Aby Warburg’s Copy of Rembrandt’s Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis

At the top of the Warburg Institute's main staircase, between the third and fourth floors (please note, this area is not open to the public), you’ll find a striking painting: a copy of Rembrandt's The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, commissioned by Aby Warburg in 1926 for his library in Hamburg.

In this blog post, Claudia Wedepohl, the Warburg Institute’s Archivist, revisits the painting’s fascinating journey, which she originally explored in the Warburg Institute’s Summer 2004 newsletter. 

In January 1925 Aby Warburg contacted Axel Gauffin, the director of the National Museum in Stockholm, and requested the name of a painter and the price for a copy of Rembrandt’s famous late painting, The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis, held in the museum. The copy was originally intended for a prominent position in the Reading and Lecture Room of his new library building in Hamburg; in January 1926 the Swedish history painter and draughtsman Carl Schuberth finally agreed to the conditions for its execution. His canvas has survived the aftermath of Hitler's ascension to power in 1933 and it is now displayed on the upper landing of the Warburg Institute's main staircase. The circumstances surrounding the painting’s creation and subsequent survival were the subject of an article I wrote 20 years ago for the Institute's Newsletter.[1] In 2004, the Rembrandt copy was scheduled to depart from its London home for an exhibition in the Netherlands. Before its return, the painting was cleaned and framed, and it was placed in the more prominent location. Additionally, the scholarship on Warburg's Rembrandt research has advanced significantly since the publication of my article. For instance, Warburg's 1926 lecture, Italian Antiquity in Rembrandt's Age, in which the Conspiracy plays a pivotal role, has been published.[2]

Warburg's Rembrandt copy represents one of a number of visual references to Warburg’s pioneering ideas and personal ideals that connect the London Institute at Woburn Square with its predecessor, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg. To commemorate the reopening of the Institute following the two-year Warburg Renaissance project and to introduce new audiences to Warburg's work, I am republishing my piece in a revised, illustrated version.

Conspiracy in the Common Room 

Claudia Wedepohl's article from the Warburg Institute's Summer 2004 newsletter

Anyone who has spent even a short amount of time in the Institute’s Common Room during the past few years will surely have noticed, hanging on the wall at the far end of the room, one of its most striking features: a huge unframed painting depicting a group of men, some brandishing swords, huddling intensely around a large table dimly illumined by a soft glow of light which emanates from an unseen source at the centre of the gathering (Fig. 1). Most art historians will have little difficulty identifying this picture as The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606–1669), and many will no doubt know that the original is housed in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (Fig. 2); but few are likely to be aware of the story surrounding this particular copy of the painting, now kept at the Warburg Institute and due to be sent out on loan for a few months to the Valkhof Museum, Nijmegen, where it will feature in the exhibition De Bataven / The Batavians (18 September 2004 – 9 January 2005). 

Rembrandt’s Conspiracy was commissioned by the governors of Amsterdam to form part of the decorative cycle of their new town hall (Stadhuis). In 1659 it had been decided that this civic building should be adorned with scenes illustrating the history, recorded by Tacitus, of the revolt of the Batavians (supposed ancestors of the Dutch) against Roman rule in the first century AD. Twelve canvasses were contracted with Govaert Flinck who died before he could deliver anything. To fill one of the commissions, Rembrandt produced a monumental canvas (c. 550 x 500cm in a lunette shape) which depicted the Batavian leader (Julius Civilis, known also as Gaius or Claudius) in a nocturnal scene, binding his confederates to an oath of resistance. But this enormous work was only displayed in the Stadhuis for a couple of months before, in 1662, it was taken down and replaced with Flinck’s version of the scene, executed by Jürgen Ovens (Fig. 3). 

Rembrandt’s canvas was returned to his workshop, where it was considerably truncated and heavily reworked, but never restored to its original location. In 1734 the painting was sold at auction to the collector, Nicholas Coel; and in 1798 it was presented, by one of his heirs, to the Swedish Academy of Fine Arts (which still owns the work).Since 1864 The Conspiracy of the Batavians has been kept in the Swedish Nationalmuseum; and it was here in 1926 that a scale reproduction of it, measuring 196 x 309 cm, was made by the Swedish painter Carl Schuberth (1860–1929) at the request of Aby Warburg. Schuberth had been recommended to Warburg by the director of the Stockholm gallery, after Warburg had read a report in Dagens Nyheter about a Viennese painter working on a copy of the famous canvas (Fig. 4). Warburg and Schuberth met in April 1926 when Warburg visited the Museum to see the Rembrandt original and to inspect the copy of it, which was then in progress. Although work continued on the reproduction for several more months during which time Warburg had to write a series of increasingly insistent letters to Schuberth urging him to complete the job. When the replica eventually reached Hamburg in December 1926, Warburg was very pleased with the result and paid Schuberth a bonus of 200 Krona in addition to the price of 1,500 Mark.

