Search Results

The Public Face of the Seminary

Paul C. Gutjahr

in Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy

Chapter thirty-four examines Hodge as he establishes himself as the leading professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. Through his teaching, administration, and hospitality of famous guests such as ... More

Chapter thirty-four examines Hodge as he establishes himself as the leading professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. Through his teaching, administration, and hospitality of famous guests such as William Cunningham of Scotland, Hodge shows himself to be the Seminary’s marquee figure.Less

The Long Debate

Berys Gaut

in Art, Emotion and Ethics

This chapter briefly outlines the history of the debate about art and ethics since Plato, both in popular culture and in the literary and philosophical traditions. It identifies as recurrent ... More

This chapter briefly outlines the history of the debate about art and ethics since Plato, both in popular culture and in the literary and philosophical traditions. It identifies as recurrent positions in the debate — humanism, aestheticism, and the view of art as transgression. It also distinguishes five different issues about art and ethics: the causal effects of art, public policy, conceptual, intrinsic, and structural symmetry issues. The intrinsic issue will be the one that is mainly discussed in the book. It concludes with a detailed example of ethical criticism, discussing Rembrandt's and Willem Drost's depictions of Bathsheba.Less

The Night Watch: How the Sandbank Crumbles

Harry Berger Jr.

in Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits

The most famous and certainly the weirdest of all shooter portraits, the one that most fully tests the limits of disaggregation, was not originally known as The Night Watch. It acquired that title in ... More

The most famous and certainly the weirdest of all shooter portraits, the one that most fully tests the limits of disaggregation, was not originally known as The Night Watch. It acquired that title in the late eighteenth century, partly because the picture had darkened and partly because by then night patrol was virtually the only function the militias still performed. It contains a full yard-sale display of costumes and props like those in Rembrandt's storeroom, as well as antique clothes and armor that belonged to the identified sitters. These two passages are the source of the myth that The Night Watch was considered a failure when it first appeared and that it was rejected by those who paid and sat for it. Modern commentators have routinely, though at times nervously, mentioned and dismissed the story.Less

Evasive Action: Three Ways to Shore Up the Sandbank

Harry Berger Jr.

in Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits

Because the proponents of the approaches all premise or assume that unity was a desideratum, either they ignore the disruptive features of the painting or else they allegorize them away. They ... More

Because the proponents of the approaches all premise or assume that unity was a desideratum, either they ignore the disruptive features of the painting or else they allegorize them away. They acknowledge the problems Rembrandt's compositional choices place in the way of the demands and conventions of the portrait function. The militia guilds were called not only Schutters but also Kloveniers, because in 1522 the original fourteenth-century weapon, the crossbow, was replaced by a primitive firearm called a klover. The most important function of the company may be to dine together.Less

Disaggregation as Class Conflict

Harry Berger Jr.

in Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits

Captain Cocq performs his pose with authority, as if he knows it derives both from “the tradition of Amsterdam guard Captains” and from a predominantly aristocratic tradition of full-length ... More

Captain Cocq performs his pose with authority, as if he knows it derives both from “the tradition of Amsterdam guard Captains” and from a predominantly aristocratic tradition of full-length individual portraits. But his performance only makes his relation to what goes on around and behind him more peculiar. According to Norbert Schneider, the confusion is what makes the painting special because it enables The Night Watch “to break down boundaries between the portrait and the history painting.” He argues that Rembrandt's purpose is to “impart nobility to his bourgeois clientele by showing them as historical agents, a role hitherto considered above their station.” In spite of his reliance on the clichés of class conflict, he remains sensitive to the complexity of what he describes.Less

An Odd Couple: the Ghost of Anslo's Wife

Harry Berger Jr.

in Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits

Riegl praises Rembrandt for the discipline with which he maintains the pattern of subordination that foregrounds the two officers and isolates them from the remainder of the company. Several ... More

Riegl praises Rembrandt for the discipline with which he maintains the pattern of subordination that foregrounds the two officers and isolates them from the remainder of the company. Several commentators have noted resemblances between Cocq and the figure of Cornelis Claesz. Presumably the sitters collaborate with the painter in setting the visual scene, and presumably the painting reflects their efforts to control the final product, including, no doubt, requests for alteration of details that do not suit sitters. But although the painting itself may represent sitters' efforts to control it, there are indications that it challenges such efforts. Rembrandt's competition with the sitters brings out theirs with each other.Less

