Rembrandt van Rijn's "The Raising of Lazarus"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the Baroque period for Dutch Catholics was different than the rest of Europe because the country was governed by different religious strictures and political realities. Rembrandt worked under these restrictions. The author points out that the original Bible story differs from what Rembrandt painted. The paper concludes that, in this Rembrandt painting, the power of the event taking place is emphasized by the form of the image, the color values used, the stance of each person in the picture, the expressions on the faces of each person, the balance of light and dark, and every other element incorporated into the painting.

From the Paper:

"While religiously themed paintings and etchings were common in the Seventeenth Century, this was not necessarily the case in Holland at the time. Rembrandt often treated the stories and parables of the Old and New Testaments in accessible, familiar images in his works. However, the Dutch Reformed Calvinism of his time banned religious art in churches, and this carried over into the non-Church world so that public commissions for paintings of biblical subjects were virtually nonexistent. There was, however, an enthusiastic private patronage for such works, and this accounts for the preponderance of religious subjects in Rembrandt's work."

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