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Rembrandt's Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies
Julius S. Held
A landmark gathering of Rembrandt scholarship by one of the great connoisseurs of Dutch and Flemish art. The title essay is a famous piece of detective work: by close reading of the face, the dress, and the objects, Julius Held argues that the pensive figure in Rembrandt's celebrated painting is Aristotle contemplating a bust of Homer — the identification that became standard. Around it stand studies of *The Polish Rider*, *Juno*, Rembrandt and the Book of Tobit, and the tangle of truth and legend in the artist's biography. Written over some twenty-five years, it is scholarship of the old, deeply-looked kind — for anyone who wants to see how a master art historian builds an argument from the evidence of the canvas itself.
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The author
Julius S. Held (1905–1992) was one of the twentieth century's foremost authorities on Flemish and Dutch art — a German-born scholar who emigrated to the United States and taught for decades at Barnard College and Columbia, celebrated above all for his work on Rubens and Rembrandt. He wrote as a connoisseur of the first rank, and the essays here were composed across roughly twenty-five years.
The book
Published by Princeton University Press in 1969. The title essay makes its case for the Aristotle identification by patient visual analysis; other chapters take up The Polish Rider, Juno, Rembrandt and the Book of Tobit, and the theme of truth and legend in the artist's life.
How it has aged
As durable art-historical scholarship. Later work — notably Walter Liedtke's Metropolitan Museum catalogues — has refined the picture, but Held's essays remain foundational reference points, still cited whenever these paintings are discussed.
For more context
Held's own Rubens: Selected Drawings; and Simon Schama's very different, more literary Rembrandt's Eyes.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Julius S. Held
- Publisher
- Princeton
- Place of publication
- Princeton, New Jersey
- Year
- 1969
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine