Rembrandt’s Turbans: Orientalism and the Secular World
This is a draft paper for the use of students in courses taught by Ivan Kalmar. The asterisks (*) indicate where changes are to be made. Please do not quote in any published material without the author’s permission.
To discover, or better, to “invent” the biblical story as an
oriental one – as one taking place among people that resembled Muslims – was a
move that prefigured “secularization.” Biblical society and biblical landscapes
were understood on the pattern of what western Christians, who after the
disaster at
The Christian Scriptures were eventually researched as if they were a secular text, as “literature.” Biblical philology flourished from the late eighteenth century on, inseparable from the general philology or linguistics, and from the literary criticism, of the period. But much before that, the desire to depict the Bible as taking place in an oriental cultural context was evident in western art. Artists portrayed the biblical orient according to what they knew of the real, secular Orient. The intention was for this to be for the greater glory of God. But secular historiography and ethnography were thereby released from the bottle, and they would loom threateningly large over traditional Christianity. “Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System,” wrote Marshall McLuhan, “that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”[1]
The Secular and Secularization
“Secular” is a difficult word, and “secularization” even more so. “Secular,” at least in this book, means “this-worldly” or “mundane,” which is not the same as “non-religious.” For the secular to exist it is only required that the world exist; not that it should exist without God. Otherwise “secular priest” would be an oxymoron, yet it is the classic term for priests who, rather than spending their time secluded among monks in monasteries, live in “this world” among ordinary people. But while the secular need not be imagined in opposition to or independently of religion, it must by definition be imagined as separable from the subject of religion: the divine. The distinction between the secular and the divine was central to medieval faith. “This world” was but a way-station to the other; it was a repository for the most part of pain, and the source of vice. Virtue came from God, not the world.
Hegel on the secular
Hegel wrote that it was only in the Reformation that “the recognition of the Secular as capable of being an embodiment of Truth; whereas it had been formerly regarded as evil only, as incapable of Good – the latter being essentially ultramundane.” * ref Asad 192 This is true, especially if one includes under “Reformation,” the Catholic variety also known as “Counter-Reformation,” but which is now widely and more correctly labeled the “Catholic Reformation.” The change in the western evaluation of the Secular began during the same period as orientalism: in the Renaissance.
Hegel’s statement might be read to imply that in the Renaissance the Secular began to be capable of embodying Truth on a par with the Sacred. And certainly there was a built-in tendency in Renaissance humanism to glorify man’s works. Renaissance people were conscious of the great advances made in their age in science, art, and the economy. For the most part, however, they were worried about the threat that these advances – modernity – posed to the certainties of faith. Martin Luther, far from being an advocate of the Secular as the locus of the true or the good, frequently used the phrase “prince of this world” (John xii.31) to refer to Satan. The Reformers’ near-pathological fear of “the world” can still be heard reverberating awesomely in Bach’s cantatas, as when his famous Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (“A Mighty Fortress is Our God”) exhorts us to fight for Jesus “in the war against Satan’s host, and against the world and sin.”[2]
Worldly human knowledge and ingenuity were producing
unprecedented results in the Renaissance and the subsequent “baroque period,”
with innovations in the arts, science, technology, travel, and finance causing
a sense of achievement among the rich burghers who sponsored them. But the
pursuit of prosperity gained from earthly wisdom and labor did not fit easily
the values inherited from feudal society, and least of all the values of the
Christian church. The result was a grater than ever interest in demonstrating
the limits of the world as opposed to the eternity of God. Biblical texts
emphasizing that message became a popular subject of both homiletics and art.
There was a vogue for Ecclesiastes, the book that opens with a famous warning
about all human endeavor being in vain (“vanity”): vanitas vanitorum omnia vanitas.[3] In earlier
times, during the middle ages, the emphasis had been on contrasting to the
Divine the world as sinful (characterized in particular the seven
cardinal sins). With the Renaissance vogue for Ecclesiastes, there was a shift
to seeing the world as ephemeral. Before “vanitas
painting” became a popular genre in seventeenth century
In our context we must not forget Holbein’s references to the Orient. There is a carpet of Central Asian origin on the table, a common sign of privilege. The rich fur rim of the man on the left might also have been read as oriental. * ref The name attributed to the picture, too, recalls a famous anonymous picture also called The Ambassadors (15**, fig. *), which represents a western embassy to the splendid court of the Sultan. According to D*, that Ambassadors was a seminal painting in orientalist art. It was a Venetian work, and was widely known. Perhaps Holbein’s ambassadors had been sent to the Ottoman court, and brought back with them both the carpet and their scientific expertise. The Muslim world was the source of both for the West.
