Rembrandt at 400: modern, impressive, frustrating

Last month marked the 400th anniversary of the observed birthday of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (best known by his first name alone – just like Cher), and naturally, there is a good deal of celebration connected to the milestone in Rembrandt's nation of birth. Chief among these are a series of exhibitions at the Netherlands national museum in Amsterdam, and, through an online interface that is at times both impressive and frustrating, the Rijksmuseum is reintroducing Rembrandt to the world.

He looks good for 400.

Given the age of the institution (it first opened in 1800) and its current home (for the past 121 years), the design of the Rijksmuseum home page is surprisingly modern. Granted, even the oldest websites are "modern," when compared to anything more than 20 years old, but while many museum sites attempt to mimic, or at least complement, the more venerable atmosphere of their physical entities, this production could easily belong to a design or fashion house. (Especially given the exhibit currently featured on the home page.) In fact, the online Rijksmuseum is so superbly up to the minute that it claims to be the first museum site in the world to offer a downloadable Widget. (And if you're not running Mac OS X or Yahoo!'s widget engine, a Widget is a tiny application that can be revealed at any time with the click of the mouse, to provide such services as breaking news, weather, sports scores, a dictionary and thesaurus – and in the case of the "Rijkswidget," an ever-changing selection of masterpieces from the museum's collection.)

As for the design of the site (JavaScript required), the standout feature is the navigation. Featured presentations and the site's main index are arranged on the left side of the home page in a series of vertical bars, which slide out like drawers when selected. Clicking on the opened drawer of a feature loads that section of the site – from which visitors can explore through a more conventional index at the left of the page, or a via series of new interactive bars relocated to the right. The frustration arises from inconsistency, and the lack of an overall indication of where you are, or what your options are, within the site. As an example, some of the drawers launch their features with a click anywhere on the image, while others require activation through a specific link. To illustrate the second problem, one of the home page features, Really Rembrandt? would appear at first to only be offering a brief text synopsis of the physical exhibit, and it's only when you make your way into "Rembrandt 400" from the Really Rembrandt page that you discover there is also an interactive Really Rembrandt? presentation (which demonstrates how genuine Rembrandts are distinguished from the work of his students and mimics).

But the content does reward the extra effort – and includes a series of interactive exhibits on the Rembrandt 400 page. The previously mentioned Really Rembrandt? walks the surfer through the factors that were involved in determining the provenance of three well-known 'Rembrandts' – from layering and brushstrokes, to matching the tree that provided raw material for a pair of paintings on wood panels. All the Rembrandt Paintings celebrates the physical Rijksmuseum's current exhibit of its entire collection together in a single room, and offers an eight-part biography (accompanied by relevant paintings) and a very nice interface which allows the surfer to browse, investigate, and even create subsets of the 19 works on display. (Other categories of Rembrandts, such as sketches, are available through the Rembrandt Masterpieces page.)

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