In her recent book, Amy Golahny interrogates a consequential subject for understanding the complex origins of Rembrandt's art, one not treated at length in over a generation. How fitting it is that a scholar whose lifetime of work has been devoted to this subject is the author of this essential study. Always generous with citing the work of fellow scholars, she offers a rich, nuanced presentation of the various ways Rembrandt's engagement with Italian art can be understood.
Golahny defines her topic in the preface: “The present study examines selected works by Rembrandt with respect to Italian imagery and concludes with Italians’ reception of Rembrandt with respect to the Ruffo commission” (xi). For me, this proved a modest definition, for she ranges more widely than this definition suggests in illuminating Rembrandt's multivalent relationship with Italian art. Indeed, her first two chapters deal with other concerns that nonetheless round out the picture of Rembrandt and Italian art. The first considers other Dutch artists, who did or did not travel to Italy, and explicates the role that collecting of Italian art played in the Dutch Republic. It also offers a detailed description of who collected Italian art in the Netherlands and what kinds of Italian art were most popular there. Rembrandt's own collecting of Italian art was of course crucial for his interaction with it, and Golahny's discussion of this aspect of his interests is sharpened by her contrast of Rembrandt with the painter and art writer Joachim von Sandrart as collectors. Sandrart had spent time to Italy before arriving in Amsterdam, where he became a rival to Rembrandt, but was more oriented towards classicism.
In the second chapter, Golahny investigates attitudes towards Rembrandt's art in his lifetime, especially views about his stylistic naturalism and its contrast with Italian artistic values. Familiar classicist arguments against Rembrandt's aesthetic approaches are here used to distinguish differences from Rembrandt's fundamental expressive goals as a visual artist. The third chapter treats Rembrandt's collecting in depth and begins to explore connections between works he is known or presumed to have owned and his own art works.
The following three chapters form the heart of the book in explicating the relationship of Italian models to specific works by Rembrandt. These discussions are not arranged in a chronological order, but more helpfully follow themes: pragmatic solutions (chapter 4); appropriating for commentary (chapter 5); and appropriation and deviation (chapter 6). Golahny consistently practices an admirable scrupulosity in making clear what is her speculation, and what is based on known connections. She emphasizes that Rembrandt's stance toward Italian art—even artists such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian—was not one of unalloyed admiration. Many of the examples discussed offered a critique of Italian art (and artists) by the confident and independently minded Dutch artist.
Golahny's final chapter treats a specific case where Italian artists responded to Rembrandt as a model: Don Antonio Ruffo's three painting commission from Rembrandt, followed by a series of paintings commissioned from a range of Italian artists. Her detailed discussion of correspondence from Italian artists, Ruffo, and his Flemish agent Abraham Brueghel offers a fascinating glimpse into contemporary Italian artistic understandings of Rembrandt's art.
In her book, Golahny returns to familiar cases of Rembrandt's engagement with Italian art, and offers fresh and often deeper insights about them, while also presenting intriguing new connections. Typically, she brings in multiple works that Rembrandt might have contemplated during his deliberative process. Throughout her study, paintings and prints—Northern European as well as Italian—are brought into her discussions of specific Rembrandt works to indicate the complexity of the artist's process. This is far from reductive source hunting; rather, it offers a fully realized view of Rembrandt as a creative thinker who considered a wide range of visual material to arrive at a satisfying expression of his own.
Readers less familiar with contemporary Dutch ideas about artistic imitation and emulation might wish that she had introduced her discussion of these concepts earlier than in chapter 4, perhaps in the preface. Not all visual comparisons she draws seem equally compelling to me, though each one made me think carefully about the possible relationship. These are small quibbles to make about such an accessible and stimulating book. Her informed, wide-ranging, sensitive, and above all intelligent presentation of ideas formed over the course of her career offers ample rewards for a variety of readers, those well versed in Rembrandt studies or new to them.
