The man with the gold helmet

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The man in the gold helmet (not assigned)
The man with the gold helmet
not assigned to 1650/1655
Oil on canvas
67.5 x 50.7 cm
State museums in Berlin

The man with the gold helmet is a portrait from the circle of the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn , which for a long time was considered to be an original of Rembrandt. It is exhibited in the Gemäldegalerie Berlin as the property of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum Association .

description

The picture shows an elderly man in front of a dark background with a striking golden glowing helmet on his head.

The helmet is the dominant pictorial object through color and light and the impasto application, against which the half-lit face and the dark background lose importance.

interpretation

The sitter is not, as is often assumed, Rembrandt's brother Adriaen. Arnold Houbraken mentions a painting of the god of war Mars by the Rembrandt pupil Heyman Dullaert , which was sold in Amsterdam as a real Rembrandt.

It should be noted that for viewers of the late 17th century, the helmet from the late 16th century was already considered an antique. This suggests that the person portrayed was intended as a warrior of the past, whose magnificent helmet was a sign of his high rank.

It is noticeable that the actual attribute became the main motif of the picture; the sitter remains anonymous. Abraham Bredius characterized the picture as a “masterful still life of a helmet”. Wilhelm von Bode was of the opinion that the motif was "only invented by Rembrandt to enhance the expression and character of the head".

painter

The Kaiser-Friedrich-Museums-Verein, as a support association of the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, acquired the picture as an autograph work by Rembrandt in 1897. In the 1970s, however, as part of the “ Rembrandt Research Project ” started in 1968, doubts arose about the authenticity of the picture. It turned out that the portrait was a workshop work and that no relative of Rembrandt's model had sat.

The man with the gold helmet has not been assigned to Rembrandt since 1986. Ernst van de Wetering reported in the Tagesspiegel about the re-evaluation of this picture and the reactions to it:

“For us, too, it was an integral part of the general Rembrandt picture. When the painting was then taken out of the frame in the restoration workshop, our eyes almost fell out of our heads. At first we thought a write-off was completely impossible and remained silent for years, because our findings were only preliminary judgments until they were written down in the research volumes. "

The questions of authenticity are controversial and provoke violent reactions. The employees of the "Rembrandt Research Project" would often have heard:

“You steal, you destroy the owner's capital. The people felt that we were taking something away from them. "

A reassignment of the image has been tried many times. In this Carel van den Pluym brought and Heyman Dullaert as a painter in the debate. The Augsburg painter Johann Ulrich Mayr , who worked in Rembrandt's workshop around 1648/1649, was also considered, as the helmet was recognized as the work of the Augsburg armory. However, it cannot be ruled out that the painter of the gold helmet did not belong to the inner circle, but to the wider circle of Rembrandt.

Rembrandt's signature

The Berlin art historian Werner Busch stated that according to the statutes of the 17th century, “the master had the right to sell everything manufactured in his studio under his name”. This also explains that there are works with Rembrandt's signature that he had practically not given a hand:

“There are Rembrandt pictures that are more Rembrandt than Rembrandt himself - like the man with the gold helmet in Berlin. His thick impasto, which produces potentiated shine, drives a Rembrandt principle beyond itself. That is precisely why the picture could become so famous, for a certain time it was the epitome of Rembrandt without being from Rembrandt. "

literature

  • Michiel Franken, Kristin Bahre, Jan Kelch : Rembrandt. Genius in search. DuMont, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-8321-7694-2 .
  • Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin: Catalog of the paintings from the 13th to 18th centuries. Century. Berlin 1975.
  • Saam Nystad: The gold helmet. In: Yearbook of the Berlin museums . Vol. 41, 1999, pp. 245-250 (on the possible template of the helmet, see an article in: Der Spiegel , May 29, 2000).
  • Jan Kelch (ed.): The man with the gold helmet. Documentation by the Gemäldegalerie in cooperation with the Rathgen research laboratory SMPK and the Hahn-Meitner-Institut Berlin. Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-88609-157-0 .
  • Ernst A. Busche: The man with the gold helmet. New insights into the provenance of the painting . In: Yearbook of the Berlin museums. Vol. 75, 2015, pp. 99-106.

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Both quotations from Saam Nystad: The gold helmet. In: Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 41 (1999), pp. 245–250, here p. 245.
  2. ↑ a b Quote from van de Wetering after Nicola Kuhn: The principle of connoisseurship. In: Der Tagesspiegel , January 29, 2006. Retrieved August 15, 2010.
  3. ↑ Werner Busch: Really Rembrandt? 400 years after his birth, the painter is still puzzling research. In: Tagesspiegel supplement of the Free University of Berlin , June 24, 2006. Retrieved on May 24, 2014.