With the new exhibition dossier Rembrandt meets Rembrandt. Dialoghi in Galleria the Royal Museums celebrate the genius of the greatest Dutch master of the seventeenth century, with a selection of twenty-two works including paintings, drawings and etchings set up in the Discovery Space of the Savoy Gallery from 14 December 2022 to 16 April 2023.

The ideal centerpiece of the exhibition is Supper at Emmaus at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris , on loan to the Royal Museums thanks to the exchange policy adopted to strengthen collaboration between Italian and European cultural institutions. The work is compared with the Portrait of a sleeping old man in the Savoy Gallery , one of only three paintings by the artist in national collections.

The two works, datable to 1629, are representative of Rembrandt's youthful phase (Leyden, 1606 - Amsterdam, 1669) and constitute significant examples of the painter's mastery in the use of colour, in the modulation of light and in the poetic transfiguration of subjects drawn from daily reality and sacred history.

In the panel from the Galleria Sabauda, acquired in 1866, the figure of the sleeping old man is immersed in an at times impenetrable darkness: only the man's face and hands appear in full light, illuminated by the faint embers of the hearth. The artist enhances the details, intensifying the effect in a deliberately unreal way. In the French canvas, the prodigious appearance of Christ to the apostles is built on the contrast between darkness and light, which is also mystical light, an image of divine revelation.

In the two paintings compared, the realistic depiction of the environment and of the characters , combined with the expressive and symbolic use of light , recalls the innovations introduced by Caravaggio in sacred painting in the first decade of the seventeenth century, promptly implemented in the naturalistic pictorial schools in several Italian and European centres.