In honor of the Rembrandt Year, linguists from the Institute for the Dutch Language in Leiden reconstructed Rembrandt's language. This served as the basis for the Rembrandt Tutorials:a series of YouTube painting lessons by the master himself.
This year it is exactly 350 years ago that painter Rembrandt van Rijn passed away. In the spring, ING, as the main sponsor of the Rijksmuseum, therefore launched a series of YouTube painting lessons, spoken by a fictional Rembrandt. The films were preceded by an extensive language study. Because how did people actually speak in the seventeenth century?
Linguists Dirk Geirnaert and Roland de Bonth converted the texts for the films, written by a contemporary painter, into seventeenth-century Dutch. Olga van Marion, a Dutch language specialist at Leiden University, instructed a Dutch voice actor to arrive at the correct pronunciation. Finally, the speech was computer refined by a team from Pittsburgh University.
Painter-Boeck
It was a labour-intensive job, say Geirnaert and De Bonth during a conversation at the Institute for the Dutch Language (INT), located on the Rapenburg in Leiden. For a month they were busy retranslating the texts into seventeenth-century Dutch full-time. For this they mainly used the Dictionary of the Dutch Language, which is available digitally on the website of the INT.
Searching for the term 'painting' in the seventeenth century period yields a lot of material, according to the researchers. “All kinds of quotations then appear from painting manuals that were used in Rembrandt's time,” says De Bonth. “We have some of those painting manuals here in our library.” He holds up a yellowed book:the Schilder-Boeck by Karel van Mander from 1604. Published two years before the birth of Rembrandt van Rijn in 1606.
Walrus black
When studying the books, the researchers immediately noticed that the painting terms deviated a lot from contemporary painting jargon. And that sometimes made it difficult to translate modern words into seventeenth-century words. For example, when it comes to paint shades:“Zinc white for example, that didn't exist yet. You did have lead white ”, says De Bonth. “Or take the word grisaille ”, adds Geirnaert. A grisaille or a gray painting is a painting on which no natural colors are applied, but mainly gray or brown tones are used. “That was not yet known in Rembrandt's time. The word gray or gray was still used .” The linguists recorded all these kinds of words in a special dictionary, which has been available online since this month.
It also contains terms that are no longer used, because the paint was made in a different way, for example. Walrus black was obtained from charred waste from walrus tusks. And dragon's blood was a dark red resin used as a dye. De Bonth:“There was so much more to painting, it was really a craft. You can also see this in the painting manuals:in them you can read how to make brushes and paint. Apprentice painters had to master all this, but the real masters probably left a lot to their students to focus more on the composition of the painting.”
“That was something I hadn't actually realized before, that a painter didn't just make paintings. There was so much more that he had to be able to do before he really got to work”, says Geirnaert.
Hy sat ende skiltered
But if you have only translated the words, it is not yet seventeenth-century Dutch, the researchers emphasize. The grammar also had to be adjusted. Geirnaert:“We turned a sentence like 'he sat painting' into 'he sat and painted'. For this we used our own knowledge of older Dutch, but we also gained inspiration while reading quotes in the Dictionary of the Dutch Language.”
And then the spelling. It was actually not relevant to the pronunciation in the YouTube videos, but when the researchers published the text fragments separately, they still wanted to keep the correct spelling. For this they transcribed eight original letters from Rembrandt, which have been made available digitally by the Huygens Institute for History. Most letters are addressed to Constantijn Huygens, who was secretary to Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau. Frederik Hendrik regularly ordered paintings from Rembrandt, but the payment often came too late or not at all. And Rembrandt then asked Constantijn Huygens to go after it.
They were able to deduce from the letters which spelling Rembrandt used, says De Bonth. “For and Rembrandt always wrote ende, which was actually a bit old fashioned for its time. And he used a lot of French loanwords like order .” Geirnaert:“It was also striking that Rembrandt often wrote compound words separately, such as a passij stuck, expect and even Brake burns .” They couldn't catch him on typical safe words, because they were fairly businesslike letters.
Modern Amsterdammer
When the six painting lessons had been converted into seventeenth-century Dutch, another researcher was brought in to examine the pronunciation. Olga van Marion is assistant professor at Leiden University and specializes in literature and culture of the golden age. Most literature from that period consists of plays, or 'performance literature' as Van Marion calls it:“You didn't read that, you heard that. That is why I have my students recite a lot of texts. Then you really know what it sounded like.” It is therefore not surprising that Geirnaert and De Bonth approached her for the verdict.
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Together with emeritus professor of Dutch language and literature Cor van Bree, she thought about how Rembrandt's language might have sounded. They looked at his age, the social environment he was in and the region where he grew up. “Rembrandt grew up in a miller's family in Leiden. But we only let that Leiden resound in a single word. As a young artist he moved to Amsterdam. So we turned it into a modern Amsterdammer in the middle of the seventeenth century, who speaks Dutch. That was already standardized. At that time, the ij sounded like ai and the sch like sk, as in skilderai. We don't think Rembrandt spoke plain Amsterdam to his international clientele. Although he came from a working-class family, he dealt with people who had a lot of money on a daily basis. Then you will behave accordingly.”
Van Marion instructed a Dutch voice actor who recorded the painting lessons. The audio files were then sent to Pittsburgh University to be refined with high-tech equipment. A team of AI specialists works there with the FBI to reconstruct a face based on a person's voice. The exact opposite happened in this project:his skull was reconstructed on the basis of self-portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn in order to get an impression of his voice. “The structure of the face tells a lot about the structure of the skull,” says speech technologist Rita Singh in the making-of:“We can deduce the size of his vocal tract from that.”
De Bonth:“I don't know whether the language we have developed is exactly Rembrandt language. But it is nice to get as close as possible to him.”
The 'making-of' of the Rembrandt Tutorials.