The Ascension

Around 1630 the Dutch statesman and connoisseur Constantijn Huygens visited two young painters in Leiden, Rembrandt and Jan Lievens, and noted with regret that they would not travel to Italy. They told him they had no time to spare, and that the best Italian pictures could be seen in the Netherlands anyway. Rembrandt never did go. This Ascension, finished in 1636 for the Passion series of Frederik Hendrik, the Prince of Orange, shows how much of Italy he could take in at second hand. Its arrangement is often linked to Titian's great Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari church in Venice, a figure carried up on a cloud above a crowd of watchers. In Titian the little angels heave the cloud upward. Rembrandt's angels seem to adore more than they lift. At the top the dove of the Holy Spirit sends its light down onto the rising Christ, and the apostles below look up into it.