The Touch of Love: Gestures of Touch in Three Late Works by Rembrandt

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The Touch of Love: Gestures of Touch in Three Late Works by Rembrandt: Prodigal Son, Jewish Bride, and Family Group

Part I: Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (part II on the Jewish Bride is a separate document)

Robert Baldwin

Associate Professor of Art History

ConnecticutCollege

(written as a graduate student in 1982-3; revised in 1984 and presented as a paper in 1987

"The Touch of Love in Rembrandt's 'Return of the Prodigal Son' and 'Jewish Bride'," Midwest Art History Society, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, March 27)

Among Rembrandt's many impressive late paintings, the Return of the Prodigal Son, the so-called Jewish Bride, and the Family Group are particularly striking for their quiet depth of feeling (Figs. xxx). Grounded in qualities of composition, brushwork, light, color, and theme, the emotional resonance of these works finds a particularly vivid outlet in the prominent gestures of stilled, gentle touching. Without denying the "infinite tenderness" often noted in these works by more modern viewers, [1] I hope to develop a more historical vocabulary to suggest the possible responses of seventeenth-century viewers to these works. Since the search for precedents and parallels always risks burying a work's unique aesthetic qualities in a mass of texts and contexts, an initial visual reading will serve to orient my selection of historical evidence. Though two different gestures and iconographic categories are involved in this paper - the "hands on the shoulders" in a religious work and the "hand on the chest" in two portraits - the three works share certain qualities of meaning established by chronological proximity, similarities of style, an interest in familial or conjugal love, and an almost ritual language of touch.

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The novelty of Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son is intelligible only in relation to the pictorial tradition its plays against. Free from Biblical prescriptions for the posing of father and son - Luke only says "And he arose and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him"[2] - most European artists adhered to a visual tradition. The viewpoint was from the side or from three-quarters where both faces could be seen. Ignoring Luke's "great distance", the meeting was usually placed directly outside the house to stress the theme of homecoming. The returning son most often knelt on one leg as if caught rising or falling. [3] In turn, the standing father reached one hand around the son's shoulder, back, or, more rarely, placed it on his head. [4] The other hand made contact with the front of the son's body, either resting on the upper chest, [5] grasping one or both of the son's hands, [6] or reaching across the torso under the opposite arm. [7] Occasionally the father reached both hands under the son's arms while the son held the father around the back or neck. [8] If this facial legibility allowed artists to show clearly the father's mercy and the son's grief mixed with hope, the youth's partial genuflection revealed his exemplary contrition and obedience and implied an imminent raising by his father. This suggestion of falling and rising was only heightened by the common ambiguity of the father's hands, at once falling, embracing, and raising the son up. Not found in the Bible, this visually developed imagery of clarified the story's traditional analogy with The Fall and the subsequent raising of mankind by Christ. [9] With such a clear visual communication of emotional and allegorical information, it is easy to see why this basic grouping was so frequently adopted.

In contrast, Rembrandt's painting attempts to grapple with the elliptical nature of parable narrative with its simultaneous veiling and revealing, its indirect presentation of hidden mysteries within everyday reality. The actors and their gestures, the composition, colors, chiaroscuro, and brush technique all reinforce the paradox of a vivid remoteness and a familiar mystery. Thus the painting dazzles the viewer with monumental forms, opulent draperies and colors (not to mention the opulent tactility of its own paint) while avoiding the mundane, familiar textile descriptions prominent in contemporary Dutch painting. Shadows both give the forms a massive presence and remove them into a mysterious gloom. The father simultaneously faces the real beholder and remains absorbed in a private encounter. The son kneels on both knees just inside the picture plane, [10] a surrogate for the real spectator facing into the picture [the painting's frame works as a kind of doorway for the returning viewer's gaze], yet hidden and inaccessible, his back turned, his face a lost profile, his kneeling posture a rebuke to the standing brother at right and the real beholder. Like this troubled and uncomprehending brother, the real viewer stands before the kneeling son, physically close and yet psychologically and spiritually removed, unable to see what father and son know.

