Rembrandt 400 jaar (2006)

Nature wasn’t in a particularly democratic mood when she heaped the gifts of a thousand artists onto the shoulders of a small-framed man with a potato nose. Whether Rembrandt appreciated getting more than his fair share from the Muses’ treasure trove remains hidden in the vaults of history; fact is, he made his talents work.

Have I ever told you I entered a hall of the Rijksmuseum and started to contemplate the various tableaux from other painters exhibited there, never realizing I stood with my back to “De Nachtwacht”?
When I turned round, there was this fraction of a second I didn’t recognize what, almost violently, thundered its way into my perception…high alarm!….I saw the full-blown force of a talent so vast that I felt instantly crushed, like a house devastated by an indifferent tornado in two seconds flat.

That was my first experience of De Nachtwacht. Be prepared if you haven’t seen it yet, but plan to do so. It shouldn’t take you by surprise, like it did me.
Rembrandt, like for instance Bach, Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci belongs to the category “too good”, so unfathomable are their creative abilities. You’re in for a shock when you see a random collection of his works exhibited for the first time.

That said, a word of apology: usually, I’ll do my best to rip a dvd to avi, so that those who have slower connections can download it too. Unfortunately, the structure of this dvd is rather complicated; it would have left me with eleven-or-so multi-language avi’s which virtualdub won’t sew together without losing five of the six language tracks. So I decided to upload the unconverted dvd.
Study the menu well if you decide to take this; before you know, you’ll have missed a significant subdivision. When I played it a second time I was all of a sudden in a chapter I hadn’t seen before.

It’s worth the download. Politicians in my country used to give it as a diplomat’s gift to their foreign colleagues, for the simple reason it’s a very good art dvd.
Literally everything concerning Rembrandt has been included: his life, his own paintings and those of his colleagues, his brush strokes, etching techniques, his surroundings, restoration procedures, museums where he’s exhibited, etc. etc. It’s too much, really; in short, a video which is almost as gorgeously rich as its subject’s talents. I’m not even talking about the wonderful picture quality.

Coming with the dvd is a doll of a little printstudio program on cd-rom. I included it as a separate upload (link 40).