Parting Thought On Rembrandt

Melville’s two prints after paintings in which Rembrandt depicted the Christ figure speak to each other as well as to other prints he acquired featuring the Christ figure. The prints he acquired of "Noli me Tangere" (CAT 199) and The Woman taken in Adultery (CAT 200) each depict a scene memorable for what Christ says, before he says it. Rembrandt’s depiction of the scene at the tomb catches the moment before Mary Magdalen turns to see him, after which he will say “Noli me tangere.” His depiction of the scene in the temple shows the moment during which a Pharisee is accusing the woman of adultery, after which the Christ figure will defend her by saying, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” In each case the posture and affect of the Christ figure prefigure the care, compassion, and timeliness of the words he will soon be speaking.

The Christ figure is more actively depicted in Melville’s prints after artworks by Claude Lorraine, Jean Jouvenet, and Annibale Carracci. In the print Melville acquired of Claude’s Landscape—Christ Tempted (CAT 135), the Christ figure points to his own mouth as he tells the Devil that “man shall not live by bread alone, but every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” In the print he acquired of Jouvenet’s The Resurrection of Lazarus (CAT 157), the Christ figure gestures directly to the Lazarus figure in the process of bringing him back to life. In the mezzotint Melville acquired of Our Saviour Healing the Blind (in the image we propose by Annibale Carracci), the Christ figure extends the tip of his healing finger up to the eye of the sightless man (CAT 111).

Although the above five prints resemble each other in reproducing a famous scene in the life of Christ as imagined and depicted by an Old Master artist, they differ in the engraving techniques by which each print was created. In this sense, the line engraving by which John Grieg reproduced Jouvenet’s The Resurrection of Lazarus for the Historical Gallery of Portraits and Paintings in 1807 differs sharply from the steel engraving by which G. Levy reproduced Rembrandt’s “Noli me Tangere” for The Art-Journal in 1857. Each of those intaglio techniques differs from sharply from the etching technique by which John Burnet reproduced Rembrandt’s The Woman taken in Adultery from the Angerstein Collection in 1823. Richard Earlom achieved a very different of effect by combining etching with mezzotint in his reproduction of Claude’s Landscape—Christ Tempted from the Liber Veritas in 1802, a combination he had also used in reproducing Annibale Carracci’s Our Saviour Healing the Blind from the Robert Adam Collection in 1785.

Melville had an excellent guide to those various techniques in chapter 6 of the copy of The Wonders of Engraving by George Duplessis that he acquired in 1875. He made a sophisticated literary application of many of those techniques in Clarel in 1876 (see Otter and Wallace, p. 100). Melville had additional engravings after Rembrandt’s depictions of scenes from the life of Christ in his copies of The Works of Eminent Masters and Mollett’s Rembrandt (see MBB 4.1). Mollett illustrated his chapter on various engraving techniques with Abraham Bosse’s action image of various stages of printing a copper-plate engraving (fig. 1 below).

CAT 201 after (fig 1) bosse Copper-plate printing from Sam duplessis.jpeg

Figure 1. Abraham Bosse. Copper-plate Printing. In George Duplessis, The Wonders of Engraving, 1871, acquired by Herman Melville in 1875. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Melville would have enjoyed the above image not only for Abraham Bosse's visualization of the process of cooper-plate printing, but also as a supplement to the four engravings by Bosse in his own print collection (CAT 151-154). Bosse combined etching with copper-plate engraving in the prints of the four seasons that were printed in Nuremberg between 1637 and 1640—while Rembrandt in Amsterdam and Rubens in Antwerp were creating many of the artworks featured in this chapter.