The Cerruti etching, an original after a drawing by Rembrandt dated 1641, stands out for a clearly visible alteration in the centre of the scene. 

Rembrandt’s etchings attracted interest and were studied from very early on. The first general catalogue of his engravings dates back to 1751. It was compiled by Edme-François Gersaint (1694-1750) and published posthumously. Gersaint, a Paris merchant and art historian, began his research with a group of graphic works, employing great intuition and attention to detail (traits typical of an 18th-century expert) to distinguish autograph pieces from those produced by his pupils. 

Rembrandt produced around three hundred etchings, the majority of which directly onto copper plates, without preparatory drawings, demonstrating the command he developed of this technique over the years. He tried his hand at various genres, often citing works by great masters such as Dürer, but also drawing inspiration from artists contemporary to him. His corpus was not created on the basis of a set plan, but grew discontinuously, switching from commissioned portraits to book illustrations. His production often appears to be spontaneous, with homogeneous groups or individual plates, prints inspired by paintings in his collection, simple sketches or engravings with almost painterly chiaroscuro effects that fascinated his contemporaries. It has therefore proved very difficult to study his autograph engravings and arrange them in chronological order, as they are rarely dated and signed. Furthermore, the painter often touched up the plates, sometimes years later. 

The Cerruti etching, an original after a drawing by Rembrandt dated 1641, stands out for a clearly visible alteration in the centre of the scene. The painter had initially drawn a small head in the middle, but realising that it was poorly positioned, he decided to rotate the plate and start again. He therefore produced a Virgin and Child resting on the clouds, illuminated by divine light. For this iconography, Rembrandt seems to have drawn inspiration from Dürer’s Madonna on the Crescent Moon from the title page of his Life of the Virgin (Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung), a small print of the same subject by Jan van de Velde after a design by Willem Buytewech, or Federico Barocci’s Madonna in the Clouds (fig. 1).¹ The latter features a number of similarities, from its size to the setting, and it is also interesting to see how Rembrandt also adopted the uncommon motif of the Virgin’s folded hands. Rembrandt had a lot of engravings in his collection, including three of the four engravings currently known to be by Barocci, revealing his careful study of the painter from Urbino. However, the overall tone of the painting is different, with Rembrandt portraying a mother whose gaze is lost in the distance, as in the iconography of the Mater Dolorosa, because she knows the fate that awaits her child. These reflections were the object of a sheet of studies dated c. 1637 with the Virgin of Sorrows and Mary Magdalene, conserved at the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam.² 

Rembrandt’s copper plate with the Virgin and Child in the Clouds survived until the 18th century, when it is mentioned for the last time in the Pieter Haan auction catalogue in 1767. The exemplar in the Cerruti Collection shows lighter shading, suggesting that it was made from a plate that was already worn. 

Sara Comoglio 

¹ Schapelhouman, in Rome 2002-03, cat. 43, p. 161. 

² Benesch 1973, vol. II, p. 80, no. 152.