A Thousand Words
Rembrandt's
The Denial of Peter
Rembrandt’s world, the Holland of the seventeenth century, has been described as “a rich stew of religious denominations,” predominantly Calvinist, but flavored with Lutherans, Remonstrants, Anabaptists, Collegiants, Quakers, and a seasoning of Catholics and Jews. Religious controversies were the hot topics of the day. Yet for all that, religious painting in the Netherlands languished. Calvin considered that painting was suitable only to render an account of the visible world, useful for the decoration of private spaces or civic buildings, but that any figural representation of the divine diminished or degraded it, and was therefore unsuitable. Calvinist churches were stripped of all decoration, especially of paintings, and the market for religious imagery dwindled. Most painters became specialists, painting landscapes, still lifes, portraits, or scenes from everyday life, while painters of scenes from history, mythology, and the Bible shrank their pictures to a scale suited to the domestic interior.
With one notable exception. Throughout his long career, Rembrandt occupied himself with religious and biblical topics far more than with any other subject, and he painted them on an increasingly grand scale. The Denial of St. Peter (1659, now in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum), which measures nearly five by six feet, is a case in point. We do not know whether it was painted on commission (perhaps for a wealthy patron), on speculation, or purely to satisfy the artist’s own imagination; Rembrandt was never a very practical soul, and by the time this was painted, he had already undergone bankruptcy proceedings and the sale of his grand house and collection. Still, the painting dates from a period of relative tranquility, when he might have felt free to explore topics of personal interest.
Hidden Light on a Troubled Soul
Rembrandt was always a serious student of Scripture. In 1637, the Estates-General of the Dutch Republic published the Statenbijbel, an annotated translation of the Bible from the Hebrew and the Greek into Dutch, putting a wealth of material at Rembrandt’s disposal. For his Denial, he appears to have chosen the passage from Luke’s Gospel for its quantity of apparently eyewitness details, conflating the passage of time from about an hour to a single instant. Luke sets the scene at night, which for Rembrandt provides a strong contrast of light and dark, fitting to the starkness of the choice that Peter is called to make. Rembrandt’s color palette is restricted to just black, white, red, and yellow, and the brushwork is rather loose and sketchy. Just a few strokes, for example, evoke the face of the maid edged with light.
The hidden light source, the candle shielded by the maidservant’s hand, was a popular device for painters; it probably derived from the footlight, which was invented in the seventeenth century to throw dramatic uplighting onto the opera and the often lurid theater of the day. Rembrandt sets his characters in a shallow, stagelike space, confronting us directly. Indeed, the second source of light, the guards’ fire, is set somewhere in our space beyond the picture plane. We see only its reflection, on the soldier’s helmet and flask, and, appropriately enough, on Peter’s left hand flung out in denial.
Within this stage, the painter has set the three figures confronting Peter in a wedge shape that presses urgently against him, the maid’s arm making a diagonal axis from the dawning brute intelligence of the soldier to Peter’s troubled face. Against that wedge, Peter stands firm and solid, square-shouldered and beautiful, wrapped in white. Possibly Rembrandt intended his white mantle as a prayer shawl, as he was acquainted with prominent Jewish thinkers in Amsterdam and interested himself in Jewish ritual and its relation to Christianity. But here, Peter uses his shawl for dissimulation, hiding his right hand, his true nature, in its folds while he makes a gesture of repudiation with his left.
Just above his left hand, barely visible in the shadows and on axis with the maidservant’s arm, stands the figure of Christ. “And immediately, while he was still speaking, the cock crowed. And the Lord turned and looked at Peter.” Here Christ is almost an incidental figure. The real focus of the painting is the expression on Peter’s face. This is a portrait of a troubled soul. Peter, the Rock, is caught in the toils of the Protestant existential moment, the personal encounter with Christ and the crucial test of faith, to accept or deny him. Even Peter gives way to human frailty.
Menno’s Meditations in Visual Form
In later years, Rembrandt would continue to explore this kind of imaginative psychological portrait, gradually stripping away the narrative details until the subject is obscured and only the physical exposition of the subject’s inner state remains. This kind of meditative portrait places Rembrandt close to the thinking of the Mennonites, particularly to the writings of their founder, Menno Simons.
Menno’s exhortations to a return to Scripture, repentance, faith, and simplicity, often focus on single figures from Scripture and their encounters with the Lord. His commentaries, and his religious practices, emphasized inward reaction and experience, eschewing all institutional ceremony and ritual practice, concentrating instead on silence and prayer. In contrast to Calvin, he preached on Christ as teacher and healer, bringing mercy and salvation to the weak and penitent. Some of the Bible stories Menno chose for his meditations are ones that Rembrandt illustrated; for example, in his Foundation and Plain Instruction of the Saving Doctrine of Our Lord Jesus Christ, he remarks at some length on the story of Peter’s denial and threefold repentance.
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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