Exhibition review: Rembrandt And The Passion, Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

Rembrandt And The Passion

Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow

* * * * *

Small is beautiful, and that is as true of exhibitions as anything else. Sometimes the close focus that a small show can offer is more telling than the more diffuse impact of a blockbuster. Indeed, one of the most memorable exhibitions I have seen in recent years was Cézanne’s Card Players at the Courtauld Gallery in London. It was focused on that single painting. As a university gallery with a superb collection, the Hunterian is in a similar position to the Courtauld and with an exhibition space of much the same size, it has been following a similar strategy.

Its latest exhibition, Rembrandt and the Passion, likewise focuses on a single picture. Rembrandt’s sketch of the Entombment is one of the gems of the collection. It is called a sketch because it is manifestly unfinished, but as the exhibition explores the picture, its history and its relationship to Rembrandt’s other work, it seems clear that it is not actually a sketch for something, but rather a picture that Rembrandt took to a point that pleased him and stopped so as not to spoil it by overworking it. There is one important fact about the picture that allows us to be certain that he did not simply abandon it unfinished for lack of interest.

One of the most significant documents we have about Rembrandt sprang from his misfortune. He went bankrupt in 1656 and so his goods were inventoried, room by room. He had one room devoted to art, his kunst caemer, or museum, in which he displayed his own art, but also works by others. He had an extensive collection, including a great many prints and drawings. Indeed, they were his principal route to knowledge of art in the wider world. The exhibition explores aspects of this collection and the use he made of it, especially later on from his admiration of the classicising art of the Renaissance.

From this inventory, we not only know that he kept the Entombment sketch at least until his bankruptcy sale, but also that it was not displayed in his museum, but in his aegter caemer, his living room. Of all Rembrandt’s extraordinary œuvre, it was this little picture that he chose to have by him in the room he shared with his family. This would make it an object of great interest, even if in its quiet solemnity its presence was not already so commanding.

The picture is almost in monochrome. The scene is set apparently within the tomb, certainly in some dark and cavernous underground space. The principal light comes from a lamp held by a woman kneeling beside the body of Christ. This has a blanket wrapped around it. One man, standing, is using this to lift the body. A second man kneels to take the weight of the upper torso. A third figure who might be a woman kneels at Christ’s feet. Others stand nearby while beyond, more shadowy figures are seen approaching. The scene is divided between light and shadow, but Rembrandt does not exploit contrast to dramatic effect as he might once have done. Rather, he uses the light and shadow to create an atmosphere of stillness and awe.

That is a quality which links the picture to a group of works representing the Passion that he did in the 1650s. These include two etchings that are among his greatest masterpieces, Christ Presented to the People and the Three Crosses. There is also an etching of the Entombment from this date, so dark it is scarcely legible. But all these and other works have in common a contemplative stillness which the exhibition suggests convincingly Rembrandt was helped to achieve by the example of Raphael and especially of Mantegna, whose works he studied in his collection of engravings and drawings. A 15th-century Italian is not an obvious model for a 17th-century Dutch artist, but by a number of telling comparisons the exhibition shows that what Rembrandt learned from this perhaps unlikely source was the power of formal control; that passion can be best articulated, not by emphasis, but by restraint, that dignity lends force.

This shift is demonstrated by the examination here of the earlier history of Rembrandt’s deep engagement with the story of the Passion. In 1636, and so still early in his career, one of his major commissions was for a set of paintings of the scenes of the Passion for the Stadholder, Frederik Hendrik of Orange. The commission came through his secretary and Rembrandt’s patron, Constantijn Huygens – who may have set up a competition between Rembrandt and his friend Jan Lievens. The Entombment from this series has been borrowed for the exhibition. In general terms there is a relationship between the two pictures, but where they differ is in the overall mood. Even at such a solemn moment, and the apparent finality of the death and burial of Christ is the darkest moment in the whole gospel story, there is a certain restlessness in Rembrandt’s treatment, a need to be emphatic. He had a relationship with Rubens, his most successful contemporary, though in the other camp, but it was not one of imitation, but rather of emulation and indeed critique. (His early prints seem to have been made with Rubens’s success in publishing his own work in print form.) In his Descent from the Cross, he takes Rubens on directly. Rubens’s beautiful modello for his huge altarpiece of the subject in Antwerp has been borrowed from the Courtauld. Beside its almost serene beauty, Rembrandt defiantly declares his own position to be very different. Nothing is ideal. Instead of Christ’s classical torso and the balletic posturing of those lifting him down from the cross that Rubens paints, Rembrandt’s Christ is emphatically limp and dead. Those attending him are struggling with the slippery awkwardness of a real dead body.

Rembrandt’s religion is set firmly in the world of experience, but that is not simple either. You see this most clearly in Christ Presented to the People, one of his most dramatic compositions from the Passion in these early years. Rembrandt lived through a time when the burning of embassies in the name of outraged religion would seem quite mild compared to the atrocities committed in religious wars the name of God. In his picture. Pilate is plainly secular. He simply wants shot of these incomprehensible fanatics, the Pharisees, who are as fierce as any Taleban. Rembrandt not only personifies the ugliness of their religious self-righteousness, however. He also characterises the hypocrisy and deviousness that it breeds. Think Holy Willie’s Prayer, or a mullah in Pakistan trying to incriminate a Christian girl.

Which takes us back to the picture in question. The two figures standing above Christ, even Christ’s own face, which is so corpse-like that a later engraver did not recognise the picture’s religious subject, are specific in the way we see in the early passion pictures. But the rest of the picture is broader, and above all the whole mood is quite different. The answer seems to be the picture was begun in the 1630s, but finished 20 years later.

Perhaps that’s why Rembrandt kept it by him. It spoke to him of the distance he had travelled, but also of how consistent he had been. Perhaps, too, he sensed what we can see in this little picture. For it marks the moment when the virtues of Christianity, compassion and respect for the individual, began to pass into ordinary life, leaving behind the bigotry which can so easily disfigure religion. The mood in the painting is one of deep reverence, but this is not reverence as a formal sentiment appropriate to religion. It is reverence as the natural compassionate human response to the spectacle of deep feeling and great grief, and so it is appropriate to all humanity.

• Until 2 December