The stoning of St. Stephen

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The Stoning of Saint Stephen (Rembrandt van Rijn)
The stoning of St. Stephen
Rembrandt van Rijn , 1625
Oil on oak
89.5 x 123.6 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts , Lyon

The stoning of St. Stephen is an oil painting by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn . It isexecuted inlandscape format on oak and was one of the earliest works by the young Rembrandt painted around 1625. Rembrandtdepictedhis own face above Stephen's head and, to the right of his raised hand, the face of his friend and colleague Jan Lievens . This makes the painting the earliest among Rembrandt's more than 75 self-portraits. The work was only discovered in 1962 by Horst Gerson in the magazine des Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon; nothing is known about its history before it was acquired in 1844.

description

History painting with self-portrait of the painter (possibly Palamedes in front of Agamemnon ), oil on wood, 90.1 × 121.3 cm, 1626, Museum De Lakenhal , Leiden

The painting shows the stoning of Stephen , as described in the Acts of the Apostles of Luke ( Acts 7.54-60  EU ). Stephen is stoned at the gates of the city of Jerusalem , in the background on the right the towers of the city can be seen. Stephen kneeling in the foreground wears a red dalmatic , his arms are spread out, his left hand raised as if in greeting, and his gaze is directed to the sky. Around him stand five men, four of them with stones in their hands raised to throw, one shown immediately after a throw. The faces of six spectators are visible between the throwers. One of them, above Stephen's head, is a self-portrait by the young Rembrandt. At the top right, in front of the city wall, there are three people who may be Jewish patriarchs and who are watching the scene. The one on the right makes a soothing gesture that he could be Gamaliel I , the teacher of Paul of Tarsus . Five people are painted in the background in the center of the picture. It is the seated young Saul , on whose lap the discarded outer garments of the stoners lie, and four companions. While the right half of the picture, with Stephanus, the stonigers and most of the spectators, is well illuminated by a light shining down from the sky, on the left there is a rider in splendid robe and on the far left edge of the picture a mounted standard bearer who is standing in the semi-darkness and watching the stoning . On the wall above the standard bearer's head, at the upper edge of the picture, the painting is monogrammed and dated with R f.1625 (for Rembrandt fecit 1625 , German: Rembrandt made it 1625 ). The monogram is accepted as authentic in research, despite clear differences to the signatures from 1626 onwards.

Rembrandt first painted the main characters in the right part of the painting, and then filled in the free spaces between them with portraits, including his self-portrait, and with landscape parts. This is an essential difference to the history painting in Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden , which was painted in layers from the background to the front in 1626 and whose figures in the foreground were often painted over existing elements. This history painting shows only partially in the background the dense staggering of the figures, which characterizes the stoning . Other early works by Rembrandt, in which the figures are similarly packed, are Balaam and the donkey in the Musée Cognacq-Jay in Paris and Christ drives the money changers out of the temple in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, both painted in 1626. The painting is determined by the strong contrast between the left half of the picture in the semi-darkness and the right half of the picture illuminated by a beam of light. Before Rembrandt, Adam Elsheimer depicted St. Stephen in a ray of light shining down from heaven in his stoning of St. Stephen . It is unclear whether Rembrandt knew this work, but no further borrowings from Elsheimer are visible.

The painting has the format 89.5 × 123.6 cm and is painted with oil paint on oak wood with a horizontal grain. This format corresponds to that of the Leiden history painting , which also contains a hidden self-portrait of Rembrandt. The base consists of three boards that have widths of 29.5 cm, 29 cm and 29 cm from top to bottom. The middle board has two cracks on the left, one of which is 31 cm long. A wooden parquet on the back was replaced in the second half of the 20th century by a support structure made of glued wooden blocks and rods made of stainless steel. The yellowish-brown primer shows through in some places. The analysis of a cross-section of the primer revealed that a 35 micrometer thick layer, presumably made of lime and glue, was applied first. A thinner layer of white lead with brown color pigments was applied to this. In this, The Stoning of Saint Stephen agrees with other early works by Rembrandt. The paint layer is in good overall condition, the brown shades have suffered somewhat and there are cracks of varying strength in different places .

