3)? 4 And did Jacob de Wit in Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. 2)? 3 Did the preacher pictured by Bartholomeus van der Helst actually mean to be recorded as if he had just seen a ghost ( fig. 1)? 2 Why did the man painted by Rembrandt in 1633 want to be remembered for waving at the viewer while rising from his chair ( fig. How could seventeenth-century Dutch men, and a few women, commission from well-known artists, for substantial sums of money, portraits of themselves depicted in what appear to us to be comically awkward poses? Was the musician portrayed by Thomas de Keyser a hunchback, or just lurching about the room ( fig. Nowhere is this increased sense of temporality more puzzling to me, however, than in a number of seventeenth-century Dutch portraits. While sixteenth-century group portraits present row upon row of heads and shoulders arranged like vegetables displayed at the local farmers’ market, a seventeenth-century innovation was the production of animated moment - such as Rembrandt’s depiction of Captain Frans Banning Cocq delivering marching orders to his men in the Nightwatch ( fig. History paintings move from passively relating narrative to actively engaging a particular moment of contemplation or the horrifying moment of death, blood squirting before our eyes. Vessels in seascapes arrive on calm seas until the second half of the century, when wild storms threaten ships with whipped waves hulls are occasionally split entirely into two. Around 1600 foodstuffs are arranged in orderly fashion across table tops, while after 1650 table cloths are wadded, lemons peeled, and beakers careen wildly or are thrown over entirely. It is a commonplace of art historical formal and iconographic analysis that flower still life paintings open the century as relatively stiff bouquets of flowers in full blossom and close the same century as lush blooms, drooping petals, spent of their life, emphasizing the passage of time - underscored, in some works, by the addition of an open pocket watch. In the fourth century Saint Augustine asked himself, “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know if I wish to explain it to one who asks me, I know not.” 1 My interest in time and Dutch portraiture originated in the observation that over the course of the seventeenth century, Dutch artists produced images that display an increased awareness of temporality.
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