The Prague
The role of the Muslim as a symbol of secular knowledge is
particularly well illustrated about a hundred years later – artistically
speaking, in the “baroque period,” by the
Clocks were a common “vanitas
device.” Ordinary upright clocks used in private homes often featured a
skull and the inscription, tempus fugit or “time is running (out).” The
artist meant to oppose the eternity of Heaven to the fleeting character of
earthly existence. But there was, in addition, an opposition between divine
The Orloj differs
from similar large astronomical clocks in that it is mounted on a civic
building and not a church. It adorns
Next to the Philosopher stands the imposing, oversized figure of an angel. The angel holds a drawn sword in one hand and in the other (hidden behind a shield decorated with a cross) a pointer aimed at the calendar. No doubt it is the Archangel Michael, the heavenly warrior whom Christian tradition expects to appear on Judgment Day to lead our souls to judgment. He points to the calendar to remind us that tempus fugit. Prepare for the Day of Judgment!
The Turks are only one part of the Orloj that reinforces this message. The upper clock face includes the figures of Vanity holding a mirror and of *, both of which wear a hat that has some elements recalling the Turks’ turban, and Avarice, represented before the post-World-War II renovation by a hooked-nosed figure meant to be a Jew. There is also a skeleton representing Death. Since an ingenious nineteenth century remodeling, every hour on the hour when the clock tolls Death has been pulling a string that sets in motion a procession of Jesus’ disciples, but also makes Vanity, Avarice, and * shake their heads, deliberately negating the message about the limits of Time. Wisely, the designers of this mechanism did not make the Turks’ heads move as well. For their failing is not that they willingly contradict the supremacy of God over human science and pleasure, but that they are ignorant of it. If you have worldly wisdom but not the Holy Faith then you might as well be a Turk.
Note, however, that the Turks, the Greeks, and the Hebrews had a truth of sorts as well. This is, presumably, what Hegel meant when he said that in the Reformation period the Secular began to be imaginable as “capable of being an embodiment of Truth; whereas it had been formerly regarded as evil only, as incapable of Good.” The telescope and the book of the Turks, like those in Holbein’s Ambassadors, and indeed the rich textiles and carpets of all such works, are hardly regarded as “evil only,” if at all. Renaissance and early modern artists as much as scholars felt that researching the world was morally and religiously not only justifiable but deeply desirable. They were, however, required to pursue worldly knowledge not for its own sake alone, but in order to discover in it the imprint of Divine Providence.
Prague
Read in another yet related way, the Orloj
was part of the Counter-Reformation project of securing the rule of the
Austrian Habsburgs over a province,
It is this historically based association of the Turk with
the Protestants that holds the key to the sectarian message of the Orloj and the other anti-Muslim monuments of
Rembrandt and Rubens
How the Catholic-Protestant conflict affected
representations of the Orient is even more profitably studied during this
period on the western coast of Europe, in the
Artistically, Dutch artists like the great Rembrandt van
Rijn (1606-1669) were living
in a different world from conservative
The practice of depicting biblical Judea as if it were
contemporary
Catholics and Protestants sought to bring the believer in closer contact with the Bible, to make the Bible what we would now call “more real.” But the Catholics preferred a visceral, physical approach, which translated the events of the Bible into religious experiences that could be experienced directly here and now. In stigmatics, for example, biblical events were literally inscribed on the body. Wounds (known as stigmata) appeared unexplainedly on the believer, in places where Christ was wounded during his passion. The first stigmatic, it seems, was Francis of Assisi (1121 or 1122 – 1226). The Catholic Encyclopedia says that “The saint's right side is described as bearing on open wound which looked as if made by a lance, while through his hands and feet were black nails of flesh, the points of which were bent backward.”[12] In subsequent centuries the number of stigmatics officially recognized by the Church increased. The Catholic Encyclopedia refers to “Dr. Imbert” who counted 321 (mostly women) “in whom there is every reason to believe in a Divine action.” [13] The increase in stigmatics as well as in personal visions of the Virgin and other sacred personalities can be read as a symptom of capitalist modernity, with its emphasis on the individual. Francis’ famous relationship with birds and nature, too, probably indexed a concern with modern urbanizing trends, evident in his native Umbria, then one of the most advanced locations of incipient mercantile capitalism. It is therefore a mistake, indicative of our privileging of written text over physical experience, to suggest, as is so often done, that the Protestant Reformation alone placed an emphasis on an individual relationship to the Bible. The Catholic Reformation or “Counter-Reformation” did as well. However, though there were many exceptions, it was true on the whole that the Catholics, more than the Protestants, encouraged the public to feel the drama of the Bible. The Protestants were also asked to read it. The Protestants preferred a narrative/textual rather than a sensual, dramatic/performative approach to scripture.
