Concetto in Rembrandt’s Passion Series

Abstract

Rembrandt’s Passion Series is the name given to five paintings of similar size and format executed over a six year time-frame, 1633-39. The works were commissioned by Frederick Hendrick, Prince of Orange and Stadholder of the United Provinces, and initially hung in his gallery in the Binnenhof complex at The Hague. Although each of the paintings depicts a traditional scene from the Passion of Christ, they do not form anything like a complete Passion Cycle. Seven years later Hendrick ordered a further two works of the same size and format of subjects from the Nativity of Christ. Unsurprisingly given their fragmented history, scholars have struggled to identify factors, save for subject matter and format, which would unify the Passion Series as a coherent series. This thesis seeks to address this quandary by positing an identifiable, consistent and unifying concetto for the works. The concetto this thesis suggests is analogous with the spirit of seventeenth-century devotional poetry. Recently several scholars, ranging from Gary Schwartz in 1985 through to Mariët Westermann in 2000, have noted a similarity between the subjective persona of the poet/narrator in devotional poetry and the artist/participant/spectator role that Rembrandt adopts in the paintings. Louis Martz has shown how the form and imaginative strategy of such poetry was derived from religious meditation. Following Martz’s lead, this thesis argues that the concetto for the paintings, like the poetry, is initially derived from the method of meditation as detailed by Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises. During the meditational process, Ignatius invokes his famous ‘composition of place’, where one inserts oneself imaginatively into the event in one of three ways. As Rembrandt was undoubtedly familiar with both the poetry and devotional literature of his age, this thesis argues that in his concetto for the five Passion Series works he invokes a similar model. Additionally, I show how such a concetto was both reflective of contemporary theological exegesis and embedded in theoretical artistic debates of the age. Although scholars have noted thematic similarities between contemporary poetry and Rembrandt’s later graphic work, none have hitherto connected the Passion Series with the Spiritual Exercises, via the poetry of the Stadholder’s secretary, Constantijn Huygens, and the Englishman John Donne, as this thesis does.