A Question of Attribution
I AM prepared to call Dr. Plesch's bluff. It was a good hoax and one that almost deserved to win. Only it was a little too bare-faced. I can imagine Dr. Plesch, sceptical, intelligent, cultured, a professor of Medicine and a psychologist, observing how absurdly remote from life art historians can become, how precious and ingenuous art critics, and so deciding to discover exactly how far he could go, how vigorously he could pull their legs. This book is the result.
The theme is simple but with many subtle asides in which he pro- tests his seriousness. Since Rembrandt was the greatest of all painters, let us look at his work very carefully ; turn his etchings up- side down, look at his canvasses obliquely from the side with half- closed eyes, cover the obvious features of his drawings with a ruler and gaze into their shadows, and then gradually we shall discover in them hidden faces, heads of animals, scraps of bodies, arbitrary letters, monsters and witches. These were all part of Rembrandt's deliberate intention. In every single work he incorporated a dozen or so others, incoherent, illogical, their existence undiscovered for three hundred years, but nevertheless bearing the true imprint of his greatness !
The cause of this was the over-stimulation of Rembrandt's brain by syphilis (" Later I may return . . . in a special study . . . to the question of the extent to which the term civilisation can be regarded as identical with syphilisation"); the result is the mysterious, incom- parable vitality that every passage in a Rembrandt seems to possess ; every passage literally vibrates with meaning.
What gives the game away is that Dr. Plesch goes too far. He claims for instance, that the " general cause " of the whole Renaissance was also syphilis. He brazenly uses quite meaningless reproductions to illustrate the " subordinate figures " he has found in Rembrandt's works. Anyone who has ever drawn knows that one can sometimes find a vague cat in a tree, an arm in a landscape, a figure in an arrangement of folds, a profile in a full-face—but that doesn't mean to say there is all that much wool over our eyes. Perhaps I should add that, if by any chance I have misunderstood the purpose of this book, if Dr. Plesch is really serious, I offer him
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