What led Aby Warburg to commission an exact copy of Rembrandt’s Conspiracy? The answer lies partly in his interest in the survival of classical forms, but more specifically in his observation of a striking similarity between the content of Rembrandt’s invention (as well as of the other paintings for the Stadhuis) and that of some engravings by the Italian artist, Antonio Tempesta (1555–1630). Tempesta’s engravings, after the models of Otto Van Veen, had been used to illustrate an edition of the Batavorum cum Romanis Bellum of 1612, which documented the history of the Batavian resistance as described in books 4 and 5 of Tacitus’s Historiae (Fig. 5). After identifying this early printed ‘humanist’ book as the model for the Stadhuis cycle, Warburg became intrigued by the way in which Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, especially Rembrandt, adopted classical motifs, and in a letter to the Dutch art historian, J. A. F. Orbaan, he compared his feelings about this discovery to those which he had had during his research on Botticelli’s relationship with the ancients.

Although Warburg realised soon after embarking on this research that the similarities which he had spotted were not unknown, he continued to develop his ideas about the painting in a vivid exchange with his deputy Fritz Saxl, who was a Rembrandt specialist. The two scholars discussed, for example, specific phenomena in the Conspiracy such as the pathos of light and the influence of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Warburg’s research on the heritage of classical antiquity in Rembrandt and stylistic development in Dutch painting from the Golden Age culminated in a lecture which was delivered on 29 May 1926, shortly after his trip to Stockholm, in his new library building in Hamburg. In this unpublished (and unpolished) lecture he drew attention to what he believed to be the roots of Rembrandt’s style: the pathos of classical pagan mythology and history which was transmitted through contemporary Dutch drama. According to Warburg, however, Rembrandt was selective in his adoption of classical forms and gave to the Amsterdam commission a very personal touch by focusing upon the darker side of classical antiquity. Warburg refers to the ‘harsh and manly sobriety’ of the Conspiracy and interprets it as an expression of high moral standards as opposed to the empty ‘romanticising rhetoric or theatrical posturing’ represented by the other paintings of the Stadhuis cycle which follow Tempesta’s models more closely (Figs 3, 5). In Warburg’s view, it was the demonic character of Rembrandt’s invention which led to its rejection by ‘nationalist’ patrons, who were the representatives, as Warburg puts it, of ‘official’ baroque taste. Indeed, the Conspiracy even attained the status of a personal icon for Warburg, who perceived Rembrandt as the true successor to Shakespeare's genius. He believed that the painter’s capacity to integrate profound emotion with a discernible sense of restraint, a so-called ‘Hamlet-tension’, constituted a defining feature of his creative style. The Conspiracy had thus acquired the status of a symbol of the kind of deliberation followed by action which he identified with; it was even perhaps a personal allegory of his scholarly battle against pure aestheticism, based on empathy.

Aby Warburg would have liked to have had the replica of the Conspiracy present during his lecture in May 1926, shortly after the unofficial opening of the new KBW building. The ‘official’ opening, however, did not take place until January 1927, following the arrival of the copy in Hamburg on 23 December 1926. Accompanied by a photograph of one of Rembrandt’s preliminary drawings of the original composition, the ‘magnificent work’ was mounted on the front wall of the elliptical reading room, above the lectern (Fig. 6). But then, in a turn of fate similar to the initial hanging of Rembrandt’s original painting in the 1660s (though on this occasion for reasons of space) the picture was taken down soon afterwards. It was then transferred to the staircase of Warburg’s private house next door, where the owner could proudly expound upon it to his visitors; though some remarks about its former hanging suggest that the copy might have returned to the KBW building sometime later. This cannot be known since the only photographic record shows only Rembrandt’s preliminary drawing above to door to the reading room (Fig. 7.1-2)

The fortuna of Warburg’s Rembrandt replica is no less interesting than its origins. When the Library was moved to England in December 1933, the canvas stayed behind; in 1934, when emigrating to the Netherlands, the new owner, Max Adolph Warburg, Aby’s son, deposited it in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It was only in the 1950s, when Gertrud Bing heard about ‘a life-size modern copy’ of Rembrandt’s Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis being ‘on deposit’ in the Rijksmuseum, that steps were taken to restore it to the Institute’s premises: in a letter to Max Adolph Warburg, dated 23 November 1955, Bing asked for confirmation that it was ‘the Heilwigstrasse copy’, and expressed her keenness ‘to secure the copy for the new building [in Woburn Square]’ … as a ‘souvenir of the Hamburg building’ [WIA, GC, 23/11/1955]; and soon afterwards, with Max’s agreement (Fig. 8), the Rembrandt copy was duly transported to London, where it was placed in storage at the Victoria & Albert Museum until the new building in Bloomsbury, still under construction, was ready to be occupied. But even after reaching the present site of the Institute, the canvas continued its wanderings: first, in the early 1960s, from the cloakroom on the ground floor to the lower landing of the back staircase; and then, during the academic year 1979–1980, to its current location in the basement Common Room, where it is now seen by an abundance of visitors.

References

[1] Claudia Wedepohl, “Conspiracy in the Common Room”, The Warburg Institute Newsletter 15 (2004), p. 2-3.