Rembrandt’s Holy Family with a Cat (1654)

Rembrandt, Holy Family with a Cat and Snake (1654) Etching. First State

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Rembrandt's well-known engraving of Joseph peering through a window at the Virgin and Child clearly has no source in the Bible. Why, then, would he engrave it? What would his purpose have been? Prior experts have had little more to say than it is "an extraordinary combination of slice-of-everyday-life realism and traditional symbolism.."1 What, however, is the purpose of combining them? From our point-of-view it can look odd.

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Mantegna, Madonna of Humility (1450-55) Engraving.

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The first step on the way to explaining this print is already well-known. Rembrandt based his motif of the Virgin and Child on a mid-fifteenth century engraving by Mantegna known as The Madonna of Humility.2 

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Rembrandt, Holy Family with a Cat and Snake (1654) Etching. First State

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Although drawn in Rembrandt's own style the "Virgin and Child" are, in essence, Mantegna's "work-of-art" with Joseph looking in on the masterpiece from outside. It is helpful to know, as experts do not, that Joseph had long represented the artist-as-craftsman in traditional images of the Holy Family. 

 

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Dürer, Holy Family (1492-3) Pen and ink. Berlin

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Joseph often sits in such images to the side, detached as a dreamer, imagining his conception of the Virgin and Child - as here in an example by Dürer - or else he observes his "masterpiece" from above or behind. Take a separate look, for instance, at our entry on Mantegna's own Adoration of the Shepherds in which the shepherds-as-spectators bow down not to Christ as they should but to Joseph-the-artist. (More examples by El Greco and others will soon follow.) 

 

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Rembrandt, Holy Family with a Cat and Snake (1654) Etching. First State

 

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Rembrandt's scene, then, is an image of Joseph-as-Rembrandt-the-craftsman looking into his own mind where he sees his conception of Mantegna's image in the process of being re-conceived.  The Dutch artist thus naturally combined the setting of his own life with scenes from the Bible. The choice was not a matter of style, as others have long thought, but of meaning.

Notes:

This article was first published online on 19th December, 2011.

1. Rembrandt's Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher (Boston: Museum of Fine Art) 2003, pp. 243-4

2. A. Hyatt Mayor, Rembrandt and the Bible (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art) 1979, pp. 14-15

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