Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

While Korda also does not show Saskia as a character in the film, he goes
even further than Zuckmayer by not even showing her portrait. In so doing, Korda
further removes Saskia from reality, transforming her into a figment of
“Rembrandt’s” imagination, and emphasizing “Rembrandt’s” idealizing of her yet
more. The film further achieves this focus on “Rembrandt” and his mental
involvement, or even life, in his art through an interpretive ekphrasis of another
self portrait, which takes up Zuckmayer’s use of a deliberate anachronism for the
purpose of constructing his filmic image of “Rembrandt”: The Painter in his
Studio (c.1629).
Although this painting was created not only long before Saskia’s death,
but even before their marriage, depicting a very young painter, the anachronism
serves a deliberate function in this scene, shifting the focus from the revelation of
Saskia’s identity to the process of artistic creation and inspiration, and to the art
work itself. The scene begins with a brief tableau vivant of an inverted mirror
image of that self portrait. “Rembrandt” is standing several feet away from his
canvas, but here he is on the viewer’s right (unlike in the original picture) while
the canvas looms large in the foreground on the left, dwarfing the artist himself.
As Rembrandt in his picture, he is wearing shabby workman’s clothes that
contrast with his previous elegant attire, and overall, he looks less refined and
rather disheveled. After briefly contemplating the canvas, “Rembrandt”
approaches it and begins (or continues?) to paint. As in the original picture, the
viewer does not know at which stage the work is, if the artist has just begun or is
about to finish it, and at no time are we shown even the slightest part of the work.
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