R.Mutt: Looking for the meanings in Belshazzar's feast, it may be helpful to remember that it's a story about interpretation; and I think that Daniel's explanation of the writing already points to all the paradoxes of Rembrandt's painting. Daniel says "you have praised the gods of silver, and gold, or bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see, nor hear, nor know. And you have not glorified the God in whose hand is your breath and all your ways."
Fair enough, but how does the God in whose hand our breath is manifest himself? He is present first in the "golden and silver vessels" taken from the temple. After that he expresses himself in money: a mina, a mina, a shekel, and half minas. A price tag - not so different from the gods of silver and gold. That contradiction seems be at to work on every level. While the story is a play on the "embarrassment of riches", at the same time as an oil painting it is what John Berger calls "a celebration of private property". And Rembrandt goes even further by turning the feast into a painting that, like you said, attempts to make its value, the magic of gold, concrete...
Alphonse van Worden: Do you think this could be the divine here straining to expand to accommodate itself to the greater abstraction of the prime relation of the social order, property? It - god, property, the divine principle - can't be stuck in this specific statue or estate, although it has a kind of preference for these sensual things, a gravitation toward them. But it has to be mobile as light, and yet tangible, detectable and incontestable all the same.
The contradiction here is provoking the radical style, this new art in this newly important medium. And so the relation of content to surface works out a complex relation to 'the ineluctable modality of the visual' which Calvinism and related protestant Christianities also put into action. Samson's blindness is the route to the divine; and the visual obsession of the (catholic) Paul - where the divine is seen directly, without metaphor, in its true form, and the eyes are the perfectly adequate organs of revelation - is critiqued as both inescapably fetishist and sort of artistically (as it is commercially) stagnant. More scuro, less chiaro! The relation of service between light and shadow is reversed from the great commercial Italian culture to the greater commercial and at least quasi-capitalist Dutch empire.
Property's presence - the idea of wealth as well as its form - strains to retreat from the golden goblet, the gorgeous object of art/craft, and becomes instead a vaporized and gaseous version, a golden glow in the atmosphere. And the value which adheres in this golden-ness only grows more powerful and intense when the edges of the objects it inhabits are in the shadows, mutable, permeable, and the spirit of property (or the divine) which was trapped or locked into figures is revealed as not reducible to them; not latched to these unique material condition nor limited by the dimensions of objects. This is commercial wealth in the very act of transforming into capital proper.
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