Saturday, February 25, 2006
Rembrandt was born
...400 years ago. Holland will be celebrating his birthday throughout 2006. I was just thinking about his timeline and a recent unrelated conversation about pop culture. I know I'm no Rembrandt, but I think it might be a useful exercise to write down my own timeline and tack it up somewhere. I can edit it as time goes on. It will look right at home among my growing collection of odd cards.
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4 comments:
Perhaps it's not so much editing your timeline as creating it? Plenty of metaphor to explore there. For example, I like the idea that when your timeline interacts with others' timelines, you weave something wonderful. It's complex, creative, and continuous.
Good point, Pete.
I like that idea of weaving.
Your Rembrandt enthusiasm provoked me to spend a "quiet day" in the store, looking at anything I could find about him. A hasty review of the Dutch and Flemish painters was in order. So far as the Dutch were concerned, the seventeenth century could be described as a period of great prosperity for the new republic, during which any number of the burgher class wanted their likenesses recorded for posterity. In the painters of the time, the bourgeoisie, the middle and artisan classes, and homely subjects really come into their--because there was a huge market for the art, though most of the painters had "day jobs." Rembrandt began with what looked like a promising career of this kind,and then, to his everlasting glory, he somehow--spiritually? philosophically? was he a crypto-Spinozist?--rose above the money culture, transcended (rejected?) his own middle class, and went on to that wonderful sense of exploration in his later work. I realize these aren't necessarily painterly reasons preferring Rembrandt to, say, his contemporaries, but for myself there's a great attraction in this.
highbrow
Interesting. Thanks for that, Highbrow. A day with Rembrandt is a day well spent.
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