background

Coriolanus and the Mothers of Rome , Pieter Lastman , oil on panel, 81 × 133 cm, 1622, Trinity College Dublin
The stoning of St. Stephen , after Pieter Lastman , black chalk, 29.5 × 36.4 cm, 1630 to 1640, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin

In 1620 Rembrandt began a three and a half year training with the painter Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburgh from Leiden , who was trained in Italy and is known for his depictions of hell . It is possible that Rembrandt learned from him how to play with light and shadow, which later characterized his work and is already echoed here in the seemingly illuminated stoning scene. In 1624 Rembrandt went to Amsterdam to study for six months with Pieter Lastman , who exerted a greater artistic influence on Rembrandt than van Swanenburgh. The stoning of St. Stephen was considered the earliest surviving work of the young Rembrandt for decades, as his monogram and the date of 1625 are generally accepted as authentic. The picture has lost this rank to The Five Senses , but the small self-portrait is still Rembrandt's earliest known self-portrait.

The Dutch art historian Ben Broos sees in Rembrandt's depiction of the horseman and the left stoner a loan from a history painting painted in 1622 by his teacher Pieter Lastman, which depicts the reception of the Roman mothers by the general Coriolanus. In Lastman, a rider is also the dominant figure in the left half of the picture, accompanied by a lance bearer, whose position in Rembrandt's painting is taken by the left stoner. Another loan, in the case of another painting by Lastman, which has now been lost, could be the design with the towers of Jerusalem in the background and the seated Saul. In the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin there is a chalk drawing based on this painting, which suggests a corresponding conclusion. In The Stoning of Stephen , and in other early works with religious or historical motifs, Rembrandt's desire to become a great history painter was expressed.

The Feast of Esters , Jan Lievens , oil on canvas, 163.8 × 130.8 cm, ca.1625, North Carolina Museum of Art , Raleigh

The employees of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) see the first volume of their corpus also borrowed from Lastman's Coriolanus , but they assume that the figures in the shadow on the left were more influenced by Jan Lievens ' Feast of Esther painted around 1625 . In the past, the feast of Esther was attributed to Rembrandt.

Self-portrait of Rembrandt, above the head of St. Stephen

Self-portraits occupy a large space in Rembrandt's work throughout his life as an artist. During the years up to 1631 Rembrandt painted, drew or etched more than 20 of his more than 75 known self-portraits. In the stoning of St. Stephen , he placed a small self-portrait among the audience for the first time. These hidden self-portraits were initially only minor characters. A few years later, in the erection of the cross painted in 1633 in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Rembrandt undoubtedly portrayed himself as one of the executioners of Christ. In this phase Rembrandt used the self-portraits to experimentally depict different states of mind. In the case of the stoning , Rembrandt depicted himself with a face contorted with horror; later self-portraits show him again and again laughing, pensive, or moved by a different mood. The self-portraits were not only used to advertise customers, but also, and above all, as a practice area to learn how to depict deep emotions for his history pictures. Like his own portrait, Rembrandt repeatedly included portraits of people close to him in his pictures. The face to the right of Stephen's raised hand was identified as Rembrandt's friend and colleague Jan Lievens.

reception

The painting was only discovered in 1963 by Horst Gerson in the magazine of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon . Gerson published his find in two art magazines in 1962 and 1963. In Kurt Bauch's catalog raisonné of the paintings published in 1966, The Stoning of Saint Stephen was listed with the number 41 and recognized as the original. He was followed by Gerson, who in 1968 assigned the painting No. 2 in his catalog raisonné and listed it as No. 531A in his revision of the catalog raisonné by Abraham Bredius . In 1982 the painting was included by the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) as the earliest picture surely painted by Rembrandt with the number A 1 in the first volume of the Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings . At this point in time, the authenticity of the cycle The Five Senses was not considered proven, so the three pictures known at the time were classified as the first three works in group B. Christian Tümpel gave the painting the number 33 in his catalog raisonné, the sixth volume of the Corpus lists it as number 5.

