Following his reflections on Leonardo's late style, Simmel returned to this notion with Rembrandt in 1916, when he himself was seriously ill. Late style reveals the individual essence of each artist, rather than types. Between these two texts, the philosopher wrote on Goethe, as well as on life and death, notably in Intuition de la vie. In this work, he sees old age as a turning point towards the essence of individuality. As early as , Goethe wrote: " Growing old means gradually withdrawing from the world of appearances. " By " world of appearances ", we mean the phenomenal world, contingency and the epoch, the present moment. And Simmel underlines : " In Rembrandt's portraits, there is this half-darkness, this deafening, this interpellation into darkness, exactly what is called death when it manifests itself finally and imposes itself in the absolute. [...] in reality, they contain life in its entirety. This applies mainly, but not exclusively, to these late portraits. " Since the portrait is seen from the point of view of death, the totality of life appears in it. Simmel's thesis is that death is not external to life ; the Fates do not, in his view, cut any thread ; that which opposes life is born of life. Death is inseparable from life, a formal element of our life.
Vladimir Jankélévitch would comment on this concept, agreeing with Simmel that " in the artist of genius, representation borrows from this a priori of death some subtle coloration ". More precisely, youthful and old-age styles bring together two modes of subjectivity : youthful subjectivity is based on the principle of the "I" as content ; old-age subjectivity corresponds to the "I" as a principle of form. The works of late subjectivity are neither anecdotal nor autobiographical, but autograph ; creativity is essentialized. In Rembrandt's late self-portraits, death runs through the laughter, as if the element of death were rising to the surface ; there is no need, as in the early Vanities, for objects to represent the memento mori. Death is internal, and the subjectivity of life is absorbed into art, as in abstraction. As Jankélévitch points out, only brilliant artists are capable of coming to terms with death: " this irreducible uniqueness of the individual in death ". As proof of this, these works show gestures and glances towards a world beyond all place, as in Grünewald (The Crucifixion) or Rodin (The Burghers of Calais).
