Rembrandt's "Saul and David" at the Mauritshuis: A Progress Report

Abstract

gbert Haverkamp Begemann was already a fully fledged art historian when he contributed to the catalogue that accompanied the 1969 Rembrandt exhibition organized at the Art Institute of Chicago on the occasion of the 300 th anniversary of the artist's death.Characteristically for someone who was to become an important mentor to many of us, he wrote about Rembrandt as a teacher. 1 In the same year, a conference was held in Chicago to coincide with a new approach to Rembrandt studies and connoisseurship. 2 Horst Gerson's monograph had just appeared, presenting a radically curtailed reassessment of the artist's oeuvre, and the Rembrandt Research Project had been established a year earlier.3 At the 1969 conference, technical studies were recognized as a vital ingredient in the evaluation of paintings: "there is hope that scientific investigations, not only of the paint and the background, but also of the support, will yield conclusive results.They will not answer all our questions, especially when these concern seventeenth-century copies or school pieces; but they will, I am sure, greatly enrich the limited supply of precise standards which connoisseurship has at its disposal." 4 More than forty years ago, it was clear that technical research would not resolve every uncertainty, but in retrospect the optimism in this statement is striking.Advanced scientific analyses have, indeed, changed our view of Rembrandt and have certainly enriched our understanding of the materials Rembrandt used and his working methods, but they have rarely led to "conclusive" results about attribution.The current study and treatment of Saul and David at the Mauritshuis is an apt illustration of how 1 2

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