ラザロの復活

Around 1630 Rembrandt was in his early twenties, still in his home town of Leiden, and sharing ideas and even models with another young painter, Jan Lievens. The two were close enough that people struggled to tell their work apart, and for a while they seem to have competed over the same subjects. This raising of Lazarus is one of them. Both men painted the moment Christ calls a dead man out of the tomb, and you can feel the young Rembrandt reaching for the biggest possible drama, Christ's arm flung up, the light punching down into the grave as Lazarus begins to rise and the onlookers recoil. He signed it while still barely known, years before the fame and the big Amsterdam commissions. The panel crossed to California in the twentieth century and now hangs in Los Angeles.