Depression, Physical Illness, and the Faces of Rembrandt

In studying Rembrandt’s self-portraits exhibited in London and the Hague, the cardiologist Carlos H. Espinel made medical diagnoses in the journal the Lancet as though the paintings were a series of autobiographical photographs.

However, self-portraits are neither photographs nor direct autobiographies. They are–as Espinel himself stated–artistic masterpieces. Therefore, the painting's aesthetic purpose and impact must be appreciated and understood to interpret the image.

Rembrandt produced more self-portraits than any major artist in history. According to art historians, his aims included advertisement, practice at mastering facial expressions, acknowledgment of his celebrity, and improvement of the tradition of great painters before him.

A particularly distinctive feature is his use of costumes from various historical periods and especially of different types of hats. In some paintings, he is dressed as a military man, a noble, or a saint; only rarely does he dress as a painter.

Much of Rembrandt’s aesthetic power resides in the expressiveness of his portraits, his construction of historical metaphors, and the overall composition of his paintings. Regarding expressiveness, it is important to remember that the mouth is the most expressive portion of the human face. Twenty-one muscles insert bilaterally around the mouth, with only six around the nose and another six in the ocular and forehead region. The consequent range and variety of expressive movement in the mouth area exceed that of other facial regions.

Although Rembrandt may not have known these anatomical facts, he arranged the composition to emphasize the mouth. I have found that in 83 percent of these paintings, the lines formed by the costume hats have the same visual configuration as the area around the mouth. This is hardly an accident since X-ray analyses of Rembrandt’s self-portraits show that he invariably painted the hats first.

The effect of this compositional technique is to enhance expressiveness and to unify costume and face visually; thereby, Rembrandt used self-portraits to make artistic statements. Uniform and artist, therefore, may be seen either as noble, saintly, or the exemplar of strength or historical tradition. Other examples, including his color and brush technique, contribute to the beautiful unity and vibrancy.

Espinel’s interpretations focus on particular features, such as the width of the nasio-labial fold, but he does not consider their place in the total context of the artwork. Also, he regarded Rembrandt’s use of dark colors in the later self-portraits as a sign of clinical depression. Still, he neglected the darkening over 350 years of a large number of this artist’s paintings and the fact that all painters use dark colors for various contrast effects.

Rembrandt was a master of chiaroscuro–the contrast of extremes of dark and light. Rather than a highly questionable source of medical and psychiatric diagnoses, the self-portraits should be appreciated as the creative depiction of human expression and artistic values.