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Amsterdam Weekend
May. 29th, 2006 05:06 pmAmsterdam was a blast, despite the fact it was raining cats and dogs on Friday. This meant we did the major museums then – the Rijksmeseum and the Van Gogh. It also meant some queuing in the rain in front of the former; sure, we had booked our tickets in advance, but so had a lot of other people, and the rain gave them the very same idea…
Anyway: the highlight, museum-wise, was definitely the Rembrandt/Caravaggio exhibition in the Van Gogh. Rembrandt was just four years old when Caravaggio died, but some early art historians compared the two, which gave the creators of this exhibition a nifty idea. It’s really a fascinating exercise in compare and contrast, though Rembrandt definitely learned something about the use of light from the Caravaggio followers. Otherwise, though, they’re so very different, even when treating the same subject, like Abraham being about to sacrifice Isaac. They both circumvented expectations there; Caravaggio, usually using every opportunity for creating homoerotic vibes, painted Isaac as a screaming, terrified child; the terror of Isaac is what really stays with you after watching this picture, not the divine intervention or Abraham. Rembrandt, otherwise taking such care in the depiction of faces, painted Isaac as a young male and went for the full male act, except for Isaac’s face, which is entirely covered by Abraham’s hand. Meanwhile, the center of the picture is the Angel shooting down with such force that Abraham drops the knife out of sheer surprise/terror/relief.
And then you’ve got the two pictures which are used for the posters of the exhibition, Caravaggio’s Omnia Vincit Amor and Rembrandt’s The Rape of Ganymed. Again, expectations are circumvented. Omnia Vincit Amor was a scandal in its time not because it presented a Cupido but because of how Caravaggio did it. The boy – same model as for Isaac, btw, though anything but childlike and terrified here – totally comes across as a street boy getting having just gotten out of bed, dirty toe nails and all, with a lazy grin, and “love conquers all” isn’t taken in the romantic sense – i.e. love overcomes all obstacles between lovers – but as sex winning over civilisation, as embodied by the symbols being read on by said Cupido – a lute, notes, armour, a violin.
Meanwhile, Rembrandt took one of the most famous homoeerotic myths – Zeus going after Ganymed and sweeping him up to Olympus to make him his boytoy – and took the sex out of it entirely, presenting Zeus as an eagle and Ganymed as a baby-plumb toddler not older than three or four, screaming and crying. (In the sketches for the picture, he had planned on including the parents raising their hands as well.) It’s effective and disturbing, especially if you know the myth. Even more so when put next to Caravaggio’s Cupido, as done in this exhibition.
Saturday the weather was somewhat better, so we did a lot of walking, which Amsterdam is simply great for. It’s a beautiful city with all its canals and those houses with their gables – and sort-of-gallows at the top; these were needed to pull up the furniture, since because of the narrowness of many houses the stairs weren’t nearly wide enough to transport furniture up there. Dad bought a lot of tulip onions for my mother, and we paid a visit to the smaller museum in Rembrandt’s house as well. You know, the beds there – both the one in the kitchen for the maid and the one in the room where Rembrandt’s wife Saskia lived – really illustrate where the English word “bedchamber” comes from. They’re like cupboards. The house is pretty well restored, since due to Rembrandt going broke an inventory of all his worldly possessions was made. At the top floor, under the roof, they’ve put paintings by students of Rembrandt and Rembrandt himself in direct contrast. Sometimes, I found the student version actually more interesting…
Saturday evening was spent with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mylexie, watching X3 (I’ll comment in another entry) and then having dinner, which was spent in mutual geeking out about lots things, not all connected to the movie. Sunday morning, we did what we had deliberately kept until the last, because in my mind you can’t really go from there to some tourist attraction – the house where Anne Frank and her family were hidden. Like pretty much everyone else from my generation, I had read the diary at school, and had seen various film versions based on it. It still doesn’t prepare you. So odd to climb those stairs, to walk to those rooms. See the photos of the people, all dead, and then the room Anne shared with Fritz Pfeffer, with those faded film star pictures put on the wall – Ray Milland, Deanna Durbin – such a teenage girl thing to do – and to read those quotes talking about her hope of the future. I started to cry then, and I hadn’t meant to, but it got worse in a later room, where they had letters from Otto Frank from Auschwitz after it got liberated, one to his brother where he talks about still hoping to find his children again. And you know they were dead, dead, dead.