Genet's chant d'amour and the Lives of the Heroes

Ann Jefferson

in Biography and the Question of Literature in France

Against the grain of the many autobiographically based readings of Genet, this chapter presents his prose writing (esp. Miracle de la rose, Notre-Dame-des Fleurs, Journal du voleur) as a series of ... More

Against the grain of the many autobiographically based readings of Genet, this chapter presents his prose writing (esp. Miracle de la rose, Notre-Dame-des Fleurs, Journal du voleur) as a series of biographical celebrations of his unlikely subjects. Genet adopts the anachronistic mode of courtly literature in order to transform his largely abject figures into glorious heroes by means of a self-consciously extravagant poetic language. The result highlights the gap between the biographical subjects portrayed and the literary medium, thus foregrounding the creative intervention of the writer. This flaunting of literariness is used by Genet as a means of disengaging his own literary project from any social or conventional consensus about literature. This is further supported by the frequent equation of homosexual love with artistic creation in his work, and is finally endorsed in his critical writings about artists such as Rembrandt and Giacometti whose skills are defined as being ultimately those of biographical portraiture.Less

A Sense of Mission

Paul C. Gutjahr

in Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy

Chapter twenty is an account of how Hodge returned from Europe a changed man. Full of confidence and new ideas, Hodge gave himself to educational reform and missions in the years immediately after ... More

Chapter twenty is an account of how Hodge returned from Europe a changed man. Full of confidence and new ideas, Hodge gave himself to educational reform and missions in the years immediately after his return. He had already been involved in missions through Princeton Seminary’s Society of Inquiry, and by the 1840s he was favoring the establishment of Presbyterian parochial schools.Less

Exemplary Figures and Diagrammatic Thought

Christopher D. Johnson

in Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images

This chapter offers a close reading of Warburg's 1926 lecture on Rembrandt, in which he crystallizes his thinking about the Baroque and “superlatives” in art and lays the groundwork for the final ... More

This chapter offers a close reading of Warburg's 1926 lecture on Rembrandt, in which he crystallizes his thinking about the Baroque and “superlatives” in art and lays the groundwork for the final sequence of panels in the Atlas. This lecture also directly informs panels 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, and 75 of Mnemosyne and helps him forge a novel, diagrammatic form of thought that lead to his fateful encounter with Giordano Bruno. In the panels in the Atlas the notion of “metaphorical distance” is at once realized and ironized, as Warburg contemplates the ambivalent symbolism associated with Mussolini, the Eucharist, and new technology.Less

The Preacher's Wife

Harry Berger Jr.

in Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits

Wives got a better deal in pendants simply because they occupied their own picture space, and it also implies that they had enough input and influence to affect the production ratio. According to ... More

Wives got a better deal in pendants simply because they occupied their own picture space, and it also implies that they had enough input and influence to affect the production ratio. According to David Smith, painters often treat the wife in a double portrait reasonably well—so long as her pose demonstrates appropriate support and devotion, a condition that by no means excludes emphasis on her autonomy. Schama reads the visual interaction between the sitters as “a portrait of a partnership,” that is, he reads it not merely as the iconic sign of an act of posing but as the index to a more enduring “relationship” and to its “essential human truth.” As the author's modifications of Schama's reading depend on that reading, they are vulnerable to the criticism leveled by Stephanie Dickey in her important new study of Rembrandt.Less

Manual Mischief: The Loneliness of the Red Musketeer

Harry Berger Jr.

in Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits

Margaret Carroll resists the traditional view that unity was a positive value and that Rembrandt achieved it by “conveying the present-day activities of Amsterdam's militia companies and at the same ... More

Margaret Carroll resists the traditional view that unity was a positive value and that Rembrandt achieved it by “conveying the present-day activities of Amsterdam's militia companies and at the same time recalling their historical role as armed and trained troops in service to the city and the republic.” Inattention and self-absorption are suggested by other means. There is lack of coordination not only within the figure—between the slackness of the lower, gun-bearing hand and the finicky finger-work of the upper hand—but also between this sitter and the others. The obvious problem to avoid is an interpretation that reduces the sitters to unwitting targets of Rembrandt's satire.Less

Between Stad and Stadholder: Captain Cocq's Dilemma

Harry Berger Jr.

in Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' and Other Dutch Group Portraits

It is easy to imagine that, after the patrons were bowled over by its size and scale, its unparalleled technique, and its generic novelty, they would begin to examine whether it did justice to both ... More