This was a political decision. In the late Middle Ages some Christians responded to what they saw was a decline in the standards of the Church by appealing directly to the Bible as an authority above the Church. The supreme authority of the biblical text became the cornerstone of most Protestant Christianity. At the Council of Trent, which met essentially to formulate an effective response to Protestantism, it was declared on the contrary that the traditions of the Church had an authority equal to Scripture. The cardinals agreed to fight Protestantism by a presentation of the faith that relied more on an appeal to the senses than on literacy. An interest in the details of the biblical text was consequently not as evident in Catholic art as in Protestant. This meant, necessarily, a lesser interest among Catholics in the Bible’s oriental setting. This must have much to do with the reason why after Trent Protestant artists were much more likely than Catholic ones to locate their biblical scenes in the Orient and so to draw on secular historical, geographic, and ethnographic knowledge about the Muslim world.
Rembrandt must have upset even some of his Protestant
contemporaries by the lengths to which he went in picturing the biblical Orient
as a this-worldly, real place. His St. John the Baptist Preaching
(*,
Rembrandt’s turbans themselves were sometimes used to discuss together, visually, sinful existence and Christian potential. To Rembrandt, the turban is much more than an index of the oriental setting, and more than an excuse for displaying virtuosity by allowing the artist to represent the sensuous qualities of intricately folded fabric.[14] Typically, Rembrandt’s turbans symbolize power and wealth. They are a luxury item. On an Old Testament king like David the turban represents the splendor of his court as a favor from God. But when a turban appears on the head of Christ’s enemies it brands the worldly arrogance of privilege and wealth.
A major example of the turban being used in this way is on a
figure that was commonly shown in the background of scenes of Christ’s
suffering, such as the Road to
Rembrandt and Rubens: Protestant and Catholic
On the
Catholic side of the religious conflict dividing the
Rubens was as interested as Rembrandt in bringing the biblical story to life for the Christian viewer. Like Rembrandt (who too had adopted the sensualist character of baroque art), he aimed to capture the sensuous qualities of the flesh and of material, in order to portray his subjects as part of a convincing “reality.” Both used light as a symbol of the divine presence in the everyday life of ordinary people, who become transformed by its effects. Yet the Catholic Rubens, though he knew Rembrandt’s work very well, refused the Protestant’s orientalist inclinations. There is nothing in Rubens’ canvases to mark his biblical characters visually as Israelites. His emphasis on bare flesh, effective in making us understand biblical characters as sensuously human, also helps to free his scenes of a historical identity, since clothes are an indicator of a place and time.
Religion did not, fortunately, prevent artists from admiring
and competing with each other, or from finding clients in the opposing camp.
Rubens in particular was quite successful in Protestant England. It helped his
contacts that he was also a high-ranking diplomat. As a Spanish subject (Flanders
remained in Spanish hands) he helped to establish the truce between
When the visitors arrived, the first thing they saw was The Apotheosis of James I. James had been proverbially fond of comparing himself to King Solomon of the Bible, and liked to be flattered by the sobriquet “The New Solomon.”[16] Even so, Rubens did not give in to the temptation of surrounding the king with markers of oriental splendor. Instead, his oriental reference is limited to the soaring Solomonic columns that surround the composition.
