GOING FOR BAROQUE Into the Bin - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

36.
Rembrandt
Harmensz.
van Rijn (Dutch,
1606-1669)
Blinding of Samson, 1636
Oil on canvas, 92%
x
117 m. (236 x302 cm)
St?delsches Kunstinstitut,
Frankfurt am Main
Photograph:
Foto Mar
burg/Art Resource, N.Y.
37
Guercino
Back of a Man, Seated,
Stripped to the Waist,
ca.1619
Red chalk, stumped,
heightened
with white
beige paper, 13 V* x
10% in. x (33.5 27 cm)
on
Institut N?erlandais,
Fondation Custodia, Frits
Lugt Collection,
Paris
Rembrandt's
intentionally revolting
treatment of the same theme
(fig. 36), painted
in 1636, to understand how
important Aristotelian
notions are to the character of Italian
.f
Baroque painting.
Rembrandt
devised his as a painting
broadside on the issue of decorum, and it is
/
fascinating
to watch how, with maturity,
he turned away from this sort
/
of pre-Hollywood
sensationalism.
For Guercino's picture
to work, the back of Samson had to be
I painted
with complete conviction, and it is not
surprising
that a study
by Guercino has survived a
showing
male model viewed from the back
with his head down,
one arm raised and the other
a
pushing against
cloth-covered box that will become Delilah's lap (fig. 37).
It is the
same
technique
Ludovico Carracci used in painting
The Lamentation.
The was
opposite approach
taken by
Mattia Preti in 1663 in his
canvas
grand
of Pilate
Washing
His Hands
(fig. 38),
in which atten
tion is focused on Pilate's face as he looks out at the viewer
a
through
proscenium-like
framework. He has, in a sense, painted
the viewer
into the picture
and uses the back-viewed, half-length
soldier in the
as a
right foreground
further means of binding
the pictorial
fiction
with our
experience
of it. We are asked to judge
Pilate's attempt
to exonerate himself of hav
ing condemned Christ to death. Ingeniously,
Christ and the crowd of onlookers become a
footnote to this study
of guilt.
Preti was
younger than Guercino and southern Italian rather
than Emilian, but he knew Guercino's
paintings
both in Rome and in Emilia-Romagna (in
1651 he worked in Modena, north of Bologna).
In 1662, for the Sicilian nobleman Don Antonio
39