Unidentified Brussels Workshop, The Three Fates, early 16th century, Silk, wool, and linen (fragment from a larger tapestry), 304.8 × 259.1 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Unidentified Brussels Workshop, The Three Fates, early 16th century. Silk, wool, and linen, fragment from a larger tapestry, 304.8 × 259.1 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
This imposing tapestry fragment, woven in Brussels in the early sixteenth century, represents the Three Fates, the ancient personifications of destiny. At the centre of the scene Clotho spins the thread of life, Lachesis measures its length, and Atropos, holding her shears, prepares to sever it. Beneath them lies the fallen figure of Chastity, overpowered by forces beyond human control. The subject draws on Petrarch’s I Trionfi, in which the triumph of Chastity is overturned by the greater triumph of Time and, ultimately, of Eternity. The indifferent female figures in the background heighten the contrast, suggesting the fragility of virtue when set against the inexorable power of fate.
The tapestry embodies the intellectual and artistic climate of the Renaissance, where classical mythology was reinterpreted as a vehicle for moral reflection. Produced in a Brussels workshop, it would originally have formed part of a much larger hanging, conceived for a princely interior. Tapestries of this kind were luxury objects, demanding collaboration between designers who prepared the cartoons and highly skilled weavers who translated them into richly coloured textiles.
In the early sixteenth century, tapestry occupied a central place in European courtly culture. Mythological themes such as this, once confined to intimate humanist contexts, were reimagined for large-scale decorative cycles. They acted not only as expressions of wealth and magnificence but also as vehicles for disseminating learned imagery, circulating across Europe through diplomatic gift-giving and dynastic exchange. Alongside antiquities, wedding chests, and other objects adorned with classical subjects, such hangings contributed to the transformation of iconography in the Renaissance, bridging the gap between humanist erudition and the visual languages of painting, sculpture, and decorative art.
Christopher Weiditz (c.1500–c.1560), Hercules Removing a Thorn from his Foot, c.1540–50. Ivory sculpture, 15.3 × 10 × 10.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Christopher Weiditz (c.1500–c.1560), Hercules Removing a Thorn from his Foot, c.1540–50. Ivory sculpture, 15.3 × 10 × 10.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Christopher Weiditz, active in Strasbourg and southern Germany, was among the more inventive sculptors of the German Renaissance. His travels with Emperor Charles V’s court allowed him to study antique models and the most celebrated art collections of his age, experiences that shaped the blend of classical reference and naturalistic observation visible in his work.
This small, partly damaged ivory statuette was once almost certainly part of a princely Kunstkammer, intended to be handled and admired as a curiosity of art and erudition. A companion piece representing Cleopatra, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, suggests it originally formed part of a pair. The figure adapts the celebrated antique prototype of the Spinario—the boy plucking a thorn from his foot—yet transforms it into an image of Hercules. The hero sits cross-legged on a tree trunk draped with the skin of the Nemean lion, the first of his Labours, whose defeat became one of his most recognisable attributes.
Here Hercules appears not as the bearded strongman of later legend but as a youthful, clean-shaven figure, his body still echoing the antique Spinario. The modelling of the head, however, moves towards a greater naturalism and may reflect a study from life. The ivory thus embodies a Renaissance play between the ancient and the modern: a classical pose reinterpreted through the lens of myth, reimagined by a sculptor alive to the possibilities of direct observation.
Workshop of Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721)? A white marble baptismal font stands in St James’s Piccadilly, London.
A white marble baptismal font stands in St James’s Piccadilly, remarkable for the richness of its carving. At the base Adam and Eve flank the Tree of Knowledge, around which coils the serpent. The bowl above is divided into three narrative panels: the Baptism of Christ, St Philip baptising the Eunuch of Candace, and the animals entering Noah’s Ark. The original gilded cover, once adorned with angels, has long been lost, probably to theft.
The font, dated 1686, belongs firmly to the flowering of English decorative sculpture in the Restoration period. Its attribution has long been debated. The virtuosity of the carving naturally suggests Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721), whose workshop in the 1680s was producing work on a scale unprecedented in England. Yet the sheer number of followers who adopted his manner, and the collaborative nature of his practice, prevent any conclusive assignment either to Gibbons himself or to his circle.