The art historian Gary Schwartz sees Rembrandt as one of the most outstanding visual interpreters of the Holy Scriptures due to the multitude of religious motifs in his work. He also regards it as a forerunner of ecumenism (Schwartz uses the term ecumenism ) because it accepts orders from both Protestant and Catholic customers . Rembrandt's closeness to Catholicism is expressed in depictions such as that of his son Titus as a Franciscan ( Rembrandt's son Titus in a monk's habit , 1660, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam ). The stoning of St. Stephen connects Rembrandt with the moderate Reformation, the Remonstrants . In the years before Rembrandt painted his stoning , leading representatives of the Remonstrants had been executed or driven out. The Leiden history painting with the painter's self-portrait was also regarded as a counterpart to the stoning of St. Stephen because of the parallels - for example the stoning of the protagonist, the format and the embedding of a self-portrait - with the hypothetical title Palamedes before Agamemnon . Both paintings were then commissioned by the Leiden philologist, historian and writer Petrus Scriverius , who adhered to the Remonstrant faith and related both pictures to the dispute between Moritz von Orange and his opponent Johan van Oldenbarnevelt , who was executed in 1619 .

Provenance

The painting was acquired at auction by the Musée des Beaux-Arts in 1844. Details about this sale and the history of the painting are not known.

Further adaptations of the motif by Rembrandt

The stoning of St. Stephen , etching, 9.5 × 8.5 cm, 1635, Rijksprentenkabinet , Amsterdam
The stoning of St. Stephen , pen drawing, 12.4 × 25.5 cm, 1655 to 1660, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin

In 1635 Rembrandt made a small-format etching, the composition of which, with the densely packed figures and Stephanus caught by a beam of light, is very similar to the right half of the painting. Several museums have copies, the plate is still preserved. In the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin there is a pen drawing made between 1655 and 1660, with which Rembrandt depicts the motif in a sketchy manner, but whose Stephanus kneels down on the floor and has no other parallels to the painting.

Exhibitions (chronological)

  • Wallraf-Richartz-Museum , Cologne, Germany. Exhibition triumph and death of the hero. European history painting, from Rubens to Manet , October 30, 1987 to January 10, 1988
  • Kunsthaus Zurich , Switzerland. Exhibition triumph and death of the hero. European history painting, from Rubens to Manet , March 3, 1988 to April 24, 1988
  • Musée des Beaux-Arts , Lyon, France. Exhibition Triomphe et mort du héros , May 19, 1988 to July 17, 1988
  • Fondation Custodia / Collection Frits Lugt , Paris, France. Exhibition Tableaux flamands et hollandais du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon , 1991
  • Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, France. Exhibition Flandre et Hollande au siècle d'or. Chefs-d'oeuvre des Musées de Rhône-Alpes , April 25, 1992 to July 12, 1992
  • Gemäldegalerie , Berlin, Germany. Rembrandt exhibition . Genius in search , August 4, 2006 to November 5, 2006 (not in the catalog)
  • Museo del Prado , Madrid, Spain. Rembrandt exhibition . Pintor de historias , October 15, 2008 to January 6, 2009
  • Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, France. Exhibition car portraits. De Rembrandt au selfie , March 26, 2016 to June 26, 2016 (not at the other locations of this exhibition)
  • Musée Jacquemart-André , Paris, France. Rembrandt intimate exhibition , September 16, 2016 to January 23, 2017

