ty in Rembrandt’s self-portrait and other portraits painted by him show that Rembrandt was of the Caravaggio style when it came to rejecting the traditional modes of painting. In his works, Rembrandt “applied all that he knew of the dynamics and the psychology of light, the visual suggestion of time, and the art of pose and facial expression” (De La Croix and Tansey 748). We can see this most clearly in Syndics of the Cloth Guild. In this work, the syndics are about to go over the books of the company. However, it appears someone has entered the room and they have all paused to look at the person. Each man’s reaction seems frozen in time, as if interrupted suddenly, and Rembrandt has rendered each man’s expression in a way that suggests the personality of each individual and their possible relationship with this newcomer to the room.
Vermeer’s works reflect the everyday events and simple pleasures of the middle-class Dutch. In his works we see the secularized influence of Caravaggio and the use of light and dark value contrasts. In his Young Woman with a Water Jug, we see how Vermeer is able to use light and dark to add a spiritual or mystical value to otherwise secular scenes and images. Vermeer’s use of camera obscura enables him to design a painting that has a calm and serenity to it. In Young Woman Vermeer shows us that he understood that shadows and light were not all one color. We see this in the way the blue drape is painted as dark blue on one side of the water pitcher, but light on the other, while the same technique is used to show the red of the carpet as modified because of the reflection of the gold basin. The camera obscura technique also makes Vermeer’s works appear softly out-of-focus while viewing them up-close, but they move into focus as we distance ourselves from them. Vermeer would become a master of pictorial light in part because of the influence of other masters of its use such as C...