Though best remembered for his cascades of limewood foliage, Gibbons was also active in stone and marble, particularly in church monuments. His career, spanning five monarchs from Charles II to George I, reveals a master capable of adjusting his style to shifting tastes while retaining a distinctive language of ornament. His early training remains uncertain—perhaps among the ship-carvers of Rotterdam, perhaps under Artus Quellinus (1609–1668), the leading sculptor of the Netherlands—but the breadth of his legacy in Britain is beyond question. Even in cases where attribution falters, the font at St James’s testifies to the reach of his style and the ambition of late seventeenth-century English church furnishing.
Peter Lely (1618–1680), Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland (1640–1709), with her son Charles FitzRoy (1662–1730), as the Virgin and Child, c.1664. Oil on canvas, 124.7 × 102 cm. The National Portrait Gallery, London
Peter Lely (1618–1680), Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland (1640–1709), with her son Charles FitzRoy (1662–1730), as the Virgin and Child, c.1664. Oil on canvas, 124.7 × 102 cm. The National Portrait Gallery, London
Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, was at the centre of Charles II’s court from the king’s return in 1660. As his mistress, she bore him five children, all later legitimised, and for many years she controlled access to the king, shaping political fortunes through her patronage.
Lely’s portrait of her, painted around 1664, is one of the boldest images of the Restoration. Villiers is cast as the Virgin Mary, holding her young son Charles FitzRoy in the role of the Christ Child. What might, in another context, have been a devotional scene becomes here an audacious conflation of sacred imagery with the politics of dynasty and desire. The effect is unsettling: a king’s mistress steps into the place of the Madonna, and the illegitimate child assumes the attributes of the Saviour.
Villiers was Lely’s most frequent subject, her beauty providing him with endless variations, and his paintings in turn making her the face of the new court. This portrait exemplifies the portrait historié, a genre that blurred the lines between history, allegory, and likeness, though here the fiction carries a sharper edge.
Her life remained turbulent. She fought bitterly with Queen Catherine of Braganza, quarrelled with Frances Stuart, and endured the king’s shifting affections before losing her position to Louise de Kérouaille. Known for her extravagance and entanglements with younger lovers, she died in 1709 aged sixty-eight.
School of Novgorod, Miracle of St George and the Dragon, c.1400–1450?, Tempera and gesso on linden panel, 77.4 × 57 cm, British Museum, London
School of Novgorod, Miracle of St George and the Dragon, c.1400–1450?, Tempera and gesso on linden panel, 77.4 × 57 cm, British Museum, London
In 1959, in the village of Il’inski Pogost on the River Pinega, a tributary of the Severnaya Dvina in the far north of Russia, an icon was found serving as the shutter of a barn window. Subsequent cleaning by the conservator Adolf Ovchinnikov at the I.E. Grabar State Restoration Workshops in Moscow revealed a panel that had been overpainted several times, beneath which lay one of the finest surviving examples of late medieval Russian painting.The icon entered the British Museum in 1986, though the circumstances of its journey from the Soviet Union to London remain incompletely documented.
The panel, painted in egg tempera and gesso on wood (probably linden), measures 77.4 by 57 centimetres. It is conventionally known as ‘The Black George’ (Чёрный Георгий) after its most striking feature: Saint George, wearing a red mantle, rides a black horse to the left, transfixing a dragon beneath him with a spear held in his right hand (BM, 1986,0603.1). The background was originally a light yellow, painted in orpiment (a yellow arsenic sulphide pigment used to imitate gold leaf), though most of this has been lost during earlier restorations, with traces surviving on the right side and in patches elsewhere (Cormack, 2007, pp. 82–85). An inscription in Church Slavonic above the saint reads: Ο ΑΓΙ(oc) ΓΕΟΡ(г)ИЕ (Saint George). The dating is not entirely settled. The British Museum’s object record gives c.1400–1450, while it late fourteenth century.
The icon belongs to what Russian scholars term the concise iconographic type (краткий извод) of the Miracle of Saint George, in which only the saint and the dragon are depicted, without the princess, the city walls or witnessing figures that appear in the more detailed type (пространный извод). The concise type is the older of the two, with its earliest known examples in tenth and eleventh century Cappadocian church frescoes (Walter, 2003, p. 128). It became particularly popular in Novgorod and the Russian north, where the cult of George as warrior-saint (Георгий-змиеборец) had deep roots in popular devotion. The absence of the city of Lasya (Lacia) and of any narrative context is therefore not a decision peculiar to this painter but a well-established tradition within which he worked. What he chose, in effect, was the more austere of two available compositional formats.
