The showoff and the showman

REMBRANDT {heart} CARAVAGGIO.

That, in a nutshell, is the simple theme of a powerhouse exhibition mounted here in celebration of the 400th birthday of Rembrandt, one of the Netherlands’ two favorite artist-sons. The other is championed in the exhibition venue -- Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum -- although the show was organized by the nearby Rijksmuseum, which is mostly closed for renovation. The show brings together 34 paintings by two leading exemplars of Baroque painting in Northern and Southern Europe, including a good number of monumental canvases. They have been gathered from great public collections all over Europe, from London and Rome to Madrid and St. Petersburg, and several in the United States. The organizers describe this eye-popping assembly as “a spectacular encounter,” and for once an outsize museum claim borders on understatement.

Of course, after the shock wears off from seeing so many unparalleled masterworks by two hugely influential artists together in a single show, one could be forgiven for asking: So what? Is there anyone who doesn’t {heart} Caravaggio? What does it mean to isolate and lionize Rembrandt’s veneration?

One thing it means is that Baroque painting is one of the great theatrical pageants of all time. The pageant began in Rome, where Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) got his start in the early 1590s, and it spread to Amsterdam, where Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69) took the town by storm in the 1630s.

Think of the two cities as the New York and Los Angeles of their day -- one old, powerful, tradition-bound and immensely wealthy, and the other young, inventive, nouveau riche and on the make. The similarities and differences, as evidenced by the ambitious and ingenious pictures made by these two artists, offer stark lessons in European art’s 17th century transformation.

Take Caravaggio’s “Boy With a Basket of Fruit” (circa 1593) and Rembrandt’s “Flora” (1635). They hang side by side in the show, forming one of 12 carefully chosen groupings that function almost like a college slide lecture.

All right, class: Compare and contrast.

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A tousled youth

THE “Boy With a Basket of Fruit” shows 16-year-old Mario Minniti, a Sicilian painter who modeled for many paintings by Caravaggio and who was likely the 22-year-old artist’s lover. Caravaggio was trained in the refined naturalism of his Northern Italian youth, and his depiction of Minniti is partly a visual essay in the exquisite rendition of disparate surfaces. There are tousled curls of hair, the soft fuzz of a blushing peach, the rough weave of the basket, the complex folds of the white blouse, and more. Caravaggio poses the sensuous display in a shallow space against a blank, mottled wall. For drama, a deep shadow sets off the white blouse at the bottom, while the lighter wall above contrasts with the boy’s dark-eyed, dark-haired head.

The lighting is fairly described as histrionic, and the young man -- costumed, coiffed and carrying a prop -- emotes to the painting’s intended audience-of-one like an actor on a stage. Like something out of Playgirl magazine, with his off-the-shoulder robe and gentle swoon, he offers himself to a viewer like a basket of fruit: ripe, lush, slightly bruised around the edges, ready to be taken.

He is, in one sense, a male Flora -- pagan goddess of spring, symbol of fertility and a minor deity revived and much in vogue among 16th century Renaissance humanists. (No wonder more than one observer over the centuries has mistaken Caravaggio’s boy for a girl.)

Likewise Rembrandt, taking a cue from Titian, three times painted his young wife Saskia in the guise of Flora. (Two are here.) However much Rembrandt’s versions differ from each other in the elaboration of sumptuous costume and setting, they are profoundly touching as mementos of the artist’s adoration if only because of the sitter’s sweetly vacant homeliness.

The London version that’s paired with “Boy With a Basket of Fruit” fairly radiates light from within its dark, mahogany-toned woodland setting. Saskia, 23 and newly married to Rembrandt, cradles a smallish bouquet in her left arm (almost like a baby) while grasping the knob of a grapevine-covered staff in her right hand. But her arms are held away from her body, posed to form a loop. What she gathers to her bosom is neither flowers nor grapes but the warm, liquid gold of effulgent light.

Caravaggio’s light is sharp, stark, almost harsh, meant to quickly push your eye around the picture so that its parts become surprising scenes in an unfolding narrative. It’s manipulative in the extreme.

Rembrandt’s light is soft, atmospheric and tactile, like a warm bath. He uses light to sanctify the material sumptuousness of depicted objects -- Saskia’s cascading hair, the rich brocade of her garment, the creamy pearls dangling from her ears.

But he also uses light in another way -- to sanctify the material surface of the painting. No one does a painting’s surface like Rembrandt (and his copyists), with its glistening globules of dappled oil paint.

This last is critical to understanding his difference from Caravaggio. The Italian, partly because of his training in Lombard naturalism and partly because he conceives his pictures as almost cinematic spectacles, always stands in the background as director of the stylized action. (Like Hitchcock, he sometimes even makes a cameo.) Rembrandt, on the other hand, becomes an actor who gesticulates on the stage of art.

“Flora,” like many of Rembrandt’s pictures, is characteristic of an unusual invention he called a tronie -- a mythological, historical or religious subject, which also functions independently as a recognizable portrait of an individual. A tronie was a kind of bargain painting: two pictures for the price of one.

But it isn’t just Saskia (or another flesh-and-blood sitter) who is on show. As Berkeley art historian Svetlana Alpers once argued, Rembrandt’s art is always as much about the bravura display of paint handling as it is about the subject. Saskia performs as Flora, and Rembrandt performs as Artist. A buyer gets those two pictures for the price of one -- plus the artist’s signature solo act.

Therein lies the starkest difference between Rembrandt and Caravaggio, on vivid display at every turn in the exhibition’s galleries. Caravaggio was a showoff; Rembrandt was a showman. With Rembrandt you often have the feeling of an entrepreneur at work. It can become wearing. Of course he’s a genius, but he’s always working an angle.

After all, that’s why Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam in the first place. After 1625 the formerly rough-and-tumble coastal shipping port was on a fast track to becoming Europe’s richest city. Where there’s money, there are opportunities for artists.

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A sight unseen

IN the context of “Rembrandt-Caravaggio,” consider the not insignificant fact that Rembrandt never laid eyes on an actual painting by the Italian artist. The Dutchman was 4 years old in 1610, when Caravaggio died of a fever after his arrest and brief imprisonment in a Tuscan coastal town for a crime he did not commit. (There were many crimes the volatile painter did commit -- including, perhaps, murder.) He was 38, and the aggressive realism of his style had made him the most controversial yet effective painterly advocate for the aspirations of the Counter-Reformation Church.

Not only did Rembrandt never see a Caravaggio painting but, famously, when the time came for him to prepare himself for art’s major leagues, he declined to travel to Rome for study.

Born in the university town of Leiden, 25 miles southwest of Amsterdam, one of 10 children of a relatively prosperous miller, Rembrandt studied Greek, Latin and classical history. But he dropped out of university to follow his hankering to draw and paint. He learned from a local figure painter -- one who had worked in Italy for years.

Italian art was the gold standard. Dutch and Netherlandish artists regularly made their way south to immerse themselves in the fruits of the Florentine and Roman Renaissance. Pieter Lastman, the successful Amsterdam artist with whom Rembrandt eventually decided to apprentice, painted in a manner deeply indebted to Raphael.

But the younger artist demurred. Besides, as Rembrandt is said to have remarked late in life, Italian art could be studied as easily in Holland as in Rome, so pervasive was its influence in the north. Why go look at Raphael when you’re apprenticed to Lastman?

And Caravaggio -- whose untimely death only enhanced the legends already surrounding his powerful work, much as Raphael’s youthful demise at 37 had for him -- inspired a whole host of painters throughout Europe. For their embrace of a theatrical rhetoric of religious subject matter, dramatic lighting and the suppression of idealizing forms in favor of grittier, more fully human characters, these followers came to be called the Caravaggisti.

The exhibition opens with a small selection of Dutch Caravaggisti, including fine religious paintings by Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst. As Amsterdam’s wealth exploded, Italian paintings also entered Dutch collections in increasing numbers. But Rembrandt was an artist in a hurry, and Italy would have taken too long.

Caravaggio painted for private patrons (“Boy With a Basket of Fruit” was owned by Mannerist painter Giuseppe Cesari and, later, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of the pope), as well as church commissions. But Rembrandt was in a very different milieu. He was more a creature of the newly developing open market, where paintings were bought and sold as a form of fluctuating currency. Differences in the Dutch and Italian economic power structures go a long way toward explaining differences in their art. Caravaggio was more a propagandist, Rembrandt more a seducer.

Some pairings in the show feel forced. It’s one thing to compare two artists’ versions of the same subject -- the sacrifice of Abraham, for example, a premonition of the crucifixion in which the patriarch is set to enact God’s directive to kill his son as a sign of faith. Caravaggio renders it as a scene of sheer brutality. The father squeezes the son’s head like a melon, forcing open his mouth in a squeal anticipating the imminent pain of murder. Rembrandt shows it as a scene of unimaginable pathos, with Abraham placing his hand over Isaac’s face to shield both their eyes from connection in the unspeakable inhumanity of the act. The vast range of Baroque visual rhetoric is eloquently displayed.

More typical is the jarring juxtaposition of Caravaggio’s marvelously salacious “Love Triumphant,” in which a naked Cupid straggles out of a rumpled bed, a delirious grin smeared across his young face, and Rembrandt’s mewling “Ganymede,” in which Jupiter, disguised as an eagle, carries off a corpulent, wailing baby who urinates in terror. Yes, each masterpiece depicts a child from ancient myth in a scene with a sexual dimension, but that’s a loose bond too broad to carry much significance.

One result is a sense of glittering generality. It turns up throughout the show, also establishing a surely inadvertent sense of competition between the painters. Ironically, given that it’s Rembrandt’s birthday party, Caravaggio wins.

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Brilliant jumble

THE most remarkable painting here is Caravaggio’s 1602 “The Betrayal of Christ.” Lost for centuries, it was rediscovered in 1990 hanging in a Jesuit seminary in Dublin. (Appropriately for the exhibition, it had been misattributed for centuries as a painting by Van Honthorst, the Dutch Caravaggist.) The painting, a brilliantly orchestrated jumble of body parts, merges spirituality and carnality in astounding ways.

Judas leans forward to kiss the lowered face of a sorrowful Jesus, as other apostles react in horror and amazement. Across the center of the picture the armor of a Roman soldier’s arm gleams with a ribbon of light that shoots like a lightning bolt, dragging your eye straight into the arm of Judas clutching the doomed man.

Below, illuminated as if by a spotlight, the intertwined fingers of Jesus’ two hands record his helplessness, while mirroring the entanglement of guru and disciples. And then the kicker: A few inches to the right, also brightly illuminated by a dramatic light, the muscular buttocks of the soldier inject an inescapably homoerotic jolt to the kiss and the betrayal.

Rembrandt {heart} Caravaggio, and it’s easy to see why.