ABSTRACT
Today, few of us would regard the art of Rembrandt (1606-1669) as a paragon of elegance and stylishness. Four centuries after his birth we value the painter’s realism, his ‘frankness’ and ‘earthiness’, while the aesthetic objections of a later generation of painters make us smile. Jan de Bisschop, for example, abhorred Rembrandt’s female nudes. Even when representing a Leda or a Danae, Rembrandt and the painters working in his style portrayed ‘a naked woman with a fat, swollen stomach, pendulous breasts, garter marks on her legs, and many more such deformities’ (Figure 13.1).1 As the playwright Andries Pels bemoaned, these were the shapeless bodies of contemporary washerwomen and not the perfect and timeless ones of classical antiquity.2 He was right, of course; but unlike him or, much later the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, ‘the last of the gentlemen aesthetes’, we hardly care.3 We prefer Rembrandt’s proletarian flesh above the stylish and all too perfect bodies of the later seventeenth century.
