Nathan E. Lewis

Don’t miss Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam on display at the Portland Art Musuem, June 2 - September 16, 2007. Dust off your complete works
of Francis Schaeffer and use the index to locate each comment he makes about Rembrandt and the art that flowed from the Reformation.
In his book, “Art and the Bible,” Schaeffer made the point: “Art forms add strength to the World-View which shows through, no matter what the world-view is or whether the world-view is true or false.” He writes:
“Think for example, of a side of beef hanging in a butcher shop. It just hangs there. but if you go to the Louvre and look at Rembrandt’s painting, ‘Side of Beef Hanging in a Butcher Shop,’ it’s very different. It’s startling to come upon this particular work because it says a lot more than its title. Rembrandt’s art causes us to see the side of beef in a concentrated way, and, speaking for myself, after looking and looking at his picture I have never been able to look at a side of beef in a butcher shop with the superficiality I did before. How much stronger is Rembrandt’s painting than merely the label, ‘A Side of Beef.’”
A few pages later he writes, “The past art forms, therefore, are not necessarily the right ones for today or tomorrow. To demand the art forms of yesterday in either word systems or art is a bourgeois failure. It cannot be assumed that if a Christian painter becomes ‘more Christian,’ he will necessarily paint more and more like Rembrandt…. A Christian should not, therefore, strive to copy Rembrandt or Browning.”
In his book, “How Should We Then Live?” Schaeffer writes, “I am not at all saying that the art which the Reformation produced was in every case greater as art than the art of the south. The point is that to say that the Reformation depreciated art and culture or that it did not produce art and culture is either nonsense or dishonest. It is not only Christians who can paint with beauty, nor for that matter only Christians who can love or who have creative stirrings. Even though the image is now contorted, people are made in the image of God. This who people are, whether or not they know or acknowledge it….It was not only in Germany that the Reformation affirmed painting. The clearest example of the effects of the Reformation culture on painting is Redmbrandt (1606-1669). Rembrandt had flaws in his life (as all people do), but he was a true Christian; he believed in the death of Christ for him personally. In 1633 he painted the ‘Raising of the Cross’ for Prince Frederick Henry of Orange. It now hangs in the museum Alte Pinakothek in Munich. A man in a blue painter’s beret raises Christ upon the cross. That man is Rembrandt - a self portrait. He thus stated for all the world to see that his sins had sent Christ to the cross.”
Schaeffer writes, “Rembrandt shows in all his work that he was a man of the Reformation; he neither idealized nature nor demeaned it. Moreover, Rembrandt’s biblical base enabled him to excel in painting people with psychological depth. Man was great, but man was also cruel and broken, for he had revolted against God. Rembrandt’s painting was thus lofty, yet down to earth.”