls, and he liked pushing to the moments when less and less is visible, sometimes almost as a prank, to see how little he could get away with showing and still have a picture, but more often with serious purpose, to find out how much you could take away or occlude and still keep the whole surface tense with the expectation of meaning, which might need to be searched for, but was there to be found. Earlier, darkness might just signal experiment; later, solemnity appears more often. In the year after The Three Crosses a smaller Descent from the Cross by torchlight appears, in which the body of Christ occurs twice, once as a crumpled corpse, and again as a blank sheet. His shroud waiting for him on a stretcher at the bottom of the picture has such a strong presence it’s as if there are two of him, or two moments both present in the single image, which there’s an old instinct (familiar in many medieval narratives) to include within one frame.

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The sheet is so characterful, contains such subtlety of outline and feature, that it seems a depiction of a collected, resolved and tranquil state of mind, like a washing away of all the kinks and twists of everyday human character—to become a blank sheet again, a certain ideal conception of what happens to the individual at death. The prominence given to this empty container is preternaturally strong and purposeful–at the front and bottom of the space, yet canted away from strict horizontal, a relaxed, not a rigid disposition, one of the most beautiful details in all of Rembrandt. After all the toil and trouble, peace; after hideous cruelty, a slate wiped clean.m 25 56 b260 entombment w surface tint AN00059590_001_l copy 2.jpgThere’s a further, more resolved stage of the same process in the revised plate of the Entombment from the same year. Revision here has consisted of removing much detail by darkening it, while allowing faint suggestions of the main spatial divisions to remain, not quite consistently, to give a grand general sense of the entire space while narrowing the focus to a few of the figures formerly visible (in earlier stages of this print) and only to selected fragments of those who remain. The details that are left have become more precious: they are all that there is: expressions simplified are more solemn, surrounded by gloom they sink deeper into the viewer’s consciousness. Christ is the least evident of all of them—can that be right? Earlier it was even possible to overlook him, not now. In some technical sense the scene is lit by a candle which we cannot see, but that is an explanation we think of afterwards. Our first impression is that Christ’s limp body emits a strange glow, unnaturally intense like a firefly, the only point of light in the night sky, which is to say that in death he compels us more than ever. You can describe this effect to make it sound simple, and so it appears, but what it is still more, is focused, and wonderfully so, and it arises from Rembrandt’s understanding of human responses, and of the play of light and its absence, which is all brought to bear on a small stretch of inked paper, most overwhelming in those parts where nothing is there, no ink, just paper, the very instant when the artist’s absent hand is felt most of all. 



*Other impressions of the small Lazarus change Christ’s expression, which becomes less meditative.

The print of the late Descent from the Cross by torchlight shown here is a counterproof, in which the blank of the shroud is paler but stronger.

Rembrandt: thinking on paper at the British Museum until 4 August 2019