Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits

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Rembrandt’s “late religious portraits” play with the idea of what makes a painting a portrait. They are based on real people contemporary and sometimes personal to Rembrandt but they are also meant to represent biblical figures. However, Rembrandt only includes small clues as to the biblical identity of the figures and maintains contemporary forms of identifications of the “models”. Therefore, Rembrandt’s “late religious portraits” are combination portraits of the person who is modeling and the biblical figure they are meant to represent. Their contemporary identity is connected to the identity they are performing. There are two ways that Rembrandt makes combination “late religious portraits”; the first is combining a contemporary archetype and and a religious symbol, the second is by using people whom he has personal connections with to combine their personal characteristic with those of a religious figure. …show more content…

However, they fit within a group, an archetype. Rembrandt combines that archetype with a known religious figure to create realism in the portraiture. An example of this is Christ Resurrected, 1661 that is thought to have use the model from Christ, 1648. The work Christ has recently adopted the name, in reality it is a simple character study of a young Jewish man in Rembrandt’s neighborhood. Rembrandt was able to see the attributes that have been used to represent Jesus in the young man and used that to create the dualistic “religious portrait”. Because Rembrandt used a real life model for Christ it gives the painting a humanistic and empathetic character as described by Wheelock in “Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits”. The archetype of the young Jewish man is synonymous to Christ according to Rembrandt. He uses the Jewish identity of Christ to create a combination portrait of contemporary young Jewish

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