It has recently been discovered that many attributions of paintings to the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt may be false. The contested paintings are not minor works, whose removal from the Rembrandt corpus would leave it relatively unaffected: they are at its very center. In her recent book, Svetlana Alpers uses these cases provocative discussion of the radical distinctiveness of Rembrandt’s approach to painting.
Alpers argues that Rembrandt exercised an unprecedentedly firm control over his art, his students, and the distribution of his works. Despite Gary Schwartz’s brilliant documentation of Rembrandt’s complicated relations with a wide circle of patrons, Alpers takes the view that Rembrandt refused to submit to the prevailing patronage system. He preferred, she in his refusal to limit his enterprise to those paintings he actually painted. He marketed Rembrandt.
Although there may be some truth in the view that Rembrandt was an entrepreneur who made some aesthetic decisions on the basis of what he knew the market wanted, Alpers’ emphasis on economic factors sacrifices discussion of the aesthetic qualities that make Rembrandt’s work unique. For example, Alpers asserts that Rembrandt deliberately be reducible to the works he himself painted, it is not reducible to marketing practices either.
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