Roughness is the sensual quality most often associated with Rembrandt's idiosyncratic style. It best defines the specific structure of his painterly textures, which subtly capture and engage the imagination of the beholder. Rembrandt's Roughness examines how the artist's unconventional technique pushed the possibilities of painting into startling and unexpected realms. Drawing on the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl as well as firsthand accounts by Rembrandt's contemporaries, Nicola Suthor provides invaluable new perspectives on many of the painter's best-known masterpieces, including The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman, The Return of the Prodigal Son, and Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. She focuses on pictorial phenomena such as the thickness of the paint material, the visibility of the colored priming, and the dramatizing element of chiaroscuro, showing how they constitute Rembrandt's most effective tools for extending the representational limits of painting. Suthor explores how Rembrandt developed a visually precise handling of his artistic medium that forced his viewers to confront the paint itself as a source of meaning, its challenging complexity expressed in the subtlest stroke of his brush. A beautifully illustrated meditation on a painter like no other, Rembrandt's Roughness reflects deeply on the intellectual challenge that Rembrandt's unrivaled artistry posed to the art theory of his time and its eminent role in the history of art today.

This book examines how secret knowledge was represented visually in ways that both revealed and concealed the true nature of that knowledge, giving and yet impeding access to it.

Volume IV of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings deals uniquely with the self-portraits of Rembrandt. In a clearly written explanatory style the head of the Rembrandt Research Project and Editor of this Volume, Ernst van de Wetering, discusses the full body of work of paintings and etchings portraying Rembrandt. He sets the different parameters for accepting or rejecting a Rembrandt self-portrait as such, whilst also discussing the exact working environment of Rembrandt and his apprentices. This workshop setting created a surroundings where apprentices could be involved in working on Rembrandt paintings making it more difficult to determine the hand of the master. Van de Wetering, who is one of the Rembrandt experts of our day and age, goes down to great detail to explain how the different self-portraits are made and what techniques Rembrandt uses, also giving an overview of which paintings are to be attributed to the Dutch Master and which not. In the additional catalogue the self-portraits are examined in detail. In clear and accessible explanatory text the different paintings are discussed, larded with immaculate images of each painting. Details are shown where possible, as well as the results of modern day technical imaging like X-radiography. This work of art history and art research should be part of every serious art historical institute, university or museum. Nowhere in the art history have all Rembrandt’s self portraits been discussed in such detailed and comparative manner by an authority such as Ernst van de Wetering. This is a standard work for decades to come.