Guided Pathway

On the one hand, Moeyaert’s “Rape of Proserpina” (1628) (#12) quotes van Haecht / van Balen, depicting a Proserpina incapable of resisting the relentlessly rightward-thrusting movement of Pluto’s chariot, which carries her to his realm. Stylistically, the pictorial arrangement of the scene by these artists, with a single horizontal through-movement organizing the action, represents the possibility of a “northern” Baroque that “monumentalizes” the event in a classicizing way even as it sensationalizes it, suggesting only a kind of “false pathos” (Warburg ctd. in Leuschner, 578). Rembrandt, on the other hand, eschewed this kind of sensationalism (Christiansen, 39).