There is a really compelling story to be told about the ways in which Rembrandt’s artistic approach to religious representation reflected broader seventeenth-century European attitudes, including the oft-overlooked movement of art (and paintings in particular) as a tool of partisan reconciliation. To work as an artist in Holland you had to be a member of the Guild of St. Luke, whose members quite rapidly realised they were on the brink of losing a large part of their clientele once the Catholic Church stopped commissioning artworks that would inevitably be burned or destroyed by the Calvinists from 1600 onwards. Early seventeenth-century Dutch artists therefore turned from religious to history painting, but the ethos and reification of the Renaissance’s fin-de-siecle was still present in these new secular works.

An example of this is Peter Lastman, who was a Catholic and Rembrandt’s first mentor. In Odysseus and Nausicaa (1619) we see a fusion of pagan and Catholic iconography in a pile of supplies presented by Nausicaa’s handmaidens, but also of secular, domestic Protestant craftsmanship: hidden amongst the grapes and bread (symbols of abundance in both pagan and Catholic/Eucharist iconography) is a golden ewer made by renowned silversmith Adam van Vianen only three years earlier, now considered one of the earliest examples of the then inchoate Rococo silversmithing tradition. Rembrandt followed suit: in his work there are constant coalesces of the biblical, the pagan and the industrial-mercantile, tripartite representations of the sort of propitiative attitude held by the first generation of the Dutch Golden Age as they navigated their nation’s new circumstances.

Well, at least I find it very compelling. The curators of two major and recently concurrent European institutions clearly disagree: Rembrandt – Hoogstraten: Colour and Illusion at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the newly restored collection of Rembrandt paintings at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (previously shown in 2019 at the anniversary exhibition All the Rembrandts) make zero mention of the Reformation, or of Rembrandt’s religion at all. This is arguably a minor complaint, but I am nevertheless interested in dissecting how the overall failure to address the native environment of the Dutch Master’s success can provide a hermeneutic overview of how European museums display historical art today.1

One can, to an extent, forgive the Kunsthistorisches Museum for foregoing any mention of general Dutch culture. The exhibition uses Rembrandt’s student, Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten, as an anchor through which to examine the Old Master’s use of illusionist painting techniques. It’s a nice idea with a lot of nuance – as the late Rembrandt expert Josua Bruyn put it, Rembrandt’s corrections would often ‘betray the testy reaction of the teacher to the somewhat timid composition of the student’ (especially evident in Hoogstraten’s earlier self-portraits).2 It does a good although slightly timid job of delving into how both artists came to embody broader trends in seventeenth-century painting, such as ‘Beweeglijkheid’,3 the concept in Dutch painting that refers to the dynamic composition and sense of movement, leading to practices like drawing and studying one's emotions before a mirror, practiced by Rembrandt and still Van Hoogstraten still advised in 1678.

But this is about as far as the exhibition is willing to go in terms of pulling out broader narratives concerning Dutch culture – and who can blame them? Austria and the Holy Roman Empire had a hell of a lot going on during the seventeenth century and cramming in information about a country halfway across the continent isn’t particularly serviceable. You could, if you really wanted to, use Rembrandt as a jumping off point to talk about how and why so much of the Habsburg collection at that time came from outside of Vienna, but this is a curatorial route of more interest to the historian (and, oddly, the naval engineer) than the art-lover. Visitors to Vienna want to know about Rudolph II, not William II.