The black horse is the panel’s most discussed feature. It is unusual but not unique. The British Museum entry notes parallels on a small number of other fourteenth to sixteenth century Novgorod and northern Russian icons, including a mid-fourteenth-century ‘Miracle of St George’ from the Morozov collection, now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (Bruk and Iovleva, 1995, no. 21), a sixteenth-century panel of ‘St George, Nikita and the Deesis’ in the Russian Museum, St Petersburg (Likhachёv, Laurina and Pushkariov, 1980, fig. 237), and a ‘Miracle of St George and his Life’ from Ustyuzhna dating from the first half of the sixteenth century (Rybakov, 1995, fig. 214). A further Novgorod icon of ‘Saint George the Victorious on a Black Horse,’ now in the Khanty-Mansiysk Museum, dates from the second half of the fifteenth century. The black horse, then, was a recognised variant within the Novgorod and northern Russian iconographic tradition. Whether it carried specific symbolic freight, or was primarily a regional stylistic convention, remains an open question in the scholarship.
What can be said with more confidence is that the panel’s formal character belongs to a visual world quite different from the one in which contemporary or near-contemporary Western painters were working. The flat orpiment background, imitating gold, offers no illusion of spatial depth. George and the dragon are arranged as a compressed compositional unit in which legibility and symbolic clarity take precedence over narrative plausibility. The spear does transfix the dragon, so the image records the moment of victory, but the manner in which it does so is revealing. There is no struggle, no exertion, no dramatic tension between combatants. George’s posture is upright and calm, his face impassive; the dragon, though pierced, writhes with undiminished energy beneath the horse. The effect is less that of a battle concluded than of a condition made permanent. In a Western painting of the same subject, the viewer would expect to see the dragon in its death throes, the saint in the act of delivering a decisive blow, and the surrounding landscape as a stage on which an unrepeatable event takes place. Here, the absence of setting, the stillness of the rider, and the continuing vitality of the creature beneath him suggest something closer to an emblem than a narrative: not a triumph accomplished but a spiritual combat that is, by its nature, unending. The Orthodox theology of the icon, as articulated by writers from John of Damascus (c.675–749) onward, held that the sacred image should make present the prototype it depicted, functioning not as a picture to be admired but as a window onto the divine. If the icon makes the event perpetually present rather than historically past, then the dragon cannot be shown as definitively dead, because the evil it figures is not definitively overcome in the fallen world. Stylisation, in this context, was not an absence of skill but a positive discipline: the painter avoided naturalism because naturalism would domesticate the sacred, reducing miracle to anecdote (Lazarev, 1983; Cormack, 2007, pp. 14–22). The dragon that refuses to die is, on this reading, a theological statement made in formal terms.
The contrast with Western European treatments of the same subject is instructive, though it should be handled with care, since the comparison risks flattening both traditions. Antonio Pisanello (c.1395–c.1455), in his fresco of Saint George and the Princess of Trebizond (c.1436–1438, Pellegrini Chapel, Sant’Anastasia, Verona), placed the saint in a minutely observed landscape populated by horses, dogs, and hanged men, embedding the miracle in a chivalric world of courtly display and empirical detail. Vittore Carpaccio (c.1465–c.1525/1526), in his Saint George and the Dragon (c.1502, Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice), composed a theatrical panorama in which the saint charges on a white horse through a landscape strewn with dismembered body parts, the city visible behind. Both painters treated the subject as an occasion for narrative invention and visual spectacle, working within a tradition in which the image’s power was understood to reside in its capacity to persuade the eye. Carpaccio’s cycle dates from roughly a century after the Novgorod panel, so the comparison is not strictly contemporaneous, but the underlying divergence in pictorial principle had been established well before either painter was born. The Latin West, from the thirteenth century onward, moved progressively towards naturalism and spatial illusion; the Eastern Churches, for theological reasons that were articulated, debated, and in some periods violently contested, maintained the icon as an image governed by different rules.
