Learning from the Old Masters
Mark Greene learns about communicating biblical truth from the brush of Rembrandt.
Rembrandt is without doubt one of the greatest pictorial dramatisers of the word of God in the history of exposition. And from him we have immense amounts to learn, as Schama’s recent magnum opus vividly demonstrates. But we’ll get to that.
There’s a lot of guff spoken about communication these days. Particularly in the British church. And that’s primarily because we hardly have anyone who really knows anything about it – at least not yet in positions of influence. Hence the perennial fiascos of church advertising campaigns which cause controversy for all the wrong reasons – not because people are scandalised by the Gospel but because you can always find a church leader somewhere who thinks the campaign is wrong for some reason or another. The most obvious example of that was that really rather clever Easter campaign: Surprise! It had the audacity to focus on the resurrection as opposed to the crucifixion. And didn’t even include the cross in the visual. This campaign was rounded on by a bevy of blighters. Such catastrophic misunderstanding of the limits of a poster campaign simply made the church look foolish. That said, and rushing to join the blighters myself, most of the big campaigns have had clever copy writing and good art direction but have not in my view at least been underpinned by the kind of disciplined strategic and research process which usually leads to the great campaigns.
Anyway, when it comes to communicating the Bible and the Gospel, people have been telling us that we need to do this and that we need to do that – mainly as it relates to platform speaking as opposed to what most of us need which is to develop our conversational skills, know the Gospel and be able to tell our testimony. The current vogue is for people telling us we should tell stories because Jesus told stories – neglecting to ask why he told stories or indeed whether telling stories that people would not understand, as Jesus did, is part of our imitation of the master communicator. Or indeed whether the impact of Jesus’ stories and the attention people gave them had anything to do with the fact that he was also doing some rather remarkable miracles. Miracles may not convert anyone but they do tend to get you an audience.
Well, I do think that we should tell stories to gain attention, illustrate and dramatise a point but not to the neglect of The story and of the Bible stories. My own necessarily limited experience is that I have seen one too many kids’ talks where someone has told a story or used a video or done a pantomime and then said: ‘You know, that’s a bit like a story in the Bible.’ Indeed. So, why didn‘t you tell the story in the Bible? The challenge today is not to gain people’s attention with stories but to grip people’s imagination with the Bible, with the history of a people they can join, with the character and deeds of the only person who has the words of eternal life. Which brings us to Rembrandt.
Who has one or two things to recommend him. First, he was an artistic genius. As the Sunday Times indicated, no significant art critic has ever really savaged Rembrandt. This is partly the respect accorded to his great craft skills and his originality of approach, partly the respect accorded to his originality of thought and partly the interest generated by a man at once courageous enough to take on the establishment, but humble enough to make himself one of the people nailing Christ to the cross. Or, in his 1625 Stoning of Stephen, to include his own likeness, as Schama points out, in three of the principal figures – witness, executioner and victim. This is not vanity but its opposite – realism. Is it not true that we are responsible for Christ’s death? Is it not true that we have sometimes stood by when evil savaged the innocent? And is it not true that we have sometimes suffered for the name of Christ and would hope that we would, if called upon, be able to die for him? Rembrandt may not always include his face in his paintings but he is rarely absent.
Beyond that, there is his ability to bring the Bible stories alive, to take us there. So, in his Samson and Delilah (1625, Berlin, Gemaldegalerie), he has not merely updated the scene to his own time but painted the scene in a way which captures Samson’s vulnerability and the reality of the awesome power of his now lost strength. We know from the shorn locks that the Samson sleeping in Delilah’s arms is a spent force but the soldier tiptoeing is not so sure. There is fear in his eyes and his left arm is stretched out in front of him in a self-protective gesture. As far as he is concerned he is approaching the man who killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass – it may not turn out well.
Of course, Rembrandt does not always re-contextualise but what he does is make us feel that the Bible characters are real. The resigned pain in Bathsheba’s eyes, (1654, Musee du Louvre) as she holds David’s letter of invitation and her maid prepares her feet, makes us feel that David’s ugly abuse of power is a form of rape. And Bathsheba’s expression serves to make us almost fail to notice the beauty of the body that David saw. Similarly, in The Holy Family (c. 1630, Munich, Alte Pinatkothek), Mary plays with the baby Jesus’ feet, as mothers still do to keep their suckling infants awake to finish their feed. But the gleaming wonder in her eyes and in Joseph’s is not the conventional, conscious, worshipful awe of being the parents of the Son of God but rather the common human delighting in their baby. Rembrandt’s intention, however, is not to strip the story of its reality but to make us see it afresh. The defecating dog in his etching of the Good Samaritan (1633, New York, Pierpoint Morgan Library) may have in his time shifted the focus of discussion from a good deed being done but it serves as indeed does much of the rest of the picture to capture a kind of easy naturalness about the whole scene. This extraordinary ordinary act of compassion is really the truly natural one and occurs as nature takes its course.
This ability to use the ordinary and turn it extraordinary also expresses itself in Rembrandt’s use of colour. Gone, for example, is the symbolic and expensive use of blue that marked so many earlier portraits of Mary. Rembrandt uses the earthier browns of peasant clothing. Indeed, perhaps Rembrandt is perhaps shattering the colour conventions of holiness and thereby demonstrating how the redemptive grace of Christ can take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. Indeed, as Schama points out, one of Rembrandt’s aims is not to show how different the great holy figures of the past were but how close to them we might be. This is not a theology of elitist holiness but, in line with the Reformation, a recovery of our common heritage, our common standing in Christ and our common call to sanctification.
Importantly, Rembrandt understands the difference between sight and perception, that is the difference between what can be grasped with the outer eye and what is grasped with the inner eye. His ability to make us see the scenes afresh physically is combined with a desire to help us perceive the inner truth. On occasion, this is achieved by creating a supernatural light source. So in the nativity scene, there is a lantern to cast its light. However, the baby is the primary source of light – not in the form of a halo but as a whole. Impossible when we think about it but at first glance entirely natural. On other occasions this interest in the inner light is reflected in his portraits of blind seers: the prodigal’s close-eyed father (c. 1669, St Petersburg, Hermitage), or his empty-socketed Simeon (1669, Stockholm, National-museum).
Rembrandt, then, makes us see the biblical accounts afresh, interpreting them through his own understanding of theology and applying the truth to himself with increasing humility as the years rolled by. His famous self-portrait as St Paul (1661, Amsterdam) is a portrait of self-knowledge. As Schama puts it this is Rembrandt as ‘a vessel of sin, and a receptacle of salvation; not a Paul of forbidding remoteness but a Paul of consoling humanity; a Paul for everyday sinners’.
If we’re looking to bring the Bible alive we could do worse than ponder Rembrandt‘s work – to think our way into the stories, to see the knife poised above Isaac's throat, the stone about to come crashing down on Stephen’s skull – and to re-tell those stories with a respect for the emphasis of the original authors but with the illumination of the inner truth that comes from the Spirit. After all, everyone loves a great story. We have the greatest story ever told. Oh that we could tell it so that people would know its greatness and be enthralled by its true author.
Further Reading
Hoekstra Hidde (ed.), Rembrandt and the Bible (Magna Books, 1990).
Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son (Image Books, 1994).
Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (Allen Lane, 1999).
Mark Greene
This article first appeared in Christianity & Renewal and is reproduced by kind permission.
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