I Image: "Old Man With a Beard." (Courtesy of the Rembrandt House).
Advanced X-ray technology has revealed an unfinished self-portrait by the 17th-century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn. The portrait was detected beneath an oil painting depicting an old man with a gray beard.
Faint and monochrome, the underlying portrait features strong similarities with two significant self-portraits dating to 1630, when Rembrandt would have been 24 years old.
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Announced at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam, where the small panel is on loan from a private collection, the discovery was made using a new technique called X-ray fluorescence, which detects pigments in hidden layers of paint.
Developed by Joris Dik of Delft University and Koen Janssens of Antwerp University, the advanced imaging technology was tested on the oil painting at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
The new detector system, named Maia, mapped the chemical elements in the colors used to paint the "Old Man With a Beard." The detected elements included copper for blue and green, iron for yellow, orange and brown, and mercury for red.
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Maia imaged the entire painting in roughly eight hours, a task that would normally take about 30 days.
Comparison of the outline revealed in the hidden portrait to other self-portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn: (left) Rembrandt as a young man, ((c) Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY); (right) Self-portrait of Rembrandt dated 1630, ((c) National museum, Stockholm.) .
Amazingly, the copper mapping of the small panel -- long considered a less valuable work by one of Rembrandt's students -- revealed contour lines of a beardless, seemingly younger male figure wearing a collar and beret, characteristic of Rembrandt's early self-portraits.
"One thing was clear after the images Maia produced -- this was no student copy," said Dik.
Ernst van de Wetering, head of the Rembrandt Research Project, agreed. In the contours of the unfinished figure, he recognized the typical posture, hairstyle, white collar and black beret that characterize many early self-portraits of Rembrandt.
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Based on these similarities, van de Wetering concluded that Rembrandt started the painting as a self-portrait, left it unfinished and then changed it into the present "Old Man With a Beard."
The attribution is supported by a 1633 print of the composition, with an inscription stating it was made by Rembrandt.
Housed in the building that was the artist's home from 1639 to 1658, the Rembrandt House Museum will stage next spring a special exhibition of research into 10 paintings by Rembrandt and his contemporaries using XRF technology.
"Rembrandt's many students perfected their technique by copying their teacher's works. As a result, there's a whole complex group of paintings that are exactly the same, slightly modified or in some way related to each other," Dik said.
"The goal is to understand more about how they are related and where the hand of the master begins and ends."
Tags: Technology
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