The master Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) continues to dominate the history of art and our visual imaginations. A skilled painter, draftsman, and etcher, Rembrandt transmuted the striking chiaroscuro effects that he adopted from the work of Caravaggio into a deeply personal form of expression, making himself a master of light and shadow.
The differences in the use of chiaroscuro between the two masters are instructive. Caravaggio highlights the often bitter confrontation between the individual and the external world through light and shadow. The harsh lighting effects create a glaring illumination of the human subject, revealing the contorted body in an unwelcome manner, intruding upon the seclusion of the subject, exposing dark secrets. Caravaggio’s “The Conversion of Saint Paul” is an extreme but by no means an atypical example. We see Paul prostrate on the ground, having just been thrown from his horse by his vision of God. Caravaggio reduces the entire scene to Paul, the horse, and a servant but the light itself (here a metonymic representative of God’s presence) intrudes upon the canvas as a fourth character.
Indeed, it is the light that seems to create motion within the work. Paul is frozen in the stasis of hypnotic reverie, his arms raised in a V figure above him, embracing the ecstatic vision; the horse, now becalmed by the servant, stands strangely still with its foreleg precariously hovering above the saint, its body serving as a screen for the vibrant luminosity of the deific presence. The light here is invasive, overwhelming; it intrudes upon the subjects (man and beast alike) and uproots them from their private existence.
Rembrandt largely employs chiaroscuro as a means to disclose the inner self of the human subject. Whereas Caravaggio utilizes chiaroscuro to highlight the forbidding externality that imposes itself on the person, Rembrandt exploits the technique in order to unveil the human being’s enigmatic interiority. The light in Rembrandt, while clearly deriving from an external source, paradoxically seems to irradiate from the essence of the human subject.