Rembrandt returned to the subject, "Presentation of Jesus in the Temple" at least 5 times from 1627 to 1654, two paintings, three etchings.
The subject is the biblical story of Simeon. Jesus was still an infant when Joseph and Mary took him to the temple to be presented to God. There they were approached by Simeon, a devout old man who recognised the child as the Saviour and praised him to God.
The most famous of these works was in 1631 when he was about 25 and still living in Leiden. Later that year he moved to Amsterdam. This painting is the high point of Rembrandt’s Leiden years: it represents the sum total of his artistic abilities at that
Most of his paintings are in very dark tones out of which his figures seem to appear to the foreground. Rembrandt was the master of dark and light and most of his pictures are made in this style of struggle between dark and light, night and day, sorrow and joy.
The key to the picture is how carefully and delicate the figures are painted, even those in the darkest part of the painting. The beautiful contrast, between the light on the central group and the soft dimness of the remoter parts of the cathedral, illustrates a style of work for which Rembrandt was very famous.
The lessons today are all about spiritual considerations. If you spend a little time with them, the lessons are all about the spiritual nature of what it means to live in this world before God. So with that in mind there are really four things I want to talk about today. One is knowledge and kinds of knowledge . There are two kinds of knowledge – there’s spiritual knowledge, there’s intellectual knowledge and there’s also this basic drive that human beings have for wholeness. Then I want to talk a little bit about symbols and how they are an expression of our spiritual lives.