Homer

Rembrandt's Homer of 1663 in the Mauritshuis was the second in a group of paintings commissioned by the Sicilian nobleman Antonio Ruffo, who had already acquired the Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (now in the Metropolitan Museum) in 1653. The commission for a companion Homer prompted Rembrandt to depict the blind poet in a moment of compositional simplicity and monumental presence: the sightless face raised slightly, the expression one of inward vision rather than outward sight. Ruffo also commissioned a painting of Alexander the Great, creating a trio of ancient cultural figures — philosopher, epic poet, conquering king — that reflects the humanist culture of mid-seventeenth-century Italian collecting. The painting's current fragmentary state (the Mauritshuis canvas is part of a larger original) makes its original compositional context uncertain, but what survives is among the most powerful images of spiritual vision transcending physical limitation that Rembrandt ever produced. Ruffo's correspondence about these commissions is one of our few direct sources for how Rembrandt's foreign contemporaries regarded and collected his work.

The fragment preserves Rembrandt's powerful rendering of the blind poet's face, modeled with thick impasto and warm tonal gradations. The rough, expressive technique creates an image of visionary intensity that transcends the painting's fragmentary state.