Realism, Rembrandt

 The Good Samaritan by Rembrandt from 1633. Rembrandt one of the great realists in all the arts. Look here to the front right of the picture and see what the dog is straining to obviously do - and this is a very serious rendering of one of Jesus’ famous parables! And this inclusion of the dog relieving itself is not some act of sarcastic subversion. It is that Rembrandt does not, and to a very striking degree, wish to castrate reality. Also to add there are or course depths within reality, and so Andy Warhol could present a realistic image of a tin can, but this doesn’t mean we are exactly diving deep. One could across the various art forms be considered a realist whilst remaining on the very surface and perhaps uninteresting level of things. In the sense of Rembrandt I suppose realism is here breadth of vision united with depth of vision, whilst the more common notion of it might be little beyond painstaking attention to plausible details, though with little depth to the vision. 

One other thing to add is that a common notion of realism would be to set limits, and generally quite mundane limits, to reality, but these limits may be quite imaginary even if they have the apparent weight of being apparently collectively believed.

And below also by Rembrandt, whilst not necessarily implying it relates to the theme of realism, is The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds.