In 1669, three hundred and fifty years ago, one of the most representative artists of Western art passed away in Amsterdam: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. The Monumental Complex of the Pilotta, thanks to a loan granted by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg , is celebrating this important anniversary by hosting in its rooms the Adoration of the Magi from 1632 , a true manifesto of the master’s pictorial work. This canvas painted in grisaille , a chiaroscuro almost devoid of color introduced for the first time in Rome in the first half of the sixteenth century, exalts like no other the aesthetic characteristic of Rembrandt’s artistic language: a scenographic use of light and an illusionistic exaltation of detail such as to reveal, through painting, the theological texture of history.
350 years after Rembrandt’s death, the exhibition of the Adoration of the Magi in Pilotta allows a counterpoint between the collections of the Monumental Complex, their continuity in the categories of Catholic academicism and the other face of Europe, represented by the cultures of the North, so proud in claiming ancient traditions and spiritualities ideologically superimposed on the return to early Christianity. It also allows us to identify in Northern Italy the first seeds of this mystical renewal, not by chance prefigured by the work of Caravaggio and Lombard painting, taking an articulated awareness of Italian artistic traditions, better inserted into the framework of their time.
The work, painted around 1632, belongs to a phase of creative emancipation in which Rembrandt sought his own fully original path, having left the workshop of the master Pieter Lastman just two years before in a situation dominated by Peter Paul Rubens and his followers. In the Adoration of the Magi in the Hermitage, the fundamental themes and stylistic elements that would constitute his aesthetic identity can be distinguished – a focal play that establishes the principles of composition, the reference to ancient and oriental iconographies in response to the classicism of Baroque and Catholic painting – but the not totally severed ties with Italian art can still be read, as can be seen from the representation of the face of the Virgin and Child.