If, as is likely, the large painting once decorated a prosperous Dutch interior, its juxtapositions of the father's immaterial magnificence and the son's tranquility amidst ruin would have also worked both to draw in and distance the well dressed, respectable, comfortable viewer. Ultimately the painting itself was a paradoxical object, a large, impressive, richly colored work by a celebrated Dutch artist which any wealthy collector would have been proud to own, yet a work which celebrated poverty, humility, and ugliness as metaphors for the human condition. One thinks Nehemiah Rogers's commentary on the parable, printed in English (1620) and Dutch (1649) editions. Comparing the prodigal son to modern mankind, he rebukes his reader, "thou sayest thou art rich and increased with goods and hast need of nothing, and knowest not that thou art poore, blind, miserable, wretched, and naked". [11]

All this is only heightened by the exceptional gestures. The father's placement of both hands on the son's shoulders is not found in Rembrandt's earlier scenes of the returning prodigal. [12] Indeed, this gesture is quite rare in earlier representations and appears in two works known to me. [13] Only one, an allegorical print by Cornelis Anethonisz, has some of the hieratic quality of Rembrandt's work. [14] Combined with the monumental, frontal grouping, the symmetry of this gesture deemphasizes both the physical facts of "embracing" and the potential bodily drama of lowering and raising. Suggestive more of ritual than drama, the gesture captures a moment only to suspend it from the narrative flux in fixing the story's deeper meaning. [15] By echoing the many vertical elements of the picture, including its format, the gesture also strengthens the distant, hieratic quality of the "action", freezing each actor along discrete axes. Finally, the gesture endows the father with both a new gentleness and a new authority, a paradoxical tender majesty and majestic tenderness which frames the son's equally paradoxical responses. Though we can only glimpse the edge of his face, it has lost the conspicuous anguish of Rembrandt's 1636 engraving (Fig. ) and takes on an unsettling tranquility amidst shame, submission, and ruin.

In trying to give this visual analysis a more precise, historical foundation without losing any of the picture's ambiguities and paradoxes, a traditional visual and verbal metaphor, the yoke, presents itself which both captures these ambiguities and relates to the parable. Though an analogy between shoulder handling and the yoke may initially seem far fetched, both were common visual and verbal metaphors for authority. What makes the yoke metaphor particularly useful here is its appearance in discussions both of the prodigal's return and of god's healing touch. Even more to the point, these discussions endowed the yoke with the same paradoxical qualities visually conveyed in Rembrandt's painting. [16] It is neither possible nor important to argue that Rembrandt consciously drew on the visual and verbal metaphoric tradition of the yoke when painting the prodigal son. The yoke tradition is valuable more because it makes accessible to modern viewers the kind of seventeenth-century language of feeling which would have informed contemporary responses to Rembrandt’s painting.

In order to see the analogy between shoulder handling and yoking, we need to remind ourselves of the authority traditionally associated with the human hand in ritual, liturgy, language, and art, a tradition often involving the hand held over submissive, kneeling figures. [17] As Richard Brilliant has shown, the imperial hand was a leitmotif of authority in Roman art. By late antiquity, the mere extension of the hand, usually enlarged symbolically, was enough to subdue barbarian foes in Roman reliefs. [18] In the Christian tradition, the laying on of hands was an important rite in the sacrament of penance as the bishop or priest granted absolution to the kneeling sinner. [19] Drawing on Christ's healing touch, medieval kings were often credited with a similar power: "The king touches you; God heals you". [20] So too, feudal lords, and later, courtly ladies, received the obedience of vassals and lovers, respectively, by having them kneel and place their clasped hands in the grasp of the lord or lady. [21] In Rembrandt's day, the hand of power was described in John Bulwer's, Chirologia.

"To Lay Hand upon one is their expression who with authority apprehend and lay hold of one as a delinquent to secure this person. This is one of the properest expressions of the Hand, for Hand and Hold are conjugates". [22]

With this in mind, it is not surprising to find direct analogies between the metaphoric yoke and hand as twin metaphors of power and oppression as in Exekiel 34:27

"and they shall be safe in their land, and shall know that I am the Lord, when I have broken the bands of their yoke, and delivered them out of the hand of those that served themselves of them".

The parallels between yoking and shoulder grasping are clear in verbal and visual representations of a variety of subjects including scenes of monastic vows, ecclesiastical authority, marriage, God's union with the sinner, and the prodigal's return. All of these subjects drew on and popularized Christ's easy or gentle yoke (suave jugum) described in Matthew.

Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matthew 11: 29-30)

Here Matthew paradoxically inverted the yoke's familiar connotation of burden, enslavement, submission, and defeat, [23] an inversion not lost on later writers such as Aelred of Rievaulx.

