Rembrandt: The Painter Thinking. Ernst van de Wetering. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. xi + 336 pp. €89.
small-scale, particularizing aesthetic, so very distinct from the undifferentiated masses surging forth in Albrecht Altdorfer’s monumental treatment of the same subject. Jan’s relationship to his father—whom he never knew—preoccupied him. Much as the father had emulated his predecessor Hieronymus Bosch but in his own recognizable vocabulary, the son reworked his father’s legacy into his own idiom, condensing the older artist’s copious designs into his miniscule compositions. Honig proposes that this practice engenders a fragmented means of viewing the vistas, where the audience looks detail by detail rather than immediately envisioning the entirety. Significantly, those two modes of thought could be productively conjoined as, for example, when Jan and Rubens collaborated on the Mauritshuis’s Paradise with the Fall of Man, where Jan’s piecemeal perspective engaged in a fruitful dialogue with Rubens’s more synthetic approach. Honig’s text is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, and articulate presentation of a relatively unfamiliar aesthetic, that of miniaturization. I am convinced that Jan Brueghel the Elder was both a talented and successful practitioner of that technique. But I am not convinced that a fragmented means of viewing these copper plates is engendered by their miniscule size. How else can one look at Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow, his Haymaking, and especially his largest panel, The Procession to Calvary? Generations of viewers have stood in front of these panels savoring the details: the chimney on fire, the game of shoot-the-popinjay, or the young boy wading barefoot across a stream on the way to Calvary on a chilly March afternoon. Conceivably one of Jan’s unheralded accomplishments was to apply that fragmented approach his father had practiced onto his own diminutive designs.