Rembrandt's Orient

Rembrandt (1606–1669) lived in a very different world from conservative Prague. He was just as interested as the decorators of the Orloj in the theme of the mundane and the ultramundane, but had managed to free himself completely from the heritage of the vanitas painting; he had no interest in contrasting skulls with musical instruments. What makes him of particular interest to us here (and connects his work to the “Turks” of Prague) is that he, too, explored the limitations of the mundane by presenting oriental characters, and they, too, are blind to the divine revelation around them. Rembrandt's subject matter was the Orient not of his time but of the Bible; however, Rembrandt revived an earlier convention of representing the biblical Israelites on the pattern of contemporary “Turks”. ¹ More than any other artist, Rembrandt was able to transfer to art the Protestant predilection for trying to understand the Bible in what was considered its true oriental setting. A collector of exotic artifacts, ² he studied the detail of oriental life in order to attempt an ethnographically correct portrait of the concrete, that is the worldly, environment where God spoke to, and met with, Man.