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拍品专文
This large etching is one of Rembrandt’s most theatrical and baroque. It depicts the extra-biblical story of the death of Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, recounted in Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea. According to Jacobus, an angel appeared to Mary to announce her imminent death. At Mary's request the Apostles, who were preaching the gospel in every corner of the known world, were miraculously transported to Mount Zion to attend her deathbed. There Jesus, accompanied by the angelic host, appeared to receive the soul of his mother.
Rembrandt’s immediate inspirations were Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts The Birth of the Virgin (B. 80) and The Death of the Virgin (B. 93), the series of The Life of the Virgin, published in Nuremberg in 1511, a set of which Rembrandt had acquired in 1638, a year before making this etching. Most notably, the side view of Saint Anne lying in the canopied bed in Dürer’s Birth of the Virgin seems to have been the model for Rembrandt’s Mary, while the angelic visitor in the woodcut was perhaps the cue for Rembrandt’s heavenly host. Another source may have been a stained-glass window of The Death of the Virgin by Dirck Crabeth (active circa 1540 -75) in the Grote Kerk in Amsterdam, which Rembrandt would have had many opportunities to see and to observe the unusual detail of the seated man, back turned to the viewer, reading scripture in the foreground.
Although drawing from disparate visual precedents, Rembrandt’s depiction is in many ways idiosyncratic. The depiction of the Virgin and the crowd around her bed is notable for its realism: 'In one detail Rembrandt’s reading is unlike all previous ones: Mary is no blissfully smiling, youthful apparition, but a sick old woman’ (Hinterding et al., 2000, p. 164). The protracted illness of Rembrandt’s own wife, Saskia van Uylenburgh, to which she would succumb at the age of only 29 in 1642, and the existence of numerous sketches of a bed-ridden woman from this time (see lot 12), suggests a very personal dimension to this print. Rembrandt broadens those in attendance to include other mourners besides the apostles at the bedside, including a doctor who takes the pulse of the exhausted Mary. He also eschews explicit reference to the Catholic sacrament of the Last Rites traditional in depictions of the subject, such as a candle being placed in the dying woman’s hands. Instead, an exotically dressed priest stands on Mary’s right, accompanied by a tonsured altar boy holding a ceremonial staff, waiting to perform their spiritual duties for the dead. Meanwhile, above the canopied bed celestial light illuminates the scene, emanating from clouds inhabited by a choir of putti and an angel with his arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome. It has been suggested that the contrast between the two halves of the print, the bedchamber and the heavenly realm above, combining realism with Baroque effervescence, reflects the complex religious landscape of Holland at this time, as Charles Rosenberg suggested: 'On the one hand, the print incorporates elements that anchor the scene in reality and that would therefore have resonated with his Calvinist contemporaries… On the other hand, Catholic viewers would have read the appearance of the angel and other celestial beings hovering above as an allusion not only to Mary’s sanctity, but also her imminent assumption’ (Rosenberg, 2017, p. 428).
Rembrandt’s immediate inspirations were Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts The Birth of the Virgin (B. 80) and The Death of the Virgin (B. 93), the series of The Life of the Virgin, published in Nuremberg in 1511, a set of which Rembrandt had acquired in 1638, a year before making this etching. Most notably, the side view of Saint Anne lying in the canopied bed in Dürer’s Birth of the Virgin seems to have been the model for Rembrandt’s Mary, while the angelic visitor in the woodcut was perhaps the cue for Rembrandt’s heavenly host. Another source may have been a stained-glass window of The Death of the Virgin by Dirck Crabeth (active circa 1540 -75) in the Grote Kerk in Amsterdam, which Rembrandt would have had many opportunities to see and to observe the unusual detail of the seated man, back turned to the viewer, reading scripture in the foreground.
Although drawing from disparate visual precedents, Rembrandt’s depiction is in many ways idiosyncratic. The depiction of the Virgin and the crowd around her bed is notable for its realism: 'In one detail Rembrandt’s reading is unlike all previous ones: Mary is no blissfully smiling, youthful apparition, but a sick old woman’ (Hinterding et al., 2000, p. 164). The protracted illness of Rembrandt’s own wife, Saskia van Uylenburgh, to which she would succumb at the age of only 29 in 1642, and the existence of numerous sketches of a bed-ridden woman from this time (see lot 12), suggests a very personal dimension to this print. Rembrandt broadens those in attendance to include other mourners besides the apostles at the bedside, including a doctor who takes the pulse of the exhausted Mary. He also eschews explicit reference to the Catholic sacrament of the Last Rites traditional in depictions of the subject, such as a candle being placed in the dying woman’s hands. Instead, an exotically dressed priest stands on Mary’s right, accompanied by a tonsured altar boy holding a ceremonial staff, waiting to perform their spiritual duties for the dead. Meanwhile, above the canopied bed celestial light illuminates the scene, emanating from clouds inhabited by a choir of putti and an angel with his arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome. It has been suggested that the contrast between the two halves of the print, the bedchamber and the heavenly realm above, combining realism with Baroque effervescence, reflects the complex religious landscape of Holland at this time, as Charles Rosenberg suggested: 'On the one hand, the print incorporates elements that anchor the scene in reality and that would therefore have resonated with his Calvinist contemporaries… On the other hand, Catholic viewers would have read the appearance of the angel and other celestial beings hovering above as an allusion not only to Mary’s sanctity, but also her imminent assumption’ (Rosenberg, 2017, p. 428).