Rembrandt's Roughness

Rembrandt’s Roughness

Rembrandt’s Roughness

Nicola Suthor

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Every science of observation, and in particular that which is concerned with the movements and the creations of the human mind, is, in the strictest sense of the term, essentially phenomenological. And because of this, the opportunity is given us of grasping authentic spiritual values.

—Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art

Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press

Published by

Princeton University Press,

41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom:

Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street,

Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Jacket art (front): Rembrandt van Rijn, Detail from

Rebecca and Isaac, 1662. Oil on canvas. 121.5 × 166.5 cm.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Jacket art (back): Rembrandt, The Militia Company of

District II under the Command of Captain Frans

Banning Cocq, 1642. Oil on canvas. 379.5 cm × 453.5 cm.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Frontispiece: detail of fig. 67

Chapter opening illustrations: p. 16, detail of fig. 80; p. 34, detail of fig. 1; p. 92, detail of fig. 45; p. 126, detail of fig. 65; p. 158, detail of fig. 76; p. 178, detail of fig. 81; p. 194, detail of fig. 40

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-17244-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960543

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Designed by Jena Sher Graphic Design

This book has been composed in Vendetta,

EideticNeo, and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the Czech Republic

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction

8

1

The Painter’s Intention

16

2

Clair-Obscure I: Shadow Play

34

3

Deepened Insight: On the Visibility of Rembrandt’s Imprimatura

92

4

Clair-Obscure II: Light Play

126

5

The Color Red as Visionary Space

158

6

Signing Off

178

Epilogue 195

Notes 198

Bibliography 226

Index 236

Photo Credits 240

Introduction

This book is dedicated to an idiosyncratic aspect of Rembrandt van Rijn’s style: the rough facture as graspable in the handling of the paint and surface texture that was often dismissed as a sign of the unfinished quality of his work. This roughness not only characterizes the originality of his art in its paradoxical approach to painterly mimesis but also engenders a new aesthetic perception of imitative depiction and painting in general. In the art-historical literature on Rembrandt, especially in recent years, this visually engaging, or phenomenological, quality has been examined predominantly on the basis of technical analyses of his paintings. Such research has proven insightful and has helped to better define the characteristics of Rembrandt’s hand at work, as well as to distinguish it from the hands of his students and followers. My interpretations will move beyond a scientific approach by exploring Rembrandt’s paint as medium rather than material in an attempt to improve our understanding of the artist’s mind, which is similarly at work in his art. Rembrandt endows color with an agency that goes beyond the basic function of painterly mimesis, and it is this potential that was consciously recognized and sharply criticized by his contemporaries. The detailed analyses presented here will explore the different ways by which the rough structure of the medium subtly, and even subliminally, captures and engages the imagination of the beholder. This systematic approach of thorough examination proceeds according to the phenomenological understanding that the image as visual object is not a self-evident given but emerges in the process of perception—a process that the act of description takes into account and attempts to render cognizable. Each visual evaluation is accompanied by observations from art literature that have to some extent already described the phenomenological features anchoring my concept of roughness. The synthesis of personal observations with those of others is intended to refashion subjective experience into intersubjectively valid assertions and reinforce description as epistemic practice.

If we first seek to understand the mentality of Rembrandt by reading the various biographical anecdotes and legends that have come down to us, we gain the impression of a rather uncouth and rebellious personality. There is, for example, in the Groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (Great Theater of Dutch Painters) by Arnold Houbraken—a painter, author, and student of one of Rembrandt’s students—a scarcely credible story meant to demonstrate Rembrandt’s headstrong nature. While Rembrandt was working on a commission for a family portrait, Houbraken relates, his beloved pet monkey died. The artist wanted to create some sort of commemoration, and because no other canvas was available at that moment, he simply inserted a portrait of the animal into the painting he was already occupied with. This raised many objections by the patron involved, who did not want some disgusting dying monkey in his portrait.¹ But instead of painting over the monkey’s likeness to please his patron and sell the portrait, Rembrandt chose to leave the work unfinished and ended up keeping it himself.

