Tenebrism in Baroque art

 

My favorite baroque pieces that I have had the opportunity to study have always been ones that feature tenebrism at their center. The darkness and stark contrast of light and shadow have ways of pulling the eyes from one piece of the canvas to the other. A good example of this is Rembrandt's “Simeon’s Song of Praise.” What I have always enjoyed about Rembrandt as an artist is how much he can use darkness and contrast to communicate ideas, without the highly prevalent darkness in the paintings being oppressive. 

My eyes are initially pulled at the lower left following the columns and arches to a large black shape. I can’t really decide if that’s a tapestry or something else. It’s hard to make out but my first impression is that it is some sort of tapestry. I am then pulled down following the crowd of people into the bright light where I believe Simeon is presiding over the Messiah as a child. 

There are a couple of things I think are interesting. The first is Rembrandt was a Protestant and not just that he would have been Dutch Reformed. Typically in the Reformed tradition, the second commandment means that there shouldn’t be images of Christ, or angels or other spiritual beings. I find it interesting that this piece along with many of his others feature either the Messiah as a child or other lesser-known saints just not the most well-known ones. Perhaps that might be indicative of either that doctrine hasn’t fully developed in the 1620’s quite yet or he has a softer understanding of it. This would be opposite to what the Council of Trent. The Dutch Reformed similar to the Calvinists follow the iconoclastic understanding of the second commandment. However the Council of Trent not only cements icons, and religious works of art but also ostentatiously promotes religious artwork. In Rembrandt you aren't going to see the more audacious iconography, or pictures of Christ that you would normally see in a Catholic or Eastern Orthodox church, he will paint biblical scenes that are more palatable to the doctrinal climate he is in, in the north. I think it's interesting however that he isn't exactly coloring inside the lines of reformed doctrine because on technicality he isn't exactly in lockstep with the Dutch Reformed understanding of the second commandment. Because of how popular this painting is, I might infer that the doctrine wasn't as black and white, there might have been some grey area. Kind of something interesting to think about how an artist is expressing a doctrinal grey area using the stark contrast of tenebrism.    

The next part that I enjoy with most medieval, renaissance and baroque pieces is how the artist portrays people from other places. It’s an interesting form of historical anachronism. So if you look at all of the people in the crowd they look like people from the Netherlands or from Northern Europe. Some people would characterize that as “white-washing” cultures, similar to how in the United States people of color were portrayed by white actors with makeup on. That’s reading into this cultural context our cultural context. That’s something we shouldn’t be doing. However Rembrandt I think is unintentionally reading his 17th century Northern European culture into 1st century Jerusalem. Historically most people didn’t leave the vicinity of where they were born, that changed slightly after a combination of the plague taking out two-thirds of Europe, and the rise of the middle class in the Renaissance. But for the most part that is true. So the context in which he interprets the bible which is a Hebrew/Aramaic document combined with Hellenistic influences is through his upbringing in the Netherlands. He doubtless has seen men, women, and children. So as an artist trying to communicate what people are like over in Jerusalem, he is trying to make a comparison to how they are in the Netherlands. There are people in the Netherlands, there are people in Jerusalem, they probably are more like us than different.

The idea of trying to keep things in their cultural context and portraying things accurately in the modern sense is still developing, so that is something you can see in the art itself. It’s more simplistic as in "the people I am painting are people, and the people over there probably look like the people here." As an aside it’s something you can see in iconography as you move farther west from Jerusalem how the Saints and the Messiah look more like western Europeans. 

This work uses color both symbolically but also dramatically. When you are up close to the piece the colors are rich and vibrant. If you zoom into the columns there is this opulent fiery orange highlighting the columns that otherwise look could of brown and unremarkable at a distance. It also happens to be the central column right above Jesus as well, and that detail causes it to pop out while the columns on the left are pushed back by earth tones. That central column when you look at it alone almost seems to glow. 

Rembrandt when it comes to the crowd of people seems to using some kind of impressionistic brushwork. Because he is giving the impression of people and their faces are basically glorified smudges, when you look closely at them. That’s perfectly fine because that lack of detail contrasts with the central figures which draws your eye to the center where there is lots of detail. In the center we see some of the only use of gold, blue, violet, and pink. These contrast with the earth tones and shadow in the background. 

The violet or purple or magenta depending on how you want to identify Simeon's robes is important in an Ancient Near East context. Violet dye typically came from snails from Tyre, and the shades on Simeon are shades of Tyrian purple. Purple takes significance because of how difficult it is to get as a royal color, culminating later in titles like Basil II Porphyrogennetos (my favorite Byzantine Emperor or Basileus), where Porphyrogennetos means "from the purple." Rembrandt knows this context of purple and I would infer this is deliberate on his part. I think to make Simeon who is not only called out as righteous, as kind of a person who has kingly qualities adoring Jesus. At the time, Israel didn’t have a king so the idea of someone who is kingly submitting to Christ seems to fit the narrative of what the artist is trying to communicate.   

References:

Rembrandt van rijn simeon's song of praise. (n.d.). Retrieved June 24, 2024, from https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/our-collection/artworks/145-simeon-s-song-of-praise/

van de Wetering, E. (2024, May 29). Rembrandt - dutch master, leiden period, baroque art. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved June 24, 2024, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rembrandt-van-Rijn/The-Leiden-period-1625-31