It is as though Rubens and the Catholic painters wished to take the Orient out of the Bible, and to place the holy scriptures in a generic, ahistorical setting. This would allow the European viewer to imagine biblical events as if they happened here and now, at home. On the contrary, Rembrandt the Protestant adopted the sensuous chiaroscuro techniques of the great Catholic artists to represent all the more believably the specific oriental setting of the Bible. Rembrandt does not bring the Bible to us but takes us to the Bible. He invites us to do, in our imagination, what he did literally in the Raising of the Cross: to insert ourselves into the world of the biblical Orient. And this is possible only because in a moral sense our own world is already the equivalent of the biblical Orient. It is a location that is visited by, and rejects, God.
Philosophically
and theologically, Rembrandt’s interest in the human experience of the divine
as manifested in this world matches well with (without necessarily reproducing
literally) the spirit of the period. Descartes (1596-1650) was making
secular human reason essentially (though within some limits) the standard for
understanding what God did in the world. In the next generation, the unorthodox
Sephardic Jew of Rembrandt’s own
Clearly the sense of seventeenth century painterly realism
in
And then, the ordinary world of the Orient was quite unlike the ordinary world of the West. The Orient that Rembrandt painted and his contemporaries imagined was odd in every sense of the world: strange and singular, unlike anything else. The huge turbans, the sensuous damsels, the palm groves, the camels recall that the Orient was an exotic space, a dream or a monstrosity depending on the context. It is true that orientalist art, whether in the Renaissance, or in Rembrandt’s period, or in the nineteenth century when “the orientalist school” was an official name given to painters who represented their visions of the Orient with nearly photographic “accuracy,” was typically distinguished by a strong sense of realistic representation, by meticulous attention to detail. But the “reality” that it represented was largely a fantasy. (This may be one reason why it regained popularity with collectors at the end of the twentieth century, a period that admired magical realism.) How do we reconcile the fact that the Orient represented the ordinary world as distinct from the divine, while at the same time it was an extraordinary world, the opposite of the world we know?
The answer has to be that the Orient was an alternative reality. It was at the same time spatially removed as a neighboring reality, and temporally as an ancient one that had preceded our own (in general because the Orient was conceived of as unchanging, achronic; and specifically because the biblical narrative of Christianity took place in the Orient). This, however, suggests a contradiction: as a neighboring reality the Orient is alien, but as an ancestral reality it is in a sense our own. The Orient is the Other but also the Mother. The Orient represents the origin of human society as a witness to the divine presence. Rembrandt was interested in the secular society of the Orient as the location of the indwelling God.
[1] * McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, complete the reference.*
[2] The libretto by Salomo Franck included direct quotes from Luther. Given here is Joshua Rifkin’s translation from his notes for L’oiseau lyre CD 417 250-2, a 1987 recording of Ein feste Burg and Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, with himself conducting the Bach Ensemble.
[3] Eccl. 1:2.
[4] ref *
[5] Zdenek Horský, Pražský Orloj, 1st ed., Edice Pragensia. (Prague: Panorama, 1988), 108. My information on the history of the Orloj is taken from Horský’s book. The message of the Orloj remains the same even if some of Horský’s dates should turn out to be wrong.
[6] The Astronomer-Astrologist is accompanied by a figurine that is not, without a stretch of the imagination, a “Turk.” Dressed in what seems like a medieval European robe, this statuette is probably the one added by Anton Schumann in 1787, who noted that one of the figurines, though its pedestal was still present, had been lost. It is popularly described as “The Chronicler.” If so then it is perhaps understandable that he is not a Turk. Speculative and natural philosophy (the latter we now call science) were known to owe much to Muslims; history writing not quite so.
[7] For a critical discussion of the history of this idea, see Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque, Ahmanson Murphy Fine Arts Imprint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
[8] Eva March Tappan, ed., The
World's Story: A History of the World in Story, Song, and Art (Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin, 1914). The cult of Wilgefortis
usually represents her father and her intended as “pagan” rather than Muslim.
But in
[9] The conflict between German-language lands and the Ottomans is given its proper due in the introductory chapter of Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus Und Moderne : Zum Bild Des Orients in Der Deutschsprachigen Kultur Um 1900 (Stuttgart: M & P, 1997).
[10]
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[11]
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[12] * R find page number, edition of recent
Catholic Enc. and verify quotation. The article is “St. Francis of
[14]
In the
[15] A striking Renaissance example from the Low
Countries is Pilate and the Jews at Golgotha (Royal Museum of Fine Arts,
[16] * ref.