Брук, Я.В. и Иовлева, Л.И. (ред.) (1995) Государственная Третьяковская галерея: Каталог собрания. Древнерусское искусство X — начала XV века [State Tretyakov Gallery: Catalogue of the Collection. Old Russian Art, Tenth to Early Fifteenth Century], vol. 1. Moscow: Krasnya ploshchad
Лазарев, В.Н. (1983) Русская иконопись от истоков до начала XVI века [Russian Icon Painting from Its Origins to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century]. Moscow: Iskusstvo
Лихачёв, Д.С., Лаурина, В.К. и Пушкарёв, В.А. (1980) Новгородская икона XII–XVII веков [The Novgorod Icon, Twelfth to Seventeenth Centuries]. Leningrad: Aurora
Овчинников, А.Н. и Кишилов, Н.Б. (1971) Живопись древнего Пскова [Painting of Old Pskov]. Moscow: Sovetsky khudozhnik, no. 16, pl. 33.
Смирнова, Э.С. (1976) Живопись Великого Новгорода: Середина XIII — начало XV века [Painting of Great Novgorod: Mid-Thirteenth to Early Fifteenth Century]. Moscow: Nauka
Ямщиков, С.В. (1966) Древнерусская живопись: Новые открытия [Old Russian Painting: New Discoveries]. Leningrad: Aurora
Cormack, R. (2007) Icons. London: British Museum Press, pp. 82–85.
Walter, C. (2003) The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) or/with his Studio, Half Figure of a Woman with a White Wrap, c.1650–1660, Oil on canvas, 101.9 × 83.7 cm, The National Gallery, London
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) or with/his studio, Half Figure of a Woman with a White Wrap, c.1650–1660. Oil on canvas, 101.9 × 83.7 cm. The National Gallery, London
In the summer of 1654, Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1626–1663) was summoned three times before the council of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam. She had been living with Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn outside marriage, and she was pregnant. The council admonished her for having, in its recorded phrase, committed the acts of a whore with Rembrandt the painter. She was barred from the Lord’s Supper. Their daughter Cornelia was baptised on 30 October that year. Hendrickje never married Rembrandt, almost certainly because the terms of his first wife Saskia van Uylenburgh’s (1612–1642) will would have cost him the income from her estate: the arrangement was financially rational, socially devastating, and it placed Hendrickje permanently outside the bounds of respectability in Reformed Amsterdam.
It is against this domestic reality that a small group of half-length female figures emerged from Rembrandt’s studio during the 1650s, paintings that resist every comfortable classification. They are not conventional portraits. The women wear elaborate costumes that belong to no particular time or place, draped in furs, pearls, and wraps that evoke biblical or classical heroines without committing to any single narrative. The term most commonly applied to them is tronie, a character study or type rather than a portrait, though even that label sits uneasily with canvases that carry such evident individuality in the faces. As Dagmar Hirschfelder has demonstrated, the boundary between tronie and portrait was already a persistent problem in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and it has only become harder to draw in retrospect. A tronie, in Hirschfelder’s working definition, is a head or half-figure dressed in fantasy costume, painted after life but without the commemorative or representational function of a portrait. The difficulty is that Rembrandt’s half-length women often look as though they are commemorating someone very particular indeed.
This painting, Half Figure of a Woman with a White Wrap, belongs to that group. Comparable examples survive in the Musée du Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among them, only the Juno (c.1662–1665, oil on canvas, 127 × 123.8 cm, The Armand Hammer Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles) can be tied to a specific documentary context. In the summer of 1665, the Amsterdam moneylender and collector Harmen Becker (c.1617–1678) came to press Rembrandt for an outstanding debt of 537 guilders. Becker spotted the half-finished canvas in the studio and agreed to reduce the debt if the painting were completed and handed over. The rest of the group floats without documentary anchorage, their purposes and original destinations unknown.
The pictorial formula has a genealogy that extends well beyond Rembrandt’s household difficulties, and the sources feeding into it were not singular. Half-length images of women in rich dress, poised between portraiture and idealised type, had been a European preoccupation for more than a century by the time these canvases were produced. The Venetian belle donne form the most conspicuous precedent, and the one for which direct evidence of Rembrandt’s engagement is strongest. Palma Vecchio (c.1480–1528), born Jacopo Negretti in Serina Alta near Bergamo, produced dozens of fair-haired, heavy-lidded women in loose chemises whose identities are left deliberately open. His A Blonde Woman (c.1520, oil on poplar?, 77.5 × 64.1 cm, The National Gallery, London) exemplifies the type: a voluptuous figure holding spring flowers, her chemise slipping from one shoulder, her gaze sidelong, at once reticent and inviting. Are these women saints? Courtesans? Brides on the morning of their wedding? The question was part of the transaction. ‘Flora”‘was both a goddess and a common name for courtesans in sixteenth-century Venice, and the slippage between the two meanings was productive rather than accidental. Titian (c.1488/90–1576) refined the formula further. His Flora (c.1515, oil on canvas, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) inhabits exactly this territory: a young woman holding flowers, dressed in a slipping chemise, who might be goddess, bride, or simply a beautiful figure offered for the viewer’s contemplation. Rona Goffen has argued that Venetian painters exploited this categorical ambiguity as a deliberate strategy, allowing the same image to function simultaneously as devotional object, erotic invitation, and demonstration of painterly mastery.
That Rembrandt knew this tradition is not a matter of conjecture. The Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, holds a Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1656–1657) whose pictorial type directly recalls Palma Vecchio’s courtesan portraits, and scientific investigation has shown that the position of the right arm originally corresponded with the Venetian model before Rembrandt progressively modified it. The Amsterdam art market of the seventeenth century was well supplied with Italian paintings, prints, and copies, and Rembrandt was an avid collector. His 1656 insolvency inventory lists Italian works and albums of prints in considerable number. The connection was not passive reception but active reworking: Rembrandt absorbed a formula designed for pleasure and turned it toward something less accommodating.
But the Venetian belle donne were far from the only current flowing into these paintings. The half-length female figure in fantasy dress had been circulating across Northern Europe for generations. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) produced serial images of Venus, Lucretia, and other classical heroines as half-length or three-quarter-length figures, nude or semi-nude, wearing nothing but elaborate hats and jewellery, their bodies rendered according to a distinctive slender Gothic ideal that stood at a considerable remove from Venetian opulence. These were commercially successful workshop products, turned out in substantial numbers from Cranach’s Wittenberg studio, and they established a Northern market appetite for the erotically charged female half-figure that predated Rembrandt by more than a century. Closer to home, the Utrecht Caravaggists of the 1610s and 1620s, particularly Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656) and Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629), had brought back from Rome a taste for half-length figural compositions drawn from Caravaggio and his follower Bartolomeo Manfredi (c.1582–1622): musicians, drinkers, fortune-tellers, and courtesans, strongly lit and dramatically cropped. Their half-length women were genre types rather than idealised beauties, and Hirschfelder has noted that the Utrecht masters characterised their figures through exaggerated and manipulated stereotypes rather than working naer het leeven (from life). They nonetheless contributed to the visual environment in which the Dutch tronie took shape. Behind all of these lay the influence of Northern print culture: Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), whose graphic works Rembrandt knew well, had produced fantasy heads and costumed figures that Hirschfelder and Franziska Gottwald have both identified as important precursors, the elaborate costumes in many later tronies amounting to a nostalgic reworking of Renaissance-era dress encountered through earlier engravings.
What Rembrandt did with all of this material was not aggregation but transformation. The Venetian belle donne left their women unnamed because anonymity widened the image’s range of possible uses and, by extension, its commercial appeal. Rembrandt’s studio left these women unnamed too, but the effect is different. In Venice the absence of a name invites projection and fantasy. In Amsterdam, in these canvases from the 1650s, it feels more like withholding. The viewer senses that someone specific is present but is not being introduced.
This raises the question of whether these women were painted from life, and if so, at what social cost. In sixteenth-century Venice, the use of courtesans, mistresses, and professional models for such paintings operated within a cultural framework that, while not uncontested, was broadly tolerated by patrons and public alike. The Venetian belle donne were understood to exist in a space where portraiture, allegory, and erotic display overlapped, and neither painters nor sitters appear to have suffered significant consequences for participating in it. Reformed Amsterdam in the 1650s was a different matter. The church council that censured Hendrickje in 1654 was not an abstract body enforcing distant rules; it was a local institution with the power to exclude individuals from communion and, by extension, from the social fabric of the community. For a woman already living under that censure to sit as a model for paintings that circulated publicly, paintings whose luxurious costume and ambiguous identity evoked the very traditions of courtesan portraiture from which they partly derived, would have carried a charge that no Venetian bella donna needed to bear. Svetlana Alpers, in her study of Rembrandt’s studio practice, has drawn attention to the theatrical dimension of his use of models, the way in which the studio functioned as a controlled environment where real individuals were transformed into pictorial types. But the transformation was never complete. However much the costume and pose might generalise the figure into a tronie, the face remained stubbornly particular.
Whether Hendrickje sat for this particular canvas is a question that scholarship has circled without settling. The identification rests on resemblance to other paintings where she is more confidently proposed as the model, particularly the Bathsheba at her Bath (1654, Musée du Louvre, Paris), the Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654, The National Gallery, London), and the so-called Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1654–1656, The National Gallery, London), where the sitter wears pearl earrings, a gold chain, and an almost regal bearing. The Metropolitan Museum’s Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1654–1656), perhaps intended as a generic image of a courtesan according to that institution’s own catalogue entry, complicates the picture further: if even a painting that looks like Hendrickje was conceived as a type, what does that tell us about the rest of the group? Marieke de Winkel has shown how extensively Rembrandt’s studio recycled costumes and accessories, and it is worth asking whether the continuity scholars detect between these faces reflects a single sitter or a well-practised studio habit of producing a recognisable type. The desire to name Hendrickje in these paintings may say as much about the modern viewer’s appetite for biographical narrative as it does about what was actually happening on the Breestraat.
The attribution of the painting itself remains contested, and the unevenness of the handling is the principal reason. The head is modelled with a sensitivity and directness characteristic of Rembrandt’s own probing brushwork, while passages elsewhere (particularly in the drapery) are more mechanical, suggesting the participation of studio assistants. This division of labour was standard practice in the 1650s. Pupils and assistants produced works that the master might correct, retouch, or leave partly unresolved, and the resulting canvases occupy an uncomfortable zone between autograph and workshop production.
The dating of this group is further complicated by the crisis of 1656. In July of that year, Rembrandt applied for cessio bonorum, a form of insolvency under the Amsterdam Civil Ordinance of 1643 that allowed a debtor to surrender his goods to the municipal authorities for sale in order to satisfy creditors. The contents of his house and studio on the Breestraat were inventoried and subsequently dispersed at public auction; Rembrandt, Hendrickje, and his son Titus (1641–1668) moved across the city to more modest quarters on the Rozengracht. To circumvent the requirement that future earnings be paid to creditors, Hendrickje and Titus formed a commercial partnership in which Rembrandt was nominally their employee, receiving only enough to cover his basic necessities. Whether this painting predates or follows that collapse remains an open question. The inventory, drawn up by the city’s commissioners, offers a snapshot of what remained, but it cannot account for what had already left the studio through sale, gift, or other means.
What remains, stripped of the questions that encircle it, is a painting that holds something back. The woman’s expression is composed but not blank, her costume rich but not showy, her pose dignified but carrying none of the performative warmth that marks the Venetian prototypes or the dramatic cropping of the Utrecht Caravaggists. If Palma Vecchio and Titian presented their half-length women as objects of aesthetic pleasure, images that asked to be enjoyed, and if Cranach turned the female body into a vehicle for sly eroticism dressed up as classical learning, Rembrandt (or whoever completed this canvas) seems less concerned with offering anything at all. The painting asks to be looked at, certainly. But it does not flatter the act of looking, and it does not explain itself. Whether that reticence belongs to the painter, to the sitter, or to the particular conditions under which a woman in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam might find herself painted but not named, is a question the canvas declines to answer.
References
Alpers, S. (1988) Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Bruyn, J. et al. (eds.) (1982–1989) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vols. I–III. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff/Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project
De Winkel, M. (2004) Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Goffen, R. (1997) Titian’s Women. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Gottwald, F. (2011) Das Tronie: Muster, Studie, Meisterwerk. Die Genese einer Gattung der Malerei vom 15. Jahrhundert bis zu Rembrandt [The Tronie: Pattern, Study, Masterwork. The Genesis of a Genre of Painting from the Fifteenth Century to Rembrandt]. Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag
Gould, C. (1987) National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth-Century Italian Schools. London: National Gallery Publications
Hirschfelder, D. (2008) Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts [Tronie and Portrait in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Painting]. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag
Maclaren, N. and Brown, C. (1991) National Gallery Catalogues: The Dutch School, 1600–1900. 2nd edn. 2 vols. London: National Gallery Publications
Postma, H.J. (1988) ‘De Amsterdamse verzamelaar Herman Backer (c.1617–1678): Nieuwe gegevens over een geldschieter van Rembrandt’ [‘The Amsterdam Collector Herman Backer (c.1617–1678): New Data on a Moneylender to Rembrandt’], Oud-Holland, 102, pp. 1–21.Available at, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42717486 (Accessed 23 July 2023)
Rylands, P. (1992) Palma Vecchio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Van de Wetering, E. (1997) Rembrandt: The Painter at Work. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Van de Wetering, E. (ed.) (2005) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. IV: Self-Portraits. Dordrecht: Springer
Van de Wetering, E. (ed.) (2014) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. VI: Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited: A Complete Survey. Dordrecht: Springer
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt or circle of Rembrandt, Half figure of a woman with a white wrap, 1654-1656. RKDimages, image no. 41279. Available at: https://rkd.nl/images/41279 (Accessed: 12 July 2023)
Francis William Doyle-Jones (1873–1938), Chimera with Personifications of Fire and the Sea, 1914. Bronze, 6 m high × 5.5 m wide. Signed on the base of the figure of Fire: F. W. DOYLE JONES 1914. 24–28 Lombard Street, City of London
Lombard Street, long at the centre of London’s financial life, carries a layered history. In the wake of the expulsion of England’s Jewish community in 1290, Italian merchants from Siena, Genoa, Lucca, Florence, and Venice established themselves here, introducing new forms of international banking. Across the centuries, the street became lined with townhouses, counting-houses, and churches, three of which still stand: St Mary Woolnoth, St Edmund the King, and St Clement Eastcheap, each a Baroque survivor. Much of the earlier fabric, however, was swept away during the speculative redevelopments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Among the newer insertions is the former Royal Insurance building at 24 Lombard Street, completed in the early twentieth century, whose doorway bears one of the most striking sculptural ensembles in the City. Designed in 1914 by Francis William Doyle-Jones, the monumental bronze Chimera with Personifications of Fire and the Sea measures six metres in height and over five in width. Conceived at the threshold of the First World War, the work embodies both allegory and corporate identity. The winged chimera, poised in restless motion, presides over the flanking personifications of fire and water—forces both vital and destructive, evoking the risks against which insurance was meant to provide protection.
The scale of the work, unusual for a commercial doorway, is matched by its refinement of detail: feathers ripple across the creature’s wings, while the sinuous modelling of the allegorical figures recalls Doyle-Jones’s training as a sculptor of commemorative monuments. Set amid the dense fabric of Lombard Street, it operates as both architectural ornament and symbolic statement, linking the City’s mercantile past to the modern spectacle of corporate power.
St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, the City of London
St Mary Woolnoth is the sole surviving City church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736), pupil and later collaborator of Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723). Built between 1716 and 1727, it formed part of the grand yet only partially realised scheme of Queen Anne’s reign to erect fifty new churches for London, financed through a levy on coal. The west façade makes plain Hawksmoor’s architectural formula: mass heaped upon mass, rustication confronting sharply cut classical detail, solidity pierced by voids that read as apertures carved into living stone. Its twin turreted towers, fortress-like in their bulk, generate a tension between vertical thrust and ponderous weight, a register wholly distinct from the light theatricality of the Baroque churches that rose elsewhere in the City.
The site itself carries the weight of long continuity. A Norman church is first recorded here, later rebuilt in 1445 and again in 1485. Damaged by the Great Fire of 1666, it was repaired by Wren, only to be swept away to make room for Hawksmoor’s radical new design. His scheme created a keystone monument at the intersection of Lombard Street, but the surrounding context has changed dramatically: where once the church held command over its urban setting, twentieth-century office blocks now dwarf its tower, muting the impact of Hawksmoor’s original vision.
The church is also bound to one of the most remarkable personal histories of the eighteenth century. John Newton (1725–1807), once a participant in the slave trade and later one of its most eloquent critics, served as rector here from 1780. From the pulpit of St Mary Woolnoth he gave voice to his abolitionist convictions, publishing tracts that exposed the brutal realities of the trade and aligning himself with the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. He and his wife were buried in the crypt until their remains were displaced during the construction of the Underground. Newton’s presence lends the church an added resonance: a place where architectural monumentality and moral reckoning converge.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), Self Portrait at the Age of 34, 1640. Oil on canvas, 91 × 75 cm. The National Gallery, London
In seventeenth-century Amsterdam the art market was awash with antiquities, engravings, Renaissance paintings, and exotic curiosities. Ships brought treasures from Venice, Antwerp, and beyond, and collections changed hands at auction with remarkable frequency. For a painter such as Rembrandt, who in the late 1630s had secured a position among the city’s leading masters, there was no need to travel to Italy: the legacy of the Renaissance was on his doorstep. He was an eager participant in this market, building his own collection of paintings, prints, and unusual objects, and closely following the arrival of great works in Amsterdam. The dispersal of Lucas van Uffelen’s collection in 1639, which included masterpieces by Raphael and Titian, offered him the opportunity to study such models directly and to absorb their authority into his own art.