"It is because this yoke is easy, this burden light, that you will find rest for your souls. This yoke does not bow you down to earth, but lifts you up to Him: this burden has wings, not weight. This yoke is divine love, this burden is brotherly love. Here rest may be found". [24]

To begin with ecclesiastical authority, medieval and renaissance writers often spoke of various ecclesiastical yokes. Thus Cyril of Alexandria noted,

"Satan scattered us ... and led man astray ... However Christ gathered us together once more and brought us all through faith unto the one enclosure that is the Church, and put us under one yoke: all have become one". [25]

More common was the topos of a monastic yoke usually compared to Matthew's suave jugum. Thus Benedict of Nursia "subjected the company of monks to the sweet yoke of Christ" while monks vowing obedience would often say they had promised Christ to bear the "monastic yoke". [26] Catherine of Siena asked, "What is a religious without the yoke of obedience?" [27] This literary metaphor was occasionally made explicit, as Giotto's allegory of Obedience in the church of San Francesco, where, to use Vasari's words, "Obedience puts a yoke on the neck of a friar who kneels before her, the bands of which are drawn by hands to heaven" (Fig. ). [28] A simpler, fifteenth-century example is Il Vecchietta's painting of a Franciscan monk receiving his order in the Alte Pinakothek. (Fig. 5) Given this tradition, it does not seem farfetched to see a yoking gesture in Ghirlandaio's fresco in the Sassetti Chapel of St. Francis Renouncing Earthly Possessions Before the Bishop of Assisi. (Fig. 6) Here, the bishop's gesture evokes the new spiritual obligations literally and figuratively shouldered by the young Francis.

Turning to representations of conjugal love, one notes that the yoke lay at the etymological core of marriage: the Latin conjugum literally meaning "yoked together" a word which spawned such later terms for spouse as the Old English "yoke-fellow". The Latin conjugum also spawned Renaissance pictorial imagery involving the conjugal yoke as seen in both the woodcuts and text of the famous marriage poem, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. [29] Perhaps inspired by this book, Lorenzo Lotto painted a famous marriage portrait, now in the PradoMuseum, showing a husband and wife sharing the conjugal yoke (Fig. 4). In Jan Steen's Marriage Contract (Hermitage), a yoke appears on the floor. [30] And in Ripa's Iconologia (1608), Matrimonio appeared as a yoked woman whose feet were in stocks. My illustration comes from the 1644 Amsterdam edition (Fig. 5). In part, Ripa's image drew on the topos of love and marriage as a bondage, fettering, enchainment, or yoking, [31] something seen in two emblems with yoke-holding cupids from Otto van Veen's Amorum Emblemata(Fig. XX). [32] By selecting a woman to bear the yoke, however, Ripa may have also suggested the double standard which assigned a greater share of obedience, submission, and yoking to the wife. [33] True, allegorical figures were generally female, but it is also unlikely emblem makers would have used a yoked man to depict marriage; the fettered, yoked male was primarily restricted to misogynist attacks on matrimony and ambiguous descriptions of non-conjugal passion as found in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, "And on his neck her yoaking arms she throws". [34] Already Horace had applied the conjugal yoke specifically to women in his ode, Not Yet.

"Your heifer's pretty neck is not yet broke

To stand the pressure of a husband's yoke.

She's too young yet to bear the weight

And duties of the marriage state". [35]

Taking up the tradition, Shakespeare described Lucretia’s body yoked to her lawful husband

Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue,

A pair of maiden worlds unconquered,

Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew,

And him by oath they truly honoured. [36]

The wife also bears this husbandly yoke, along with the gentle yoke of God, in patristic writings on the soul as Christ's mystical bride. In the anonymous, second-century Odes of Solomon, Christ describes his relation to the faithful human soul as follows.

"I lifted up over them the yoke of my love, like the arm of the bridegroom over the bride, so was my yoke over them that know me". [37]

This idea of a (husbandly) yoke on the neck of Christ's bride was also echoed in other early Christian writers including Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. [38] Robert Blois's Advice to Ladies even compared the wife under the husbandly hand to the monk under the prior.

"Take care not to allow your breast

To be felt, foldled, or caressed

By any hands save those that ought.

For, true it is, when one first thought,

Of fashioning the clothing clasp,

It was to keep man's lustful grasp

From woman's bust, which should be known

To husband's hands and his alone,

(For husbands may touch what they choose,

Since for their pleasure, they may use

Their ladies as they wish; and wives

Must lead submissive, duteous lives,

Obedient as the monk or friar,

Who bends the knee before the prior".[39]

In a sixteenth-century discussion of "Subjugatio Matromonium" under the larger heading, "Subjugatio", Piero Valeriano referred to chains, rings, and yokes as signs of wifely submission, comparing husbands and wives to kings and prisoners. [40] In his Lectures on Timothy, while discussing why "all who are under the yoke of slavery [should] regard their masters as worthy of honor", Luther jumped easily from slaves to conjugal obligation which, though mutual, was clearly unbalanced.

"All the more ought each one to be obedient to his ruler; all the more ought a wife be obedient to her husband and a husband not desert his wife". [41]

In the seventeenth-century, William Gouge introduced a similar yoke in warning against an excessive or harsh subjection of wives to their husbands. "That which maketh a wives yoake heavy and hard is a husbands abuse of his authority". [42]