HIDDEN MASTERPIECE: Kassel's Rembrandt

THE industrial city of Kassel, Germany, is off the tourist track, and its art museum has only 60,000 visitors a year (as against 200,000 each for Munich and Cologne). Yet Kassel's Gemaeldegalerie can boast of one of the world's most brilliant collections of early German and Flemish paintings, topped by no fewer than 19 Rembrandts. Kassel can thank the art-loving Landgrave Wilhelm VIII, who ruled Hesse from 1751 to 1760. As a youth, Wilhelm did military service in the Low Countries, fell in love with Flemish art, and got in the habit of collecting it. Wilhelm's finest trophy was Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, which Rembrandt painted in 1656, the year of his financial collapse and the beginning of his happy fall from worldly fame.

He had made his success with portraits, but Rembrandt preferred to paint religious subjects, which failed to interest Calvinist Amsterdam. Before his death, Rembrandt devoted 600 known drawings, 80 etchings and 160 paintings to Biblical subjects. Living with his common-law wife, Hendrickje Stoffels, and his ailing son Titus in a ghetto garret, pitied by some and scorned by others, the fat old man was working joyfully, devotedly and profoundly for the ages. Among his inspirations was the warm and simple faith of the Mennonites. who taught direct recourse to the Bible, and the mystical writings of Jacob Boehme, who constantly employed the symbolism of light for good and darkness for evil. Some scholars maintain that Rembrandt's characteristic and unsurpassed dramatic interplay of light and shadow stems from Boehme.

In Jacob's Blessing, light seems actually to shine from the dying patriarch. Summoned to his father's deathbed, Joseph has brought with him his two sons and his Egyptian wife Asenath, who is the mother of Ephraim, the younger son. Jacob blesses his grandsons, thus adopting them in effect and admitting them to the tribes of Israel. But against all custom, he is inspired to bless Ephraim first. Joseph gently tries to guide the patriarch's hand to the head of Manasseh, explaining that he is the elder. Jacob, filled with prophetic spirit, replies (Genesis 48:19): "I know it. my son, I know it: he also shall become a people and he also shall be great: but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations." In Christian tradition, this solemn and mysterious scene foreshadows the eventual triumph of Christianity, symbolized by Ephraim, so Rembrandt makes the boy's hands form a cross.

With his genius for making light and darkness speak, Rembrandt surrounds the entire scene with a deathly shadow, concentrates the light mainly in Jacob as that moment's vessel of God's will, and then makes it leap and pour goldenly past the dark head and hurt eyes of Manasseh upon fair-haired Ephraim, who shines like his grandfather.

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