It is not impossible that Rembrandt could have behaved in such a disrespectful manner toward clients of higher social status. Many biographical anecdotes in seventeenth-century art literature suggest he placed little value on interactions with elite society; coming from modest circumstances himself, he preferred to associate with ordinary people. As Houbraken informs us, when asked about his lack of social ambition, Rembrandt responded, Because I want to keep my spirit unfettered, I seek freedom, not honor.² His efforts to live without restraint influenced not only his social life but also his painting practice, as the artist and critic Roger de Piles suggests in his Abregé de la vie des peintres (1699). After quoting the preceding remark from Houbraken, De Piles adds: "One day when Rembrandt was reproached for his eccentric manner of handling paint, which rendered his paintings rough [raboteux], he answered that he was a painter not a dyer."³

Houbraken’s story of the artist’s dead pet incorporated into a commissioned family portrait is not mentioned in any other source and may well be apocryphal, for we find no other references to a monkey in the Rembrandt household. Still, it is an apt illustration of the painter’s free spirit. Instead of acceding to his client, he satisfies his personal need to have a memento of his pet, and by doing so disrupts the conventional family portrait demanded of him on two different levels: the inclusion of a dead animal compromises the client’s desire for a memorial image that will preserve the vital essence of those depicted, and at the same time, their dignity is diminished by the dead monkey as a disgusting prop. When we recall that monkeys symbolized the slavish artistic imitation of nature, then the provocation becomes perfectly clear: imitation (the dead monkey) is thematically present in a representative image (the family). The nonliving body’s nullity (not only the nullity of the monkey’s body but, as we shall see, also of the paint’s body, which with De Piles’s term raboteux can be understood as a type of friction) is an intrusive and unsettling aspect of the artwork.

Samuel van Hoogstraten, Houbraken’s teacher and a student of Rembrandt, published his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst: anders de zichtbaere werelt (Introduction to the Academy of Painting: Otherwise Known as the Visible World) in Rotterdam in 1678. He observes that every painting bears the characteristic mark of its creator, and that such signifying particularities tend to manifest not as perfect artistic renderings (volkomene vasticheden der konst) but as malformations (afwijkingen). These malformations, he argues, are prized as such by art lovers because their respective abnormal peculiarities create artistic diversity.⁴ In this passage, the highly erudite Van Hoogstraten may be referring to the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, who states in his Institutio Oratoria, a widely read text in the Early Modern period, that innovations in figures of speech have the same sources as do faults of language.⁵ But such innovation is to be regarded as a valuable feature, so long as it has a respectable precedent to follow.⁶ This impulse must therefore be motivated by representational intent and not emerge haphazard from ignorance, for in that case such figures would be meaningless and, as mere errors, superfluous. For Quintilian, they relieve the tedium of everyday stereotyped language and protect us from a commonplace way of speaking.⁷ It is precisely this capability that Cornelis de Bie attributes to Rembrandt in an encomium from the year 1661 when he praises the artist’s brush as being estranged from the ordinary.⁸

Van Hoogstraten’s general assertion that malformations are recognized as the artist’s unique imprint has especially proven true over the centuries in regard to the reception of Rembrandt’s work.⁹ Eduard Kolloff, in his Rembrandt’s Leben und Werke nach neuen Actenstücken und Gesichtspunkten geschildert (Rembrandt’s Life and Work According to New Documents and Perspectives, 1854), praises the assertiveness and roughness of the brushwork and coloring, which almost border on crudeness and insolence, but effect a truth and energy of representation that approaches the magical.¹⁰ Kolloff mentions several characteristics of Rembrandt’s style, such as his simplified painterly mimesis (foreshortened fingers are represented with a single brushstroke), and the smooth, granular, and faceted substance¹¹ of the paint, whose roughened surface captures the light that strikes it and generates a shimmering effect. As a distinctive and strange trait of Rembrandt’s genius, Kolloff specifies the disparity in his work between cause and effect: "this execution of unbelievable brutality is at the same time of the utmost delicacy; it is a tenderness of kicks and punches; a tenderness of a quality that the most meticulous fijnschilder painters could never have achieved."¹²

Rembrandt’s raboteux facture is often attributed to his lack of culture and disdained as a sign of his inability to follow the academic canon of art.¹³ However, in other disciplines the idea of roughness has sometimes been connoted positively; from a rhetorical perspective it has been associated with truth. According to the Spanish physician and natural philosopher Juan Huarte y Navarro, whose Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (The Examination of Men’s Wits, 1575) was translated into Dutch in 1662 and cited by Van Hoogstraten,¹⁴ underneath the coarse exterior of those persons who seem uncultivated there are precious wonders to be discovered. If the Athenians had known this doctrine, he argues, they would not so much have marvelled to see so wise a man as Socrates not to have the gift of utterance, of whom, those who understood how great his knowledge was, said, that his words and his sentences were like a wooden chest knobby and nothing trimmed on the outside, but that in opening the same, within held lineaments and portraitures of rare admiration.¹⁵

