July 15 is the anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth in 1606.
But did you know that an attempt was made to turn him into a Nazi icon? When the Nazis occupied The Netherlands in 1940, they attempted to win the sympathy of the Dutch people by portraying Rembrandt as an archetypal “Germanic Man” and his use of shadow and light as symbolic of the Aryan ideals of “blood and soil.”
Occupied Netherlands was less than impressed.
It reminds me of a recent post on A Word a Day. Godwin’s Law: : The idea that as a debate progresses, it becomes inevitable that someone would compare another to Hitler or the Nazis.
This is one of the nearly one hundred Rembrandt self-portraits, realized in 1659.
It currently resides in the National Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. USA.
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