Grace, Genius, and the Longinian Sublime in Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer

rembrandt-aristotle-with-a-bust-of-homer/ literary achievement, to which, as I shall propose, Rembrandt himself contributed with his Aristotle with a Bust of Homer of 1653 (fig.1). 3 Throughout the seventeenth century, Dutch writers addressed the question of the relative importance of innate ability ("nature") and learned theory or rules ("art"), whether with regard to the visual or literary arts, or, as was often the case, with implications for both.An early and especially illuminating example is Franciscus Junius's discussion in his book De pictura veterum (The Painting of the Ancients), published in Latin in 1637 and in English and Dutch translations, carried out by the author himself, in 1638 and 1641, respectively.4 In this text-not a source for Rembrandt but an indicator of the ideas and ideals of his contemporaries-Junius makes the case that natural talent plays the more significant part in producing truly great art, a view he grounds in Longinus's Peri hypsous, in which sublime achievement is largely attributed to in-born (or divinely bestowed) genius unfettered by artificial rules.5 Analyzing Rembrandt's picture in relation to Junius's invocations of the Longinian sublime and the broader nature versus rules debate, I interpret the painting as a narrative in which Aristotle, author of the earliest extant and most influential work of literary theory, recognizes that his rules are ultimately insignificant in comparison to innate genius, which his forebear Homer above all others possessed.6 In this work Rembrandt pictorializes the sublime and, with the golden chain that hangs across the philosopher's chest, articulates the view that Sandrart would later attribute to the artist: that in pursuit of the height of excellence in creative achievement, one ought "to bind oneself " to nature-meaning one's natural gifts-rather than to codified rules.Although destined for the Sicilian nobleman Antonio Ruffo, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer represents, as Julius Held established in 1969 in his seminal study of the picture, a subject of Rembrandt's own devising-one that is unique in the history of art and that relates, naturally, to the artistic and intellectual climate of his own milieu.7 A letter of June 19, 1654, indicates that the picture, reliably inscribed 1653, left Amsterdam nearly six months after its latest possible completion.8 The work therefore most likely remained for a significant period of time in the artist's studio, where it could have enjoyed an audience composed of fellow Dutch artists and art lovers, among them the amateur poet and playwright Jan Six, whom Rembrandt portrayed in 1654.9 In any case, there is no evidence that its subject was predetermined by or even conveyed in advance to Ruffo, whose household first registered it on September 1, 1654, as "a half-figure

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