Postscript to yesterday’s entry: It is only just last evening, while browsing through online galleries of Rembrandts in search of AC/DC resemblances, that I happen across “The Rich Man from the Parable” and am surprised to recognize that a bad replica of this painting was the picture hanging above the mantel in the Pillar and Post’s Olde Library room where Laura and I had our wedding. In fact we conducted our ceremony while standing in front of it. (You can see it on the left side of the above photo, a wide-angle B&W film shot taken by my brother, who appreciates a good ceiling.)

All this time I’d thought that that library painting had just been a kind of amusingly quaint bit of grotesque old-timey portraiture. Some mystical/alchemical sorcererish weirdo, hamfistedly rendered by, say, a plague-ridden medieval monk armed with a hazy concept of perspective and paintbrushes made from rat bristles. It was ugly, but I liked it. Now that I find it’s an attempt at a Rembrandt copy, I’ve gone back and taken a new look at it — zooming in on where it shows up in the background of one of our color wedding pics — and I can now see just how hilariously awful it is.

Left: Detail from the Olde Library’s replica. Right: Detail from the Rembrandt piece.
Click for a closer comparison.

I guess this goes back to the old idea that you can more easily grasp the genius of the great painters if you compare their works with copies, where you can see what went wrong. Our replica-artist here is not really that terrible, but it’s just that they’ve taken Rembrandt’s evocative, moody, startlingly lifelike scene and transmogrified it into a flat, lifeless, misshapen tableau of what appears to be a softening wax dummy of a malnourished Richard Attenborough, posed in mid-parade-wave, with creepy post-lobotomy eyes bent on vacancy, seconds away from being buried beneath a clutch of enormous floating pastries from Cubist hell. (The fact that I’ve been reading a novel involving art forgeries is purely coincidental.) (Need I even add: I can’t paint.)