It is easy to imagine that, after the patrons were bowled over by its size and scale, its unparalleled technique, and its generic novelty, they would begin to examine whether it did justice to both their individual likenesses and their collective project. The familiar story centers on the diminishing support given the Stadholder's “military projects” by previously sympathetic Remonstrant regents, who demanded that he reduce their military and “financial contributions to the army” because they “were better served by peace” than by his campaigns in the southern provinces. The parodic elements in The Night Watch can be kept in play as effects for which there is a plausible rationale. In providing this rationale, Carroll obviates the need for allegorization and encourages viewers to enjoy the way Rembrandt renders his portrayal of ineffectual guardsmanship gorgeously and ironically visible.Less

Self-Portraiture

Christopher S. Wood

in Self-Knowledge: A History

It is not clear that art ever offers anything like knowledge. But if it does, then one should perhaps look to the self-portrait. The self-portrait is an image of an individual created by that ... More

It is not clear that art ever offers anything like knowledge. But if it does, then one should perhaps look to the self-portrait. The self-portrait is an image of an individual created by that individual, in modern times with the aid of a mirror or a camera. Self-scrutiny in a mirror, and the effort to fix the mirror image in paint or chalk, may bring understanding about the self and its social entanglement in poses and expressions. Even study of a self-portrait produced with little effort, for example, with a camera held at arm’s length, may yield insights into aspects of character and personality masked by social performance. The possibilities and the limits of self-knowledge through self-portraiture are discussed with reference to an etched self-portrait by Rembrandt and to its democratic descendant, the “selfie.”Less

Eyes Wide Shut

in Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past

If words can be signs and signs can be faces shown or withheld, so can elements of paintings. Reading a sura is processing and responding to a “visible sign of a transcendental reality.” Visibility ... More

If words can be signs and signs can be faces shown or withheld, so can elements of paintings. Reading a sura is processing and responding to a “visible sign of a transcendental reality.” Visibility and the sign go hand in hand. A sura that tells the story of Yusuf from point to point shows rather than tells: it is a sign rather than a tale. According to one of the founders of contemporary semiotics, Charles S. Peirce, signs can do their work of signification without having to be split in signifier and signified, as continental semiotics tends to have it. The sign's elements are unstable only temporally. This chapter argues for the temporality of semiosis and for the actuality of its anchoring in philosophy. It brings Peirce, Rembrandt, and Baruch Spinoza together to further elaborate the argument for a literalism that counters fundamentalism.Less

Private Jews, Public Germans

Emily J. Levine

in Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School

Chapter seven considers to what extent the experience of German Jewish scholars in Hamburg differed from that of Berlin or Frankfurt. To this end, it investigates how Warburg, Cassirer, and Panofsky ... More

Chapter seven considers to what extent the experience of German Jewish scholars in Hamburg differed from that of Berlin or Frankfurt. To this end, it investigates how Warburg, Cassirer, and Panofsky navigated the scholarly choices of private scholar and Privatdozent and managed their rise to visibility in their respective fields, art history and philosophy. Focusing on a posthumously published lecture, delivered by Panofsky in 1921 titled, “Rembrandt and Judaism,” as well as Warburg’s carefully managed public response to Cassirer’s receiving a job offer from the University of Frankfurt, this chapter offers a contrast to the traditional portrait of humanist German-Jewish scholars as deluded and naïve. Rather, this chapter argues that a different view of Jewishness and Germanness emerges from the distinction between private and public worlds, and from an understanding of the political positioning these scholars of symbols undertook when presenting their ideas to different audiences.Less

The Unframing Image

Eyal Peretz

in The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame

The book opens its investigation of the category of the “off” by examining a paradigmatic painting of the early modern period, Rembrandt’s The Sacrifice of Isaac. The painting is shown to involve a ... More

The book opens its investigation of the category of the “off” by examining a paradigmatic painting of the early modern period, Rembrandt’s The Sacrifice of Isaac. The painting is shown to involve a reflection on the historical significance of the modern category of the “off”. The key element is the painting’s attempt to differentiate the dimension of the outside the frame (the “off”) of a modern painting from the outside the frame in a sacred image. While in the sacred image the outside is conceived as the divine, in the modern painting the outside marks the disappearance of the divine. This new dimension of the “off” is also conceived, due to its critique of the logic of the divine, as what allows for a liberation from the logic of sacrifice that guided the monotheistic religions.Less