Dr Constantinos V. Proimos Forgiveness and Forgiving in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668) Art, Emotion and Value. 5th Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics, 2011 291 Forgiveness and Forgiving in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668) Dr Constantinos V. Proimos * Hellenic Open University Harmensz van Rijn Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668) is a famous life- sized oil painting by the artist, 262X205 cm, in the collection of Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia. It is a history painting, belonging to the last phase of Rembrandt’s artistic production and crowning his evolution. The artist illustrates in his own unique way the well known biblical parable of the prodigal son from the Gospel of St Luke (Luke 22: 54-57) working with a palette knife with thick and broad layers of rough impasto, exploiting rich color and the bright-dark factor in order to increase the dramatic intensity of the event. Critics of the painting have pinpointed the popularity of the subject in 16 th and 17 th century Netherlands, Rembrandt’s debt to a woodcut by Maerten van Heemskerck and his relation to theological disputes between Catholics and Protestants that involved the interpretation of this specific parable. My task in this paper is to investigate the extent to which the problem of forgiveness and forgiving, having to do with Rembrandt’s life and career, preoccupied the artist in a way that reflected in the actual architectural arrangement of the painted scene. The set of secondary figures for whose identification there is no agreement among Rembrandt’s critics, functions as an auxiliary for the artist’s extensive meditation on forgiveness within the horizon of the unforgivable. Rembrandt portrays the meeting of father and son off center to give considerable space to a standing figure looking disapprovingly at the whole event that Christian Tümpel identifies as the older brother. The prodigal son’s father spontaneously forgives his son without any * cproimos@otenet.gr