Light on a master

It’s strange that while Britain has gone fairly mad over Mozart’s 250th anniversary, with vulgarities ranging from Mozart for Babies on Classic FM to Mozart mugs on coffee mugs, etc., we haven’t heard much about possibly his only cultural peer, Rembrandt. The Germans have now put us thoroughly to shame on the artist’s his 400th anniversary.

At the Berlin Kulturforum, where the relatively new Gemäldegalerie is just across the road from the home of the Berlin Philharmonic, there are three superb commemorative exhibitions which together will lead up to a high-powered symposium on the latest debates of the Rembrandt Research Project. The main show, over two floors, has more than 80 oil paintings from all over the world under the umbrella title Rembrandt: Quest of a Genius. Apart from a judicious selection from the many German museums with significant Rembrandt holdings, there are paintings from Lille, Dublin, Warsaw, Washington, etc., and several fortunate anonymous private collectors.

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Washington has contributed one of his most intriguing works, an almost painfully realistic portrayal of a ritual circumcision in which you can see and, wincingly, virtually feel the mohel’s knife. As always when you see the works of a master en masse you recognise his tics and tricks as almost old friends and yet still marvel afresh at the combination of technical virtuosity, psychological insight and wonderful, non-judgmental humanity. No one, except possibly Caravaggio, could match his juxtapositions of light and shade. Even in a relatively simple painting like ‘Young Woman in a Pearl Embroidered Beret’ you get gradations of light between the gold-set pearls of her headgear, dully gleaming, and the almost fierce lustre of the pearl necklace set off by her pale, indoor face with its cheeks pinkly flushed and a rather endearing, reddish tip to her nose, as if she had a cold.