Huarte explains rough, unadorned style as stemming from humble origins.¹⁶ Such a style, however, indicates not only lowliness, but also the sublime. Longinus, whom Van Hoogstraten cites elsewhere in his book,¹⁷ declares blemishes to be a sign of greatness: But supposing now that we assume the existence of a really unblemished and irreproachable writer. Is it not worthwhile to raise the whole question whether in poetry and prose we should prefer sublimity accompanied by some faults, or a style which never rising above moderate excellence never stumbles and never requires correction?¹⁸ Longinus considers roughness to be one of those faults by which extraordinary skill manifests itself.¹⁹ By Rembrandt’s time, the idea of roughness as a sign of merit appears to have been commonly accepted, although Franciscus Junius attempted to circumscribe this association in his De pictura veterum (1637)—a work whose Dutch version Rembrandt possibly knew.²⁰ Thus in the field of rhetoric, roughness characterizes speech that is true because it is unadorned. In the unpolished formulation arising from the struggle with a unique thought, expression is achieved by disrupting ordinary, standard ways of speaking.

Roughness is usually considered unpleasant. It creates a direct physical response in those who come into contact with it. Roland Barthes, in his essay The Grain of the Voice, which compares the vocal quality of two different types of singers, describes the aspect of roughness (grain) as a manifestation of the materiality of the body.²¹ He goes on to apply his idea more broadly: The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.²² Rembrandt was, of course, not an interpretive performer whose body, as in the case of the singer, is the instrument of his art. It is interesting, however, that in the abundance and diversity of literature on Rembrandt, we find an overall consensus that more or less equates his person and his work. The painter and novelist Eugène Fromentin in Maîtres d’autrefois (1876) makes reference to Rembrandt when he compares the painting style to physical characteristics such as height or thumbprint, and Fromentin ultimately derives style from individual sensory perception and emotional sensibility.²³ Even Jacob Burckhardt, who was highly critical of Rembrandt, states with a certain appreciation: In general, his style forms a whole that is inseparable from and completely identical with his defiantly robust and idiosyncratic personality.²⁴

But what do we really know about that personality? The extant documentation of Rembrandt’s life is too sparse to offer a clear picture; the anecdotes from art literature are too stereotyped to be considered credible representations of his individuality. Rembrandt left little written correspondence, and his letters offer few insights into his character. The very fact that a general consensus on Rembrandt’s personality exists at all is due first and foremost to the rough quality of his art. His unique character imposes itself in the visible perception of his work. The effort to explain the aura of intimacy in his paintings by searching for the identity of his models and utilizing this information to make connections between his life and work ends up missing the mark. Such analysis will always remain conjectural and does not take into account the evidence provided by the viewer’s visual impression.

Our consideration of the concept of roughness calls to mind a passage in the philosopher Georg Simmel’s book on Rembrandt. By way of discussing Schopenhauer (with whom he was, in fact, more familiar), Simmel offers a definition of individual style applicable to Rembrandt’s art:

That which is the most general for humanity or for culture is, for its creator, that which is most personal. Precisely this marks the uniqueness of this individuality. Schopenhauer’s incomparable individuality does not lie in his personal circumstances … because each of … [his associated] traits is merely typical. Rather, his individuality, that which was personal and unique … is … his personal being and activity, which appears all the more individual the more one turns away not only from the particular circumstances of his existence, but also from the details of his achievement on an intellectual level. These particularities and peculiarities may here and there remind us of other creative minds, but their general unified continuity is absolutely synonymous with, and only with, Schopenhauer.²⁵

