마리아의 엘리사벳 방문

The year Rembrandt painted this, 1640, his mother died in Leiden, and his wife Saskia was again heavily pregnant, carrying a child she would not keep, as she had lost others before. He was living inside the very subject he chose here: two women, one old and one young, both expecting a first son. The scene comes from Luke's gospel. Mary, newly pregnant, has climbed the hills of Judea to visit her older cousin Elizabeth, who late in life is expecting John the Baptist. Rembrandt lights the meeting with a warm, almost private glow and fills the edges with small human business, the aged Zacharias feeling his way down a stair, Joseph still toiling up the hill with the donkey. Elizabeth's lined face is often said to recall the painter's own mother. Just to the side, on the same step as the two women, he set a servant, an African woman lifting Mary's cloak, a figure he wrote into the story that no earlier painter had.