The Self Portrait at the Age of 34, painted the following year, is the most deliberate statement of this engagement. Dressed in sixteenth-century costume, with heavy folds of rich fabric and the glint of gold thread, Rembrandt casts himself in the lineage of Venetian and Roman portraiture. His pose echoes Raphael’s Baldassare Castiglione and Titian’s Gerolamo Barbarigo, both recently in Amsterdam and widely admired. The costume is not a theatrical whim but part of a cultivated language of self-fashioning, drawing upon the prestige of earlier generations and their association with poetry, diplomacy, and intellectual authority.
Yet while the structure is borrowed, the character is his own. Rembrandt’s gaze is unflinching, his modelling of flesh and fabric executed with a solidity and depth absent from his Italian models. The portrait is at once homage and assertion, a way of situating himself not only as the heir to Renaissance traditions but as their living continuation in the Dutch Republic.
The work was painted during a period of professional success and personal tragedy. By 1640 he had lost three of his children with Saskia van Uylenburgh, his wealthy Frisian wife. Their only surviving son, Titus, would be born the next year, but Saskia herself would die in 1642, leaving Rembrandt a widower at the age of thirty-six. In retrospect the faint melancholy discernible in this portrait seems prophetic, an undertone beneath the confident pose.
At the time, however, Rembrandt stood at the height of his career, living in a grand house, surrounded by art and rare objects, engaged in a vibrant market where the legacies of the past were constantly renewed. This painting crystallises that moment: a Dutch artist consciously fashioning himself through the splendour of Renaissance portraiture, yet speaking with a voice entirely his own.
Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Self-portrait at the Age of 41, 1640, Oil on canvas, 56 × 46 cm, The National Portrait Gallery, London
Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Self-portrait at the Age of 41, 1640, Oil on canvas, 56 × 46 cm, The National Portrait Gallery, London
This late self-portrait, painted in 1640, shows Van Dyck at once secure in reputation and already shadowed by illness. Eight years earlier he had been summoned to London by Charles I (1600–1649), who made him Principal Painter in Ordinary. In that role Van Dyck recast the visual identity of the Stuart court, setting a new standard of elegance and authority in portraiture that rivalled the displays of other European monarchies. By the end of his life he had achieved what his Flemish contemporaries could scarcely imagine: international acclaim, knighthood, a grand house on the Thames at Blackfriars, and the service of six attendants, all marks of his assimilation into England’s aristocratic world.
The canvas is set within an Italianate frame crowned by a carved sunflower, a motif long associated with Van Dyck. It recalls an earlier self-portrait of about 1633, now at Eaton Hall, Cheshire, in which the flower turns towards the light as an emblem of fidelity — understood by contemporaries as an image of loyalty to the King. Here, the sunflower is displaced to the frame itself, a reminder of the symbolism bound up with the artist’s persona.
The wider significance of Van Dyck’s English career has often been described as a rupture, as though he eradicated the conventions of Tudor and Jacobean portraiture. The reality was more complex. The emblematic, hieratic patterns of earlier English painting endured, but Van Dyck — arriving from Antwerp with Italian experience and continental courtly models — set them into dialogue with a more expansive idiom of grace and authority. What emerged was not the replacement of an old school by a new one, but a hybrid language that positioned England within a European courtly network while preserving its own emblematic forms. His late self-portrait, painted in London about 1640–41, epitomises that synthesis. The artist, shown with direct, unmediated gaze and a gesture that implies but does not reveal the brush, presents himself as the gentleman-artist, the cosmopolitan mediator between foreign refinement and English tradition. Yet his expression holds an unease, a subtle vulnerability. The portrait therefore becomes an allegory of the foreign artist’s position: naturalised yet always marked by difference, embodying the precarious negotiation by which imported forms entered and unsettled the visual culture of Stuart England.
References
Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H.(2004) Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University
