Project digitizes Rembrandt art

AMSTERDAM – The 731-piece life work of Rembrandt is now on display in full-sized digital reproductions that attempt to re-create the works as they emerged from the artist’s studio rather than as they exist today.

In some ways, the high resolution images are more authentic than the real paintings, said Ernst van de Wetering, a leading Rembrandt scholar who supervised the project.
Employing computer wizardry, pieces of canvas or panel that were sliced off centuries ago have been patched back on. Colors are restored to the vibrancy they had when they came off the master’s brush. Details hidden in darkness because of aging pigments emerge into view.

“The Complete Rembrandt, Life Size” exhibition runs through Sept. 7 in the former Amsterdam Stock Exchange building.

Not everyone is happy with the idea of passing off posters as true art. But even van de Wetering, who has examined much of the 17th-century artist’s work with x-rays and microscopes, said he discovered details he had never seen before.

“I got surprises,” he said, as he watched the folds of painted cloth materialize on the
computer screen and dark corners highlighted.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition brings together work from more than 100 museums and collections around the world to offer viewers “a walk through Rembrandt’s mind,” the art historian said.

It follows his 45-year evolution from young painter to possibly the most famous master of his day, and the sudden leaps of inspiration and conceptualization in between that jolted him to new levels.

During his life, van de Wetering has learned to dissect a Rembrandt into its smallest components, from the paint he used, the grounding of the work, the grain in the wood from which he cut his panels, and the number of threads in his canvas.

Van de Wetering worked with computer specialist Aehryan Hesseling to alter high resolution photographs. The images were then printed and mounted by a company which specializes in billboards and large-scale advertising.

The exhibit revives a previous debate about the value of seeing copies of the full range of Rembrandt’s work as compared with viewing a few originals.

Van de Wetering argues that the reproductions have the advantage of stripping away the aura of awe viewers often have when they see an original, which hinders their assessment of the work.

Axel Ruger, director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, complained in 2006 that the organizers appeared to see no qualitative difference between a reproduction and the real thing.

“Reproductions cannot convey anything of the wonderful three-dimensional quality of Rembrandt’s painted surfaces,” Ruger wrote at the time. A spokeswoman said the Van Gogh director has not changed his mind but declined to comment specifically about the current exhibition.

Rather than duck the controversy, Van de Wetering reprinted Ruger’s complaints in an epilogue to the book accompanying the show.

He argues that Rembrandt made copies of his work and had his students make more copies because he wanted a wider audience.

“Rembrandt would have been very happy if he had known we were doing this,” he said. “But the copies he made of his works are many times worse than ours.”