Volume 7, Number 3 · September 8, 1966
Getting at Rembrandt
By John Pope-Hennessy
Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance
by Kenneth Clark
New York University, 224 pp., $10.00
In books on Rembrandt we often read that compositions are 'taken from' some earlier source. When this is said of other artists the words 'taken from' can be accepted literally; they refer, as they invariably do with Rubens, to the conscious transposition of motifs. But with Rembrandt their significance is rather different; they denote not a simple act of theft, but recourse, frequently unconscious, to a visual culture of great richness and unusual depth. The nature of this problem, and the piecemeal nature of the attacks that have been made upon it, are seen very clearly in Münz's exemplary catalogue of Rembrandt's etchings, where we read of the Hundred Guilder print that
Review, 1785 words
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