Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance

by Kenneth M. Clark

Book by Clark, Kenneth

Genres: Art

225 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Sir Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1903 -1983) was a British art historian, museum director, and broadcaster. After running two important art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the Civilisation series in 1969.

The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings of John Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the connoisseur and dealer Bernard Berenson, Clark was appointed director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was put in charge of Britain's National Gallery. His twelve years there saw the gallery transformed to make it accessible and inviting to a wider public.

During the Second World War, when the collection was moved from London for safe keeping, Clark made the building available for a series of daily concerts which proved a celebrated morale booster during the Blitz.

After the war, and three years as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, Clark surprised many by accepting the chairmanship of the UK's first commercial television network. Once the service had been successfully launched he agreed to write and present programmes about the arts. These established him as a household name in Britain, and he was asked to create the first colour series about the arts, Civilisation, first broadcast in 1969 in Britain and in many other countries soon afterwards.

Among many honours, Clark was knighted at the unusually young age of thirty-five, and three decades later was made a life peer shortly before the first transmission of Civilisation. Three decades after his death, Clark was celebrated in an exhibition at Tate Britain in London, prompting a reappraisal of his career by a new generation of critics and historians. Opinions varied about his aesthetic judgment, particularly in attributing paintings to old masters, but his skill as a writer and his enthusiasm for popularising the arts were widely recognised. Both the BBC and the Tate described him in retrospect as one of the most influential figures in British art of the twentieth century.

Reviews

[Gerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prof. Kenneth Clark, perhaps best known as the narrator of the BBC Civilisation TV series, first lectured on Rembrandt at Oxford in 1947. He wrote this book in 1966 after he'd had a chance to think on it awhile. He freely admits in his Foreword that his academic specialty is not art history, per se. Ah well, we should all be such talented dilettantes (and in my humble opinion, some art historians should damn well lighten up).
Clark's central thesis is that Rembrandt borrowed heavily from Renaissance masters and their predecessors, the painters of the Quattrocento (15th century), which would include Leonardo da Vinci.
This is as much a book about the creative process as it is about styles of painting. It's also about the evolution of Humanism as a motivating force in artistic themes.
I learned two startling things. First, Rembrandt's experience of other paintings was to buy them at auction and take them home to his private collection. Is it any wonder he was so often broke? And apparently he paid top dollar, presumably not only to make sure he won the prize but also to honor the artists. He was not alone in this habit of collecting fine art and sumptuous found objects such as silk clothes and furs to put on his models. Other artists did the same because many did not travel and there were no public museums at the time. Fortunately for the sake of their exposure to antiquities from all over the world, Amsterdam was an active trading port, and the auction houses there were continuously replenished with new consignments.
Second stunner - Clark argues persuasively that Rembrandt borrowed certain themes, subject matter, styles, and techniques from *paintings he could never have seen.* That's plausible because we not only have the inventory of his collection (reproduced in the book), but also some of his presumed sources were never on exhibit anywhere near Amsterdam.
Clark's conclusion is something like "great minds think alike" - or, touching on common themes, different artists can find similar solutions independently. The great Theosophist Roger Weir, who recommends this book, offers a more esoteric explanation - namely that the cognoscenti learn to "see through" a story or a text or a work of art to discern its genesis in something like the collective unconscious.

[Sam Gilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

In five revised lectures, Clark draws on a deep intimacy w. Italiam Renaissance painting to trace Rembrandt’s highly personal and immensely flexible adoption of motives he encountered in works that made (and may have made) their way to Holland.

While some of the hypothesized connections are tenuous, overall Clark’s theses are illuminating. The writing is crisp, lucid, exemplary. Makes me want to read his other books.

[Nathanael Greene Slater · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expansive.