The sun was shining when we left the house; my father just put his arms around me, and we felt the horror of it all all over again. And started to walk through Amsterdam once more, until the tears were gone.
Anyway: the highlight, museum-wise, was definitely the Rembrandt/Caravaggio exhibition in the Van Gogh. Rembrandt was just four years old when Caravaggio died, but some early art historians compared the two, which gave the creators of this exhibition a nifty idea. It’s really a fascinating exercise in compare and contrast, though Rembrandt definitely learned something about the use of light from the Caravaggio followers. Otherwise, though, they’re so very different, even when treating the same subject, like Abraham being about to sacrifice Isaac. They both circumvented expectations there; Caravaggio, usually using every opportunity for creating homoerotic vibes, painted Isaac as a screaming, terrified child; the terror of Isaac is what really stays with you after watching this picture, not the divine intervention or Abraham. Rembrandt, otherwise taking such care in the depiction of faces, painted Isaac as a young male and went for the full male act, except for Isaac’s face, which is entirely covered by Abraham’s hand. Meanwhile, the center of the picture is the Angel shooting down with such force that Abraham drops the knife out of sheer surprise/terror/relief.
And then you’ve got the two pictures which are used for the posters of the exhibition, Caravaggio’s Omnia Vincit Amor and Rembrandt’s The Rape of Ganymed. Again, expectations are circumvented. Omnia Vincit Amor was a scandal in its time not because it presented a Cupido but because of how Caravaggio did it. The boy – same model as for Isaac, btw, though anything but childlike and terrified here – totally comes across as a street boy getting having just gotten out of bed, dirty toe nails and all, with a lazy grin, and “love conquers all” isn’t taken in the romantic sense – i.e. love overcomes all obstacles between lovers – but as sex winning over civilisation, as embodied by the symbols being read on by said Cupido – a lute, notes, armour, a violin.
Meanwhile, Rembrandt took one of the most famous homoeerotic myths – Zeus going after Ganymed and sweeping him up to Olympus to make him his boytoy – and took the sex out of it entirely, presenting Zeus as an eagle and Ganymed as a baby-plumb toddler not older than three or four, screaming and crying. (In the sketches for the picture, he had planned on including the parents raising their hands as well.) It’s effective and disturbing, especially if you know the myth. Even more so when put next to Caravaggio’s Cupido, as done in this exhibition.
Saturday the weather was somewhat better, so we did a lot of walking, which Amsterdam is simply great for. It’s a beautiful city with all its canals and those houses with their gables – and sort-of-gallows at the top; these were needed to pull up the furniture, since because of the narrowness of many houses the stairs weren’t nearly wide enough to transport furniture up there. Dad bought a lot of tulip onions for my mother, and we paid a visit to the smaller museum in Rembrandt’s house as well. You know, the beds there – both the one in the kitchen for the maid and the one in the room where Rembrandt’s wife Saskia lived – really illustrate where the English word “bedchamber” comes from. They’re like cupboards. The house is pretty well restored, since due to Rembrandt going broke an inventory of all his worldly possessions was made. At the top floor, under the roof, they’ve put paintings by students of Rembrandt and Rembrandt himself in direct contrast. Sometimes, I found the student version actually more interesting…
Saturday evening was spent with
mylexie, watching X3 (I’ll comment in another entry) and then having dinner, which was spent in mutual geeking out about lots things, not all connected to the movie. Sunday morning, we did what we had deliberately kept until the last, because in my mind you can’t really go from there to some tourist attraction – the house where Anne Frank and her family were hidden. Like pretty much everyone else from my generation, I had read the diary at school, and had seen various film versions based on it. It still doesn’t prepare you. So odd to climb those stairs, to walk to those rooms. See the photos of the people, all dead, and then the room Anne shared with Fritz Pfeffer, with those faded film star pictures put on the wall – Ray Milland, Deanna Durbin – such a teenage girl thing to do – and to read those quotes talking about her hope of the future. I started to cry then, and I hadn’t meant to, but it got worse in a later room, where they had letters from Otto Frank from Auschwitz after it got liberated, one to his brother where he talks about still hoping to find his children again. And you know they were dead, dead, dead. The sun was shining when we left the house; my father just put his arms around me, and we felt the horror of it all all over again. And started to walk through Amsterdam once more, until the tears were gone.