The Rijksmuseum has no such excuse. This is a Dutch institution in a Dutch city: they should be eager to showcase just how and why their national progeny became such an iconic figure in the canon of Western art. But beyond a few introductory sentences, very little is said of the cocktail of social, economic and religious forces that shaped Rembrandt’s artistic world. There is no mention of shifting tides of mercantilism that transformed patronage, the religious fracturing that forced artists to navigate a new visual language, the emergence of a self-made bourgeoisie eager to see itself reflected in portraiture, or even the deeply personal financial and professional struggles that marked Rembrandt’s later years and found expression in his increasingly experimental technique. Even his tumultuous love life — his marriage to the wealthy Saskia van Uylenburgh, which secured his early social ascent, his later relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels, who defied social convention as his common-law wife — mirrored broader societal shifts, from the growing autonomy of the Dutch middle class to the evolving attitudes toward marriage, morality, and gender roles. The Night Watch alone could serve as a crash course in Dutch history: a grand civic portrait that elevates Amsterdam’s rising militia class to near-mythic status, reflecting both the growing economic power and the increasing secularisation of Dutch culture in flux. These facts are not just incidental footnotes, they are central aspects to understanding the Old Master’s works. Nor are they particularly complex, and certainly not cumbersome for the average museum visitor, especially if they are visitors to a Dutch museum and therefore likely to be, at the very least, receptive to (if not downright in search of) Dutch historical facts.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that it’s not like the museum is afraid of Dutch history: there are dozens of placards throughout the rest of the exhibitions reminding visitors of just how many slaves the country sold, how many places it colonised, how many lives were obliterated as a result of mercantilism. Of course this is all important and interesting, especially in regards to artworks made during the seventeenth century, but what is more interesting is how this kind of contextual history seems to only be relevant for artworks that invoke the politics of international trade. Native or internal historical events of the Dutch Golden Age – the advances in science, the rise of republicanism, the extraordinary music, theatre, philosophy, astronomy, agriculture and architecture of the 1600s – are nowhere to be found.

I am reminded of the Tate’s catastrophically received revisionist rehang in early 2023, dubbed a ‘zombie social art history’. Specifically I turn to the Troubled Glamour 1760-1830 room, filled with portraits of chinless aristocrats and accompanying wall texts reminding us that these were all Very Naughty Boys (Who Sold People). Portraits of farmers and haymakers are accompanied by reams of texts reminding us that these paintings are idealised versions of rural life, to which my automatic response is well, yes, that’s sort of the point. Art did not work in the 1700s like it did today, you were not commissioned to produce raw, hard-hitting depictions of the downtrodden, you were given (sometimes vast) amounts of money to create works that were to be hung up in large houses and then looked at by the very rich and their even richer children. How quickly we forget that for most of human history art was religious first and decorative second! It’s only in the past century that we’ve started treating it as a tool — for representation, for revolution, for reclamation, for whichever social buzzword gets you featured on the A Brush With… podcast.

I can’t help but feel that curations like this give the anti-woke weirdos a really significant amount of ammo. I’m relatively indifferent to the idea that these sorts of exhibitions make you ‘ashamed to be European’ (or whatever Private Eye-esquery is going on in JJ Charlesworth’s warpath) but I am willing to concede that the pick-and-choose attitude towards contextualisation is troubling. The Rijksmuseum, like many contemporary institutions, appears to have adopted a museological strategy in which history is not examined (or indeed presented) holistically but atomised into largely moralistic narratives. This is not to suggest that the museum is obligated to address every facet of the Dutch Golden Age in equal measure, but rather that the absence of certain historical contexts (particularly those that pertain to art as a function of internal Dutch society) feels conspicuous in contrast to their eagerness to dissect the nation’s imperialist crimes.

The ability to depict psychological and emotional states by means of external characteristics – the affetti as it was known in Italian Renaissance art theory – was codified in the Netherlands by painter and art theorist Karel Van Mander in his 1603-04 work Grondt der Edel vry Schilderconst. The “afbeeldingen der affecten/passien/begeerlickheden/en lijdens der menschen" (the depiction of emotions, passions, desires, and sufferings of human beings) has become a surprisingly divinatory aspect the of curatorial ethos that would rear its head hundreds of years later. The depiction of emotions and sufferings being put on display here is our own: our anxieties over race, our guilt over colonialism, our fear of retrospective judgement being perceived as unprogressive.

But what of Rembrandt's passions? What do we gain by placing our modern, Western affeti above those that synecdochally defined one of the most intense eras of European history? More importantly, what does a museum audience gain by being told again and again that art should only be engaged with through the prism of its ability to reflect contemporary ideological preoccupations, rather than through the material conditions that gave rise to it?