thout
his being aware of it. Look at the slashed sleeves that have been so
highly praised, the ruffles, the gloves; examine the hands! Consider
well how in their affected or unaffected negligence their form is
accentuated and their foreshortening is expressed. The touch is thick,
embarrassed, awkward, and blundering. We might truly say that it goes
astray, and that applied crosswise when it should be applied lengthwise,
made flat when any other than he would have rounded it, it confuses
instead of determining the form....

At length I come to the incontestable interest of the picture, to
Rembrandt's great effort in a new field: I am going to speak of the
application on a large scale of that way of looking at things which is
proper to him and which is called chiaroscuro.

No mistake is possible here. What people attribute to Rembrandt is
really his. Without any doubt chiaroscuro is the native and necessary
form of his impressions and ideas. Others have made use of it; but
nobody has employed it so constantly and ingeniously as he. It is the
supremely mysterious form, the most enveloped, the most elliptic, and
the richest in hidden meanings and surprises that exists in the
pictorial language of the painter. In this sense it is more than any
other the form of intimate feelings or ideas. It is light, vaporous,
veiled, discreet; it lends its charm to hidden things, invites
curiosity, adds an attraction to moral beauties, and gives a grace to
the speculations of conscience. In short, it partakes of sentiment,
emotion, uncertainty, indefiniteness, and infinity; of dreams and of the
ideal. And this is why it is, as it ought to be, the poetic and natural
atmosphere in which Rembrandt's genius never ceased to dwell.

In very ordinary language and in its action common to all schools,
chiaroscuro is the art of rendering the atmosphere visible, and painting
an object enveloped with air. Its aim is to render all the picturesque
accidents of shadow, of half-tints, of light, of relief, and of
distance; and to give in consequence more variety, more unity of effect,
more caprice and more relative truth either to forms or to colours. The
contrary is a more ingenuous and more abstract acceptation, by virtue of
which objects are shown as they are, viewed close at hand, the
atmosphere being suppressed, and consequently without any other than
linear perspective, which results from the diminishing of objects and
from their relation to the h