Modern Mediocrity According to Rembrandt
The Renaissance Artist Who Successfully Painted Social Media, Capitalism, and The Heroes of Our Time.
Rembrandt and The Heroes of His Time
Even the most successful men of his time (bureaucrats, merchants, teachers, etc.) who bought his paintings were painted by Rembrandt as agglomerated, very similarly dressed, proud, and ugly little men.
If we contrast the heroic sculpture of Atlas (below this paragraph), which dates from the same period, with Rembrandt’s paintings we can see he showed that those responsible for the 17th century’s Dutch success were ordinary, too much dependent on their social relations little men. Therefore, very far from any classical heroic figure such as Ulysses, Prometheus, or Hercules.
Social Media and Protestant Ethics
No other Renaissance painter was able to register the mediocrity of modernity so well. He showed how ridiculous and phony modern man can be (and also weak, accommodated, bureaucratic, and proud of itself).
No other Renaissance painter was able to register the mediocrity of modernity so well. He showed how ridiculous and phony modernity can be (and also weak, accommodated, bureaucratic, and proud of itself).”
In fact, Rembrandt recorded very well in his realistic style, how Protestant ethics would influence art.
Ignoring the composure and dress of that century, many of his paintings resemble the photographs we see today on social media, like selfies that record groups of people, or the ones used to update “relationship status.”
How Things Ended For Him
Rembrandt died poor. He was buried as a miserable man in an unknown grave in the Westerkerk. At some point in his life, it seems he didn’t sell his paintings so well. He was criticized and possibly considered out of fashion.
“It is true that by the end of his life his realism had been supplanted by Classicism and had become unfashionable in Holland. Nevertheless, his international reputation among connoisseurs and collectors only continued to rise. Certain artists in 18th-century Germany and Venice even adopted his style. He was venerated during the Romantic era and was considered a forerunner of the Romantic movement; from that point he was regarded as one of the greatest figures in art history.” Ernst van de Wetering in Enciclopedia Britannica.
A few of his contemporaries criticized him saying he preferred ugliness instead of beauty. Mostly because some influential Renaissance artists at that time were painting gods, messiahs, classical heroes, symmetrical bodies without a single error, while Rembrandt wasn’t. According to an undated quote attributed to him, he chose “only one master — Nature.”
