Guided Pathway

In his May 29 lecture, Warburg describes Rembrandt’s fascination with, indeed, reliance on, but final superiority over the merely “elegant,” more or less shallow Florentine jack-of-all-trades, Tempesta (200 of whose etchings Rembrandt owned). In #2.3, the Italian’s figures make grand, yet, again, ultimately only “sentimental” gestures, Warburg writes (see Leuschner, 571-3). Rembrandt’s Proserpina thus outdoes the nymph of his Italian model in the rendering of serious pathos. Unhappily, Soutman’s etching (#4) – perhaps because it follows an in-the-end also still too Italianate Rubens – appears to testify to the equally as likely possibility of an “elegant” and stilted northern version of a Baroque “art officiel” that, like van Haecht’s / van Balen’s and Moeyaert’s art, had to be avoided at all costs. Ironically, Schwarz’s much earlier drawing, which also depicts a helpless and wildly gesticulating Proserpina, suggests that Rubens and Soutman were not the first “northerners” to be tempted by the weak pathos of such grandiose gestures. The well-known German painter Schwarz (1548-92) had succumbed as well.