While Rembrandt is principally known for his paintings and drawings, it is in his etchings that he most profoundly changed the course of art history. Rembrandt kept the three artistic techniques he used almost completely separate from one another: drawing, painting and etching. The latter remained his most intimate territory, his private haven. It is safe to say that Rembrandt achieved his own, unmistakable etching style, which was imitated by artists throughout Europe.

 

In his first etchings, in which he has already developed pronounced chiaroscuro effects, he makes mostly small-format works focusing on biblical subjects or scenes of poverty. The artist repeatedly portrayed figures of beggars. In these works, two of which are shown in this exhibition (“Old Beggar Woman with a Gourd,” 1630, and “Beggar with a Wooden Leg,” 1630), the artist focuses on the movement between light and dark: indigent figures draped in rags, moving freely, they exalt the alternation of light-filled areas with dark ones. From 1639, Rembrandt began using drypoint (a diamond-point needle in which an image is incised into a copper plate without etching solution), eventually executing such works as “The Death of the Virgin” (in this exhibition) almost exclusively in this technique.

 

The artist also experimented with different qualities of ink and paper. For example, until the start of the 1640s, in keeping with the usual procedure, Rembrandt removed all the excess ink from the plate to obtain uniform and well-defined images. Later, he changed strategies, leaving a thin film of ink in such a way as to obtain, in addition to the lines, tonal-like effects in the work, or in part of it. These devices allowed Rembrandt to achieve an exceptional variety of pictorial effects.

 

The artist intentionally alternated “finished” incisions with “half-finished” ones and “barely sketched” others. This variety demonstrates Rembrandt’s skill at using a vast repertoire of technical and stylistic devices to generate a surprisingly diverse corpus of works. In some cases, the artist intervened, often using drypoint, to increase the intensity of the shadows. In other cases, he actually replaced entire figures. In the 1640s, Rembrandt’s prints seem to reflect two contrasting approaches to etching. On the one hand, we find a linear style similar to drawing, as in the work shown in this exhibition “Abraham and Isaac (1645);” on the other hand, he pursues markedly more pictorial atmospheres, as in the work, also present in this show, “The Rest on the Flight: A Night Piece (1644).” In the 1650s, his style changes noticeably, with more compact compositions, figures distributed in planes parallel to the surface, and a hatching that no longer shapes the figures, but runs across forms and objects.

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Exhibition visitors will notice how Rembrandt was able to exploit the quasi-mystic power of black ink on paper. The paper is the source of the light, whether in the more worked-on areas or in the sketchier or even arid ones. The effect is like suddenly being torn from the ordinary conditions of sensory life, which in painting, instead, find room, at least somewhat, through the colors. Light and shade seem to beckon to one another in a two-way conversation, an ambiguous mingling, without forgetting that everything seems to be dictated by the light, natural in defining objects according to the “laws” of perspective and “shading,” and supernatural for its strange intensity, which seems to conjure up confused images in the observer.