Art History

  The Baroque era began around 1600 in Rome and quickly spread to the rest of Europe. As a style, Baroque art exaggerates motion and symbolic detail in order to create dramatic tension, grandeur, and passion. The Baroque movement was strongly supported by the Roman Catholic Church and also by the wealthy. It is separated into three periods, Early Baroque, High Baroque, and Late Baroque. Late Baroque is sometimes synonymous with the Rococo movement. Rembrandt was a painter that characterized the High Baroque period. In this short essay, I will focus on his painting, The Descent from the Cross.

 

   Rembrandt was an artist who primarily painted portraiture, landscape and narrative painting. His earlier paintings were smooth and held with the most accepted style of art at the time. His work was praised for its ability to capture the essence of a person without being insulting or degrading. As he progressed, his later works were rougher, with surfaces heavily textured by brush strokes and color palettes richer. His paintings also became increasingly darker, with light sources being jagged and dramatic. To contemporaries, Rembrandt is better known for these later paintings than he is for the refined portraits of the first half of his career.

 

   The Descent from the Cross is the first of a series of a pieces commissioned from Rembrandt by Prince Frederick Henry of Orange depicting the passion of Christ. In the painting, Rembrandt drew from and expanded on the style of Peter Paul Rubens, knowing his patron was a fan. The painting translates the descent of Christ from the cross into a modern time period, with figures clothed in the Dutch garments of the time. This would have made the painting relevant to the viewers of the time and expresses the idea that Christ is universal to all cultures ad ages. The emotion and love in the scene is captured by Rembrandt’s use of light; the central light source falls upon and almost seems to emanate from the body of Christ as he is taken down from the cross.

 

   In summary, Rembrandt was Baroque artist who is most well-known for his dramatically lit and richly textured paintings. These paintings often depict highly emotional religious, historical, or mythological scenes. One such painting as this is The Descent from the Cross. This piece was commissioned from Rembrandt in 1633. The use of lighting, composition of a central figure and expression of figure in the painting serves to set this painting apart from others of the same scene by creating a profound sense of suffering and the human condition.