Rembrandt’s two dozen copies of Mughal paintings that he created between the years 1654 and 1660, remains an obscure collection of drawings within the artist’s extensive body of work. In the scholarship, these drawings are usually framed as his interest in costumes and gestures. This interpretation, however, does not fully take into account Rembrandt’s sensitivity towards cultural and religious tolerance, as exhibited in all aspects of his artistic practice. Prior to his Mughal drawings, Rembrandt already exhibited a curiosity for foreign peoples and places. As a resident of Amsterdam, the global epicenter of Europe, he took advantage of his cosmopolitan atmosphere by actively collecting objects from Asia and the New World brought in by the Dutch East India Company. His art, moreover, did not remain impervious to this dynamic and diverse environment, as evinced by the numerous drawings Rembrandt made to document the different sights and peoples that he encountered in the city. His Mughal copies, moreover, do not resemble the sketches that scholars consider as exhibiting the artist’s curiosity for Oriental attire and distinct body language; instead, they closely parallel the kinds of drawings he made after works of art he found visually appealing. Rembrandt experimented with different kinds of lines and contours to imitate and adapt the Mughal style to diversify his artistic repertoire. His thoughtful engagement reveals that Rembrandt viewed Mughal art style as legitimate forms he could utilize to develop new compositions, or even to challenge and correct existing pictorial traditions. Rembrandt’s Mughal drawings, rather than being an obscure collection, demonstrate instead his unique ability to craft works of art to be reflective of his rich, diverse environment. This strong artistic desire for pictorial experimentation, in addition to his sensitivity for acute narrative interpretation, coalesces to form a more unified portrait of Rembrandt as an empathetic, albeit ambitious, artist. / text

This thesis aims to challenge a number of critical assumptions that have unnecessarily restricted the way we read Paul Celan's work, and poetry in general, by reading an unfinished cycle of poems called 'Eingedunkelt.' The poems were written during the Spring of 1966, when Celan was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in Paris, and have received little critical attention since their initial partial publication in 1968, their more extensive publication in 1991, and the exhaustive publication of the transcription of all genetic documents in 2006. The thesis consists of three chapters, the last two of which are divided into two parts. The opening chapter confronts the poems in 'Eingedunkelt' as they are now available to us as genetic documents, and engages with current theories of genetic criticism to explore new ways of reading and creating meaning within the avant-texte. Although studies of Celan's work have proliferated since his death in 1970, very few critics have been willing to look beyond the formulation of the poetics Celan defines in his 1960 Büchner prize speech 'Der Meridian.' Chapters Two and Three therefore seek to identify the presence in 'Eingedunkelt' of alternative ways of thinking about poetry that do not necessarily conform to the poetics most explicitly outlined in 1960, and that allow for the very real possibility that Celan's conception of his poetic task was often challenged and maybe even transformed. Through Celan's engagement with Stéphane Mallarmé and Jean-Paul Sartre, Chapter Two identifies the development of a poetics of suicide, according to which each poem rehearses the poet's final and greatest creative act in his or her own self-destruction. Chapter Three recognizes the existence of a counter-poetics of life through Celan's lifelong interaction with the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn, in which the material qualities of dried oil paint, which mimic the organic qualities of human skin, offer a way to create a living, breathing, but also decaying memorial to those who died in the Shoah. This provides the platform for Celan's poetic critique of both the 1963 - 1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, and Peter Weiss's 1965 dramatization of the Trial, 'Die Ermittlung.'

After the Council of Trent, Catholic Spain in the seventeenth century increasingly turned to the arts to articulate their identity and mission as a church. Writing for the Spanish Court in the early 1630s, Pedro Calderón de la Barca uses La cena del rey Baltasar to portray the Church as an essential mediator for the relationship between the congregant and the divine, specifically through the use of didactic imagery and authoritative interpretation of God’s word. This essay reviews elements in the play that support this message and articulates the eucharistic and allegorical elements therein. The action of the Biblical narrative and the play culminates in the divine manifestation of the hand of God, a moment also captured in paint by the Catholic Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera and the Protestant Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn. These painted works serve as visual hermeneutics articulating the contrasting views of Catholics and Protestants in post-Tridentine Europe.