Although Simmel was, strictly speaking, not a Rembrandt specialist, iconographic research published over the last several decades has confirmed his basic assumption that Rembrandt’s individual expression incorporated preexisting pictorial formulations and compositional elements.²⁶ Nevertheless, the interior spatial configuration of Rembrandt’s workshop attests to the growing importance placed on singularity as part of artistic identity during this period. As Houbraken relates, Rembrandt had screens made of sailcloth or paper installed so that each person could paint from life undisturbed.²⁷ Van Hoogstraten emphasizes the absolutely essential isolation of the artist from his colleagues in a poem addressed to young painters: want d’een Schilder is van d’ander / Als door een berg gescheiden van malkander (one painter is as distinct from the other, as one mountain is from the next).²⁸ This almost unbridgeable distance is established by the cultivation of a unique personal style in accordance with the demands of art theory.²⁹ Houbraken reports that he and his colleagues could not comprehend how Rembrandt created the so-called The Hundred Guilder Print by building from an initial rough sketch alone.³⁰ The general unified constituent (in Simmel’s sense) of Rembrandt’s artistic individuality is thus his visible grappling with the materiality of the paint medium, whereby his creative process itself remains opaque and consequently inimitable.

Benjamin Binstock explores the crux of the art-historical debate surrounding Rembrandt’s painting practice: the materiality of his thickly applied paint, which as we shall see, was already controversial during Rembrandt’s lifetime.³¹ Binstock refers to Svetlana Alpers as the main proponent of one school of thought ascribing a sculptural dimension, and thus corporeality, to Rembrandt’s paint.³² In her acclaimed and groundbreaking study, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, Alpers succinctly describes the mimetic complexity with which we are concerned: The visual presence of the paint interferes with, or replaces, the implicit access to the surfaces of the world.³³ She poses two questions that for Binstock form the polar opposites around which art-historical opinion on the meaning of Rembrandt’s facture is organized: Does his insistence on the thickness or materiality of his paint, to return to a feature noted by contemporary commentators, challenge craft in the name of suggestiveness? Or does it rather call attention to craft in a new sense by the production of a substantive, as distinguished from a suggestive, pictorial presence?³⁴ Alpers is speaking here, without a doubt intentionally, of the technical and not the artistic aspect of craft. The dichotomy she invokes—between visual effect and painterly facture—is not relevant to the latter because art by definition encompasses both of these elements. Although Alpers does not undertake a methodological synthesis of visual interpretation and stylistic analysis, she does anticipate the approach I will develop in this book and summarizes it thusly: Much can be gained by recalling, to adapt a famous phrase of Gombrich’s, that making comes before meaning. At least in Rembrandt’s case, attention to the making of his works may be a precondition to understanding the nature of their meaning.³⁵

When scholars have focused on the effects of Rembrandt’s paint beyond simply confirming the sheer mass of its presence, they have primarily considered its optical impact on the sensorial reproduction of reality.³⁶ In the viewer’s encounter with the deceptive illusion of painting, the paint necessarily becomes transparent, revealing itself as the medium through which an evoked reality is brought before the eyes. But this sole emphasis on the visual dimension of Rembrandt’s handling of paint, which merges painterly medium with illusion, cannot explain the power of his coloring.

In this book, I will propose that Alpers’s precondition for understanding the meaning of Rembrandt’s works³⁷ is his impasto, which creates a disturbance of semantic balance (the phrase is Ludwig Jäger’s).³⁸ This disturbance, criticized by Rembrandt’s contemporaries, generates opacity and prevents a direct view of what is being represented through the paint medium. At the very moment when paint and its accumulation are experienced as relevant to the work’s significance, the facture is perceived as an expressive medium that makes what is implicit explicit—namely, the actual meaning of the depiction. A second-order iteration of transparence, a transparence of transparence if you will, is produced, which is cognitively experienced through the process by which this implicit meaning emerges.³⁹

Stylistic critique of Rembrandt has given way in recent years to highly illuminating analyses of technique mainly concerned with the connoisseurial task of attribution.⁴⁰ Since this approach operates on the microlevel of stroke and ductus, it rarely considers the painting as a complex semantic structure. My discussion is based on the idea of painting technique and coloring as materializations of artistic intent, with a full awareness that the argument presented in this book is therefore structured around the hypothetical concept of authorship. Indeed, the framework for this examination of a painting style categorized by the term rough is meant to reaffirm the premise of artistic individuality that featured prominently in the emergent art literature (most explicitly as it so happens, in the literature on Rembrandt) at the beginning of the twentieth century. This premise was much criticized in the decades that followed; individuality was dismissed as a scholarly fiction that propagated a mythologized view of the artist. An iconographically grounded methodology supported by social-historical perspective seemed to create reliable visual and historical facts aimed at anchoring the artwork to a specific intellectual horizon and real-world environment. But these approaches necessarily single out one or another aspect of the artwork in order to investigate their particular symbolic or social-historical meaning, and this selective process overlooks the artwork as a created entity. In this respect, I share Karl Heinz Bohrer’s view that there is no objection to a historical-sociological examination of literature and art as long as the historical view maintains its awareness that such historicism, which is to say such a search for traces of reality in fiction, is irrelevant to the artistic character of the latter.⁴¹ Max Jakob Friedländer, who frankly admitted the precariousness of his own connoisseurial approach,⁴² anticipated Bohrer’s critical insight: You have to understand that scientific analysis destroys the general impression, and with that the expression of the creative personality,⁴³ and he insisted: We can start with scientific dissection only when the whole has spoken.⁴⁴ But how shall we define the whole?

