¿Indios en Holanda?
Today I visited the Lakenhal Museum in Leiden with a Secondary School friend who had returned from the Far East to see his parents here. We went to see the exhibition "Rembrandt's Mother, Myth adn Reality" that was held because 2006 will be the 400th anniversery of Rembrandt van Rijn who - as you all knew, of course - was born in Leiden. This exhibition had nice paintings, some minor works by the Master himself but mostly works by his pupils, especially Gerard Dou and Frans van Mieris, and the free audio-tour was very repetitive, almost emphasising that the theme of the exhibition was somewhat weak. The thing is that we don't really know whether this old woman that appears so often in his paintings and etches actually is Rembrandt's Mother. And the evidence for his Father's, Brother's and Sister's featuring as models is even weaker.
However, there were some fascinating things I found in other paintings in the collections. For instance there was the idiosyncratic (eigenwijze, originele) way in which Hell was portrayed in the Last Judgement of Lucas van Leijden and in similar paintings from the same period and environment. Hell was a Giant Fish, and his mouth was the entrance to it. The rest of the scenes was classic Jeroen Bosch stuff with marvellously fantastic devil creatures, but Hell a Fish? Of course my mind then goes on to think, nay scream: "Pagan stuff!"(I always hope to find clues of a pagan past in medieaval paintings, texts etc.) "Obviously they're somehow associating Jormungand(r) with Hell! (Lady Hel is Jormungand's (half-?)sister)" Can somebody check my wildly-running imagination? Anna? Lani?
Anyway, I called this piece "Indians in Holland?". I'll get to that bit now. In the Lakenhall was also this painting by Rembrandt's Amsterdam teacher Pieter Lastman called "the Baptism of the Eunuch" (1612; in Dutch: Doop van de Kamerling, click the links for the bible story), in which the Apostle Philip baptises a Eunuch in the service of Queen Candace of Ethiopia and this Ethiopian is obviously depicted a sub-Saharan black man. But his equally black servant (holding the book Isaiah the Eunuch had been reading in) is dressed rather oddly: around his head is a feathery head dress you very often see in illustrations of (Brazilian) Indians (e.g. Montaigne's "On Cannibals", 1580) and what is that bird another black servant is holding, all the way to the left? A Macaw? That's not a sub-saharan bird.
Immediately I thought about this article I read for my last paper, I forgot the exact title, but it was a chapter in a book with a title along the lines of "the Stranger in Shakespeare" and it dealt especially with the character Caliban in "the Tempest", a play that was probably written at the same time as Lastman's painting was made (± 1612). This character, the article argued, merged the new 'savages' that had recently been discovered over the last century in both sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas into some sort of primordial nature force (literally: Caliban is clearly a magical, super-natural figure), encountered on a virgin island by the white man Prospero and subsequently enslaved.
Now how is this possible? The ressemblences between the portrayal of these 'savages', these black/indian Others in the painting and the play are quite uncanny, at least at first glance... If I find out more about this, I'll report; suggestions welcome.
Today I visited the Lakenhal Museum in Leiden with a Secondary School friend who had returned from the Far East to see his parents here. We went to see the exhibition "Rembrandt's Mother, Myth adn Reality" that was held because 2006 will be the 400th anniversery of Rembrandt van Rijn who - as you all knew, of course - was born in Leiden. This exhibition had nice paintings, some minor works by the Master himself but mostly works by his pupils, especially Gerard Dou and Frans van Mieris, and the free audio-tour was very repetitive, almost emphasising that the theme of the exhibition was somewhat weak. The thing is that we don't really know whether this old woman that appears so often in his paintings and etches actually is Rembrandt's Mother. And the evidence for his Father's, Brother's and Sister's featuring as models is even weaker.
However, there were some fascinating things I found in other paintings in the collections. For instance there was the idiosyncratic (eigenwijze, originele) way in which Hell was portrayed in the Last Judgement of Lucas van Leijden and in similar paintings from the same period and environment. Hell was a Giant Fish, and his mouth was the entrance to it. The rest of the scenes was classic Jeroen Bosch stuff with marvellously fantastic devil creatures, but Hell a Fish? Of course my mind then goes on to think, nay scream: "Pagan stuff!"(I always hope to find clues of a pagan past in medieaval paintings, texts etc.) "Obviously they're somehow associating Jormungand(r) with Hell! (Lady Hel is Jormungand's (half-?)sister)" Can somebody check my wildly-running imagination? Anna? Lani?
Anyway, I called this piece "Indians in Holland?". I'll get to that bit now. In the Lakenhall was also this painting by Rembrandt's Amsterdam teacher Pieter Lastman called "the Baptism of the Eunuch" (1612; in Dutch: Doop van de Kamerling, click the links for the bible story), in which the Apostle Philip baptises a Eunuch in the service of Queen Candace of Ethiopia and this Ethiopian is obviously depicted a sub-Saharan black man. But his equally black servant (holding the book Isaiah the Eunuch had been reading in) is dressed rather oddly: around his head is a feathery head dress you very often see in illustrations of (Brazilian) Indians (e.g. Montaigne's "On Cannibals", 1580) and what is that bird another black servant is holding, all the way to the left? A Macaw? That's not a sub-saharan bird.
Immediately I thought about this article I read for my last paper, I forgot the exact title, but it was a chapter in a book with a title along the lines of "the Stranger in Shakespeare" and it dealt especially with the character Caliban in "the Tempest", a play that was probably written at the same time as Lastman's painting was made (± 1612). This character, the article argued, merged the new 'savages' that had recently been discovered over the last century in both sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas into some sort of primordial nature force (literally: Caliban is clearly a magical, super-natural figure), encountered on a virgin island by the white man Prospero and subsequently enslaved.
Now how is this possible? The ressemblences between the portrayal of these 'savages', these black/indian Others in the painting and the play are quite uncanny, at least at first glance... If I find out more about this, I'll report; suggestions welcome.
posted by Isalicus at 14:46
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