In his Rembrandt, Life and Work (Landmarks in Art History) , Jakob Rosenberg argued that Rembrandt rejected the classicist ideal that beauty had to be fully controlled with clearly bounded lines. He notes that “for Rembrandt the essence of truth about man and nature lies in the ultimate relationship of everything created to the Creator,” and also the relationship of everything to everything else. For this reason, the lines between things are blurred and indistinct:

“Forms, in his composition, are not allowed to become too definite or to have finality, since this would break their contact with the life process. If Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro has any deeper purpose, it is this: to suggest, to keep alive these mysterious relationships, so true yet so impenetrable for the purely rational approach, so strongly felt by the artist’s intuitive and religious mind, yet closed to the view of the aesthete and the Classicist who insist upon beauty and a fully controlled order.”

Figures and their clothing blend into the background, background into foreground. Each thing blends in with other things because nothing is itself except as it exists in relation to those other things.