CONTEXT: In my July 17, ‘22 post about visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam at the end of my most recent visit to Europe in 2016, I referred to two extremes in that city as a ‘summit and an abyss of human endeavor.’ The ‘abyss’ was the Nazi Holocaust of Europe’s Jews, which devoured Anne Frank. The ‘summit’ in question was Rembrandt’s remarkable group portrait ‘The Night Watch’, housed at the Rijksmuseum, a mere 12+ minute walk from Anne’s home and hiding place.

Please bear that stark contrast – summit and abyss – in mind as a point of reference about the breadth of what we are capable, if you read the post below, which I wrote about my personal experience of that seminal painting. As it notes, I chose Amsterdam deliberately (instead of Frankfurt, Germany) to depart from Europe, in order to see the ‘Night Watch’ there.

Rembrandt’s conception for the piece both reflected and reinforced a seismic shift, going on during his lifetime, in the perceptions, priorities and purposes of ‘Western’ culture. In my Aug. 28 post about the stuffed Ocelot, also at the Rijksmuseum, I touched on commercial and scientific aspects of that shift, but here, turn my attention to what the art of that era reflected about its time and place; about an outlook that often both fed, and was fed by, those contemporary ‘commercial and scientific’ developments; and to energies those developments released – but also alludes to ones they would eventually ‘unleash.‘

Later, I will re-post other items I composed about my time in Amsterdam and Cologne, my other destination for meditating on how a society that spawned a specific cultural artifact – in Cologne’s case, its extraordinary cathedral – perceived life, and the visible world it encompassed.

The Night Watch” by Rembrandt van Rijn: One of the most pivotally innovative and visually agitating paintings in history; seeing this was my main reason for coming to Amsterdam. The title (which Rembrandt did not give it) refers to these men, members of a local guild, who, in an era before regular police forces, intermittently patrolled city streets after dark.

It may not be apparent to modern viewers what a vault of imagination this picture was, compared to previous conventions for the genre. Most group portraits at the time were static ranks of figures, all ‘shown’ equally, but ‘portrayed’ little, if at all; monotonous rows of semi-identical faces that most painters lacked the skill or time to fully differentiate. Rembrandt invigorated that template in this large canvas, using a dynamic flourish that invokes the individual personhood of its subjects (and better represents their appearances) with a potion of color and kinetics, chiaroscuro and character.

(We know the identities of all the men shown here because a graphic survives listing their names and locations within the composition. Some of them however grumbled that despite paying equal shares for the work, they had been reduced to blurred ciphers in its execution. True; this arrangement made for a great image, but not for equal shares in its drama. Further, they had not asked for, nor expected such a novel conception. Some art scholars believe that as a result of the mixed reception his daring “Night Watch” got, the career of Rembrandt – at the time, Amsterdam’s most sought-after portraitist – went into a slow, but steady decline.)

People in the 21st Century have seen many action-oriented paintings like this, and so may find it difficult to grasp how novel “The Night Watch” was for its context. But at its time, it was an astonishing leap of creativity, like the music of Beethoven would be later. Both seemed to come from some entirely new dimension; unfamiliar, unexpected, even jarring.

Unfortunately, its vision has been significantly diminished from its full original ingenuity. At one point, this picture had to be moved from the hall it was painted for to a smaller space, and substantial parts of its edges were cut off to make it fit, badly distorting Rembrandt’s original arrangement. So I was thrilled to see a smaller copy beside it that some lesser artist had made of it before it was hacked, showing its intended layout. It did, indeed, sit its space better than as it appears today, but even truncated it is wondrous, a harnessed optical tempest; the Elements masterfully deployed, rather than randomly released.

This work could scarcely be more different from another era-defining masterpiece, da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” She is a rendering of cool intellectual rumination, a subject serenely detached from the petty reality of her mortal spectators; floating outside eternity and untouched by it. “The Night Watch” is no such exercise of calm introspection; one can almost feel wisps of breeze set off by the bold advance of the forthright men shown in it. It surges with movement and champing energy, the vitality of its participants fully realized by Rembrandt’s skillful integration of technical effects – as much as by the indefinable, but unmistakable, mystery of true “artistry.”

The subjects themselves, and Rembrandt’s treatment of them, reflect – among other things – the maturing self-image of the Protestant Netherlands regarding the efficacy of human enterprise, to a step beyond its classically-based stirrings in the Renaissance. That is, this picture focuses on actual people, not merely as backdrop in some crucifixion scene, a disport of Greek gods, martial valor, or some other elevated tableau. Rembrandt, in successfully executing a truly compelling group portrait, thereby presents its members’ reality as living, self-directed personages rather than space-filling scenery for some worthier center of attention.

And that was no minor adjustment of emphasis. At the time, Protestant cultures such as the Netherlands generally looked upon most Christian religious graphic art as akin to idolatry (though Rembrandt produced a good deal of it himself), so paintings depicting faith-oriented subjects faced shrinking patronage in Northern Europe. Instead, when members of the expanding Dutch middle class sought pictures on which to spend their growing earnings, they were likelier to prefer domestic scenes or portraits that edified the here and now, rather than evoking a putative, better afterlife.

Rembrandt was one of the very greatest devisers of a new real-life, real-time aesthetic. “The Night Watch” was painted when he and his work were at the height of their contemporary fame and desirability, showing Amsterdamers as they wanted (generally speaking) to see themselves: Masters of their own Fate, through their own vigor and resolve. And this approach produced a self-perpetuating cycle; the more self-assured the commercially-oriented Dutch became, the more Rembrandt and his colleagues were inclined to depict them that way, till a corpus of creativity emerged that insistently exalted such everyday references of relatively “ordinary” people. Imagery and actuality augmented each other.

As I had hoped, savoring this splendid image surely made Amsterdam a far better last memory of this journey for me than Frankfurt could have been. And having now seen ‘The Night Watch’ (marvelous though it is), I find I prefer Rembrandt’s single portraits to a larger work like this. Many of his clients were newly affluent people looking for possessions through which to display their hard-won prosperity, and portraits (previously the province of the high born or truly rich) had great cachet. To me, his portrayals of lone subjects seem to benefit from the fuller attention he could give them, the palpable presence he could elucidate when representing a single personality.

It also bemuses me to think that such peoples’ acute trading instincts might have been thrilled to discover that, in having had Rembrandt paint them, they eventually got unimaginably more than they had bargained for: True immortalization. In many cases we do not know the names of his sitters, but even anonymous and silent, he made their life realities converse with us across infinity.

Look at some of his later portraits, and you may see what I mean. Far from just giving his clients prestigious wall decorations, Rembrandt transfixed their “selves” forever in the gleaming amber of his genius, putting them among the first common people – those without high formal status in their societies – anywhere, to be explicitly monumentalized in paint.

For in that new era, ‘common’ people could not just afford to be portrayed: They were felt worthy – As individuals – of Being portrayed. Such an assertion of a self-generated, rather than divinely bestowed, value of every person (though still far from our more fully-formed 21st Century ideas of individuality) was one of many major changes western Europe underwent at this time, from the mindset that had driven, for example, the inception of Cologne cathedral.

That evolution from quasi-passive acceptance of, to active participation in, Earthly existence has admittedly brought human life immense benefits. But it would also later lead to unforeseen and stupendous costs, as I will discuss in other postings here.

Apropos: In Amsterdam, after fortifying myself by seeing at the Rijks the beauty produced by some of our species’ best spirits, I made the short pilgrimage to Anne Frank’s house to confront what we can do at our worst.