Dutch Golden Age paintings and painters (for Dutch learners)

[tommus]

How did Rembrandt's language sound?

Hoe klonk de taal van Rembrandt?

For the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's death, researchers developed a series of Rembrandt Tutorials where Rembrandt "himself" teaches how to paint. These Tutorials are on YouTube. To be realistic, they used the Dutch language as spoken in the 15th century, and even reconstructed, as best they could, how Rembrandt's actual voice would probably have sounded.

The story of the preparation of these tutorials also contains links to the Tutorials themselves.

Rembrandt Tutorials

[Nogon]

Wow! That is utterly fascinating! Thanks for telling us about it, tommus!

I'm extra happy about, that I not only could read the article with quite good understanding, but even get the gist of the "De ‘making-of’ van de Rembrandt Tutorials" without reading the subtitles - without ever having learnt any Dutch. (Except a little Clozemaster for a few weeks.) German as a native language makes Dutch almost (but not entirely) transparent. I think, I could acquire an okay reading ability without too much work. Should buy a dictionary and a beginners' grammar and check the library for some nice Dutch books.

[tommus]

The Night Watch: Rijksmuseum's high tech photo

Here is a BBC article and a link to a new technology to display Rembrandt's The Night Watch (De Nachtwacht) in amazing detail (hyper-resolution). It is as if you were standing in front of the painting with a magnifying glass.

BBC article

Direct link to Nachtwacht

Dutch Wikipedia article about De Nachtwacht

[Iversen]

Thanks for publishing the link to the reconstruction of the speech of mynheer Rembrandt van Rijn. It is actually hard to find genuine texts from his era even though it was one of the most glorious golden ages any country has been able to muster so hearing a reconstructed voice from that time was even more unexpected. I was however surprised that the short speech à la 'Rembrandt* wasn't more oldfashioned (and guttural), and that it was so easy to understand it. But I was also slightly surprised at the voice itself. Maybe it should illustrate Rembrandt's voice from a late period in his life and maybe his teeth weren't quite as complete then as in his younger days, but the voice I heard suggested that he had a lisp and also that he may have had a tendency to spit and wiggle his upper lip when talking, and he may have sounded differently in his younger years. But now that the methodology has been developed it may be used on other famous persons from the time, including young Rembrandt.

Btw: Long ago I got my Dutch listening breakthrough (epiphany) by listening for five hours to AVRO Museum TV in Dutch (the site still exists, but has changed a lot). This time the fun was over after just a few minutes, but I noticed and bookmarked the link to Nemo Kennislink near the bottom of the page, and then I can listen some more to small scientific lectures in Dutch.