By this mode of reasoning Rembrandt has a higher place than Raffaelle. But a very little reflection will serve to show us that these particularities cannot be nature: for how can that be the nature of man, in which no two individuals are the same? It plainly appears that as a work is conducted under the influence of general ideas or partial it is principally to be considered as the effect of a good or a bad taste. As beauty therefore does not consist in taking what lies immediately before …
PAINTING 95 Rembrandt The great Ecce Homo (etching of 1650) is an analogous case. As is known, the schema of the composition dates back to a Cinquecentist, Lucas van Leyden. A house wall and a terrace before it, seen frontally; people who have taken up their stand side by side in rows on and in front of the terrace—how are we to get a baroque picture out of all that? We learn with Rembrandt that it is not the subject but the treatment which matters. While Lucas van Leyden exhausts …
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Made in the seventeenth century, like Self-Portrait Drawing at a Window.