In his doctoral dissertation on the Aesthetic and Art-Theoretical Object, written in 1922 but only recently published in 2014, the eminent art historian, aesthetic theorist, and founding Warburg Institute member Edgar Wind encourages a more profound exploration of the artwork centered on the fundamental significance of style as a unifying function. Developed within a neo-Kantian terminological framework and relying heavily on Friedländer’s ideas, Wind analyzes what he terms the holistic view with reference to Rembrandt, whose art he uses to exemplify artistic individuality.⁴⁵ Deciding whether someone ‘correctly’ understands a Rembrandt, Wind at one point contends, raises a problem that we can objectively circumscribe: at issue here is whether the essence that person constitutes in aesthetic synthesis corresponds to the essence constituted by Rembrandt.⁴⁶ Ernst Cassirer, Wind’s second dissertation adviser, also raised this issue himself with his concept of integration to the whole.⁴⁷ Within an overall context of calling for an unfolding of the simple presence of the phenomenon, Cassirer states that the true, the profoundest task of a philosophy of culture, of language, of cognition, of myth, and so on, seems precisely to consist in raising the veil—in penetrating from the mediate sphere of mere meaning and characterization to the original sphere of intuitive vision.⁴⁸ My own theoretical position in the present exploration of the semantically charged power of intricacies in the artistic handling of color and form is strongly indebted to the thought articulated here by Cassirer and Wind.

In its specific emphasis on roughness, the core of my argument is aligned with two books in particular: Michael Bockemühl’s study of The Reality of the Image, which in its examination of a group of painters ranging from Raphael to Rothko partially incorporates a phenomenological approach to pictorial analysis;⁴⁹ and Christel Brückner’s detailed examination of Rembrandt’s late Family Portrait, now housed in Braunschweig.⁵⁰ Bockemühl’s central thesis that the quality of the paint’s appearance itself becomes a narrative value⁵¹ will guide us in the chapters that follow, along with Brückner’s stated goal of penetrating into what may be seen and articulated to the point where the concept of Rembrandt’s achievement becomes demarcated and animated, while at the same time the threshold to his mystery emerges more distinctly before our eyes.⁵²

Rembrandt’s Roughness is the revisited and enlarged version of a book I originally published in German in 2014. Joel Golb rendered a first translation which was turned into a legible text by Lisa Lawrence. During the course of this extended translation process, I very much appreciated Lisa Lawrence’s promptness and inspired commitment. I am grateful to Michelle Komie from Princeton University Press, who was very supportive and showed a lot of understanding and patience. A great thanks to both readers of the manuscript who made helpful suggestions for additions. Steven Sears did a great job with the beautiful layout of the book. And last but not least, I want to express my gratitude to my inspirational students at Yale University, who during our lecture course and seminar were so eager to delve into the rough texture of Rembrandt, and to my colleagues, in particular Carol Armstrong and Tim Barringer, for their interest in my thoughts.

1

The Painter’s Intention

A Graspable Roughness

Rembrandt’s haptic use of paint is often evoked in art-historical literature by citing the following statement by Arnold Houbraken: It is said that he once painted a portrait in which the paint was laid on so thickly you could lift the painting from the ground by its nose.¹ Houbraken undoubtedly played on the word neus (nose), which in Dutch also referred to a heavy accumulation of paint on the picture support. A nose is usually an unplanned side effect of excessive paint application, but Houbraken’s subsequent observation confirms that Rembrandt deliberately applied paint to produce a surplus material residue. In some paintings, we read, the pearls and gems in necklaces and turbans are laid on with a thickness that creates an impression of having actually been sculpted (al even of ze gebootzeerd waren)—a special technique generating an effect of strong projection (kragtig uitkomen) seen even from afar.² Houbraken suggests Rembrandt’s style was calculated and that he took into account that the painting would be viewed from a distance. Seen from up close, we are informed, Rembrandt’s late work "looked as if [the paint was] smeared on by a bricklayer’s trowel [Metzelaars truffle].³ Here the figurative as if reveals the polemic of Houbraken’s judgment. He follows this declaration with an account of Rembrandt’s attempt to dissuade a studio visitor wishing to closely examine a painting: You’ll find the odor of the paint unpleasant," he allegedly warned.⁴

