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Weststeijn 'Who among the great Italian or Netherlandish masters has not had […] something particular as his speciality?'According to Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678), who asked this question in his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (1678), Dürer focused on draperies and Caravaggio on 'naturalness' (fig.1).As concerns the Netherlandish masters, in his opinion 'Rubens [concentrated on] rich compositions, Anthony van Dyck on grace, [and] Rembrandt on the passions of the soul.' 1 This article will argue that Van Hoogstraten, although he based his remarks on rhetorical commonplaces, made a careful choice when he praised his former master, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) for depicting emotions.Van Hoogstraten's classification of Rembrandt as focused on the lijdingen des gemoeds first caught the attention of Jan Emmens.His 1964 study Rembrandt en de regels van de kunst largely overlooked contemporary views about the passions.2 To Emmens, Van Hoogstraten rejected Rembrandt's concern for 'merely' depicting emotions and thus put his master, together with Caravaggio, in the camp of the despicable 'Naturalists', to use the term developed at the time by Bellori. 3 But if Emmens paid little attention to Van Hoogstraten, he portrayed Franciscus Junius (1591-1677), another theorist who wrote about the passions, as entirely irrelevant to the Dutch situation (fig.2).While Van Hoogstraten's importance is now more fully recognized, the scholarship on Junius has not yet recovered from this criticism.This is in contrast to the fact that Junius's treatise was read widely the seventeenth century and Van Hoogstraten can be called his most faithful student.4 As was already remarked by his contemporaries, Van Hoogstraten depended on Junius's ideas to structure his treatise; following his predecessor's lead, Van Hoogstraten's theory gives pride of place to the depiction of the passions as the central element connecting illusionism, visual story-telling and the ultimate ethical aims of painting.5 Van Hoogstraten may have first been confronted with Junius's ideas in Rembrandt's studio.The inventory of Rembrandt's library does not mention Junius's book, The painting of the ancients, published in Dutch in 1641, but the quarto-sized volume may have been among the 'fifteen books of various sizes' that were not identified by name.6 Both
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