Self-portrait as Zeuxis
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| Self-portrait as Zeuxis |
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| Rembrandt van Rijn , around 1663 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 82.5 × 65 cm |
| Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud |
The self-portrait as Zeuxis , also known as self-portrait, laughing in old age or self-portrait with a cane , is a painting by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn . The picture was painted by the artist around 1663. Today it hangs in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne .
Image description
The 82.5 × 65 cm painting shows a half-profile portrait of the painter Rembrandt van Rijn against a dark background. In the hands, not shown, he is holding a vaguely recognizable cane , and a section of a portrait or a statue can be seen on the left edge of the picture.
The old man in the foreground is the only object in the picture that is strongly illuminated, especially the face and there the forehead is strongly illuminated. He is shown laughing with his mouth half open and his eyebrows raised. The sitter wears a cap on his head and a gold scarf over his shoulders. The neck is adorned with a chain with a large, seemingly valuable pendant, and a flash of light on the left earlobe suggests a gold ear stud. The posture of the man is bent slightly forward and his line of sight is directed towards the viewer of the picture.
Origin and interpretation
Different interpretations
In the past, the painting was viewed as a self-portrait as Democritus laughing and facing the weeping Heraclitus . This subject was supposed to portray laughing and crying as the two contrary reactions to the chaotic world. Another interpretation sees in the figure on the edge a herm of the god's terminus , which as the god of boundary stones also symbolized death and is taken up in this form in the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam . Accordingly, the portrait should represent a memento mori , a kind of reflection on death; at the same time it was assumed that the picture should have been created in 1669, the year Rembrandt died.
Self-portrait as Zeuxis
Today we are sure that the picture was taken in the early 1660s; It is dated to 1663. Today it is also assumed that Rembrandt represented himself in the painting as the classical painter Zeuxis of Herakleia . Zeuxis was one of the most famous and important painters of ancient Greece. He lived towards the end of the 5th and first half of the 4th century BC. BC and was best known for his competition with Parrhasios , in which both painters tried to outdo each other with the deception of the authenticity of their paintings. He was also known for trying to paint the perfect picture of a woman by combining the most beautiful body parts of different women into the perfect body.
The episode from Zeuxi's life chosen by Rembrandt, however, relates to the death of the historical painter. It is said that Zeuxis laughed himself to death when he was asked to portray an ugly old woman. So Zeuxis dies of the ugliness and vanity of the person he was supposed to portray. This is obviously where he turns his gaze, i.e. exactly at the position of the viewer. In this way he identifies the viewer as the vain person about whom he gets his fits of laughter - the painter laughs at the viewer accordingly and sees himself as superior to him. The superiority only lasts until he dies in his fit of laughter. The irony becomes self-irony and he or the depicted Zeuxis becomes a fool of the supposedly wise person in his picture.
The motif of the zeuxis was taken up by Rembrandt's pupil Arent de Gelder and implemented in a painting of his own. De Gelder also painted himself in the Pose des Zeuxis, but stands in front of the easel with the portrait, which is already well advanced. The model, the old woman, is also visible, which means that the viewer is actually assigned the role of a viewer in this scene.
“At de Gelder, however, not only the picture of an old woman is visible, but also the model. Not with Rembrandt, however. Now the painter does not turn because of his picture, but because of the reality that he has to depict. In this sense, in Rembrandt's work, we ourselves have to occupy that place in reality outside the picture that so tickles the painter's diaphragm. In short: Rembrandt laughs at his clients, his customers - and through the centuries also at us. An aging painter who, in his wisdom, can laugh at the world in all its vanity. "
X-rays of the mouth area show that the painter was not shown laughing in the first version, but only smiling. It can therefore be assumed that it was only while he was working on the painting that he decided to take on the role of the ancient painter - nothing is known about his original intention.
Classification in the work of Rembrandt
Rembrandt van Rijn painted around 90 self-portraits during his life, starting with portraits in a young age through to various old age portraits. The self-portrait as Zeuxis is one of the last self-portraits, perhaps the oldest, and was created only six years before his death in 1669 at the age of about 57. To this day it is considered to be his most enigmatic portrait, as it differs greatly from all others and especially from his other age portraits. Classification in the work is accordingly difficult and can probably only be understood by looking at Rembrandt's biography.
In his self-portraits, Rembrandt tried to portray himself in the very positive light of the successful artist. This resulted in regular chest portraits on which Rembrandt can be recognized proudly wearing valuable robes and accessories. The first half of his life was marked by a strong social and economic rise, within a few years he became one of the most popular painters of the Dutch Golden Age . From 1638 onwards, however, this rise came to an end due to a series of personal fates, in which, within a few years, his daughter Cornelia (1638), his mother and another daughter (1640), his wife's sister Titia (1641) and his wife Saskia himself (1642 ) died. Economic bankruptcy followed in 1656 , although he still painted a few pictures in the following years. With this background one could actually consider the choice of the Zeuxis picture as self-irony - as a self-reflection of a painter who recognized his own arrogance and mortality a few years before his death.
literature
- Ekkehard Mai : Rembrandt self-portrait as Zeuxis. Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-7861-2438-8 .
- Jürgen Müller: Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn: Self-Portrait as Zeuxis, 1663 . In: Ulrich Pfisterer, Valeska von Rosen: The artist as a work of art. Self-portraits from the Middle Ages to the present . Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-010571-4 .
- Fritz Erpel: The Self-Portraits Rembrandt Henschelverlag, Berlin 1967
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Samuel Herzog: Groundless or Wise? , Feuilleton Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 10, 2003