It was commonly believed in Rembrandt’s time that paintings composed of visible brushstrokes should not be assessed from a near viewing point because their illusory effect could unfold only from a distance. This opinion was connected with the late work of Titian, who was consistently presented in treatises on art as worthy of imitation due to the excellence of his coloring. In his popular didactic poem Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const (The Foundations of the Noble Free Art of Painting) published in 1603–1604, Karel van Mander refers to an observation by Vasari⁵ that subsequently became a dictum: Titian executed his late work with crude brushstrokes and blotches that naturally looked good at a distance but could not be viewed up close.⁶ Van Mander attests to an intensification of this method in his time, reporting that the painted surface can today almost be touched with the eyes closed and felt from all sides. For in our time paints are laid on so unevenly and crudely, you could think they are hewn in stone like a relief.⁷ This seems to indicate that Houbraken’s criticism of Rembrandt’s technique was simply based on common tropes. The application of paint in an impasto, relief-generating manner must have already been in vogue some years before Rembrandt.

A postscript from a letter Rembrandt wrote to his patron Constantijn Huygens on January 27, 1639, documents not only the concern the artist had to ensure his works were viewed at the proper distance but also the calculated manner of his heavy application of paint: My Lord, the picture will best sparkle if you hang it in strong light, and in such a manner as to permit viewers to stand at a distance from it.⁸ This request for optimal conditions, in order to allow the impact of his art to unfold, eloquently articulates Rembrandt’s awareness that the work is at the mercy of the light and spatial circumstances of the place where it is displayed. The effect of glittering or sparkling (voncken) is promoted by thickly applied lead white, whose relief, as was often remarked, scatters the light striking the paint surface and at the same time casts minute shadows. These placements are thus embedded in a very subtle interplay between light and shadow. Rembrandt alters the effect of light on the paint surface by laying dark-toned translucent glazes on top of layers of bright color. The light falling from outside onto the picture penetrates the glaze and fractures when it is reflected from these brightly colored areas. A colored light (Farblicht) is thus created, emerging from the painting’s depths;⁹ inner pictorial light and external illumination combine in their effect to captivate the beholder. In Rembrandt’s art, the penetration and refraction of light therefore depends on the roughness of the painted texture. However, the idea that Rembrandt consciously oriented his technique toward distant viewing, even though supported by the artist’s own words, does not fully explain the roughly hewn¹⁰ passages in his work. For he also prized the small format, which is also certainly able to catch the viewer’s attention from farther away, as large formats do, yet at the same time invites consideration from near proximity.¹¹ In the realization of illusion through paint as material substance—these two things being in their essence dissimilar—painting as a medium is experienced through the senses, as Heinrich Wölfflin observed: Matter has never been more perfectly rendered than when Rembrandt in his age paints an old man’s beard with broad strokes of pigments, yet that palpable resemblance of the form, which Dürer and Holbein strove to achieve, is completely lacking.¹²

Crucially, the thickened paint and fissures in the painted texture expand the viewer’s perception of what is represented and thus prolong the moment of contemplation. The haptic quality of the artistically employed material clouds immediate access to the depicted realm. Van Hoogstraten once observed that the blue on a sheet of paper used for a sketch (whose author he does not identify) can never achieve the depth of the sky’s blue, "because the paper, however it appears to you, certainly has a perceptible granularity [kenbaere rulheyt] into which your eye can gaze [in het oog staeren kan] wherever you please, whereas this is not possible with the smooth blue of the sky."¹³ The medium, here the sheet of paper, in a sense sparks back and forth between the viewer and represented object, captivating the eye.¹⁴ In other words, the visual experience is greater in scope than the optical impression or illusion. His observation is recorded in a chapter on the processes of "emergence,