Rembrandt and the Female Nude

Rembrandt’s extraordinary paintings of female nudes – Andromeda, Susanna, Diana and Her Nymphs, Danaë, Bathsheba – as well as his etchings of nude women, have fascinated many generations of art lovers and art historians, but they have also elicited vehement criticism. They were considered against-the-grain, anti-classical, even ugly and unpleasant. However, Rembrandt chose conventional subjects, keeping close to time-honored pictorial schemes, and was well aware of the high prestige accorde...