Mario del Monaco - ("Otello" Verdi) - Rembrandt (Music and Painting)

Описание: The Legend and the Man
from:
"The Legend and the Man," in The World of Rembrandt: 1606-1669 (Time-Life Library of Art), Walter Wallace, New York, 1968, pp. 17-25

In life Rembrandt suffered far more misfortune than falls to the lot of an ordinary man, and he bore it with the utmost nobility. Three centuries after his death the misfortune, if a man long deceased can be said to endure such a thing, continues. To be sure, it is no longer the fashion for critics to attack him both as artist and human being. Today the injury is done with a fond smile by writers of romantic biographies and films who mean to honor him. Their revised standard version of Rembrandt's life runs approximately as follows:

"The child of poor, ignorant Dutch peasants, Rembrandt was born with near-miraculous skill in art. As an uneducated young man, he established himself in Amsterdam, married a beautiful, wealthy, sympathetic girl named Saskia, and enjoyed a brief period of prosperity and fame. However, because men of genius are always misunderstood by the public, fate snatched him by the throat. The important burghers of the city, who may not have known much about art but knew what they liked, gave him an enormous commission - the Night Watch - in which the burghers were to be painted in traditional postures and lights. Rembrandt responded with a masterpiece, a fact unfortunately apparent only to him and his wife. Everyone else, from the burghers to the herring-peddlers, thought the painting was dreadful. Rembrandt's patrons hooted in rage and derision, demanding changes that the artist, secure in the knowledge that posterity would vindicate him, stubbornly refused to make.