Web links

Commons : The Stoning of Saint Stephen  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (Ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. I. 1625-1631. Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag, Boston, London 1982, ISBN 978-94-009-7519-4 , Work A 1 The stoning of S. Stephen , pp. 67-73.
  2. ↑ a b Rembrandt, De steniging van de Heilige Stefanus, 1625 gedateerd on the website of the RKD - Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis , accessed on August 22, 2019.
  3. ^ Ingrid Jost: A Newly Discovered Painting by Adam Elsheimer. In: The Burlington Magazine 1966, Vol. 108, No. 754, pp. 2-7, JSTOR 874755 .
  4. ^ Ernst van de Wetering: Rembrandt, a biography. In: Gemäldegalerie der Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Ed.): Rembrandt. Genius in search. DuMont Literature and Art, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-8321-7694-2 , pp. 21–49.
  5. ↑ BPJ Broos : Rembrandt and Lastman's "Coriolanus". The History Piece in 17th-Century Theory and Practice. In: Simiolus. Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 1975, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 199-228, doi: 10.2307 / 3780385 .
  6. ^ Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. I. 1625-1631, Work C 2 Esther's feast , pp. 446-460.
  7. ^ Ernst van de Wetering: Rembrandt's self-portraits: problems of authenticity and function. In: Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (Ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. IV. The self-portraits. Springer, Dordrecht 2005, ISBN 1-4020-3280-3 , pp. 89-317, especially pp. 158-178.
  8. ↑ a b Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (Ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. VI. Rembrandt's Paintings Revisited. A Complete Survey. Springer Science + Business Media, Dordrecht 2015, ISBN 978-94-017-9173-1 , p. 481.
  9. ↑ Michael Parmentier: The painted me. About Rembrandt's self-images. In: Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 1997, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 721–737, digitizedhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.pedocs.de%2Fvolltexte%2F2015%2F7003%2Fpdf%2FZfPaed_1997_5_Parmentier_Das_gemalte_Ich.pdf~GB%3D~DAZ%3ZD% 3D ~ double-sided% 3D ~ LT% 3D ~ PUR% 3D .
  10. ↑ Horst Gerson : La lapidation de Saint Etienne peinte par Rembrandt en 1625 au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon . In: Bulletin des Musées et Monuments Lyonnais 1962, Volume III, No. 4, pp. 57-62, ZDB -ID 800289-7 .
  11. ↑ Horst Gerson: A Rembrandt Discovery. In: Apollo. The international magazine of arts 1963, Vol. 77, No. 15, pp. 371-372, ISSN 0003-6536.
  12. ↑ Kurt Bauch : Rembrandt. Painting. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1966, reprint 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-005007-3 , No. 41.
  13. ^ Horst Gerson: Rembrandt paintings. Meulenhoff International, Amsterdam 1968. German: Rembrandt paintings. Complete works. Vollmer, Wiesbaden 1968, work no.2.
  14. ↑ Abraham Bredius : Rembrandt. The complete edition of the paintings. Third edition. Revised by Horst Gerson. Phaidon, London 1969, ISBN 0-7148-1341-9 , work no.531A.
  15. ^ Christian Tümpel : Rembrandt. Myth and Method. With contributions by Astrid Tümpel . Mercatorfonds, Antwerp 1986, ISBN 90-6153-165-9 .
  16. ^ Gary Schwartz : The Meanings of Rembrandt . In: Ildikó Ember et al. (Ed.): Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age . Exhibition catalog, Szépművészeti Múzeum , Budapest, October 30, 2014 - February 15, 2015, ISBN 978-615-5304-34-7 , pp. 36–57.
  17. ↑ Gabriele Groschner: The young Rembrandt in Leiden. Gabriele Groschner (Ed.): Rembrandt. Under the paint. Residenzgalerie Salzburg, November 13, 2016 - June 26, 2017. Residenzgalerie Salzburg, Salzburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-901443-43-5 , pp. 13–39.
  18. ^ Ernst Wilhelm Bredt (Ed.): Rembrandt Bible. Four volumes with 270 illustrations. Volume 4. Hugo Schmidt, Munich 1921, p. 111 and p. 142, digitized . http: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3D~IA%3Drembrandtbibelvi04remb~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3D111~ double-sided%3D~LT%3D~PUR%3D