ABSTRACT
Rembrandt van Rijn etching of the Presentation in the Temple, issues of perception, optics, and how humans can know the world are presented in the medium of etching via the inked presence of a hairy dog and the infant Jesus. The dog's presence brings to viewers' awareness the withheld presence of the biblical "flesh of the world", what Christians believe to be God's truth in creation and the incarnation of Jesus. This chapter unfold the traditional art historical context surrounding the etching's production and reception to suggest how seventeenth-century baroque interest in looking, optics, and natural science underscored the revelatory aspects of the work. These are aspects that a contemporary phenomenological interpretation queries too. The chapter outlines background aspects of the work to sketch possibilities for how seventeenth-century Calvinists might have used the etching as an aid to spiritual revelation. It provides how the emotional rhetoric that Rembrandt employed via his compositional choices, particularly the inclusion of the dog.
