You're a painter.
What's the worst thing that can happen to you?
Disgrace? Derision?
No, the worst thing is to have to cut up your masterpiece.
What had brought Holland's greatest painter to this moment of artistic suicide?
Once, Rembrandt had been cock of the walk in a city that couldn't get enough of him.
Glittering, fat, prosperous Amsterdam,
but that was then.
Now, he's living opposite an amusement park,
drunks throwing up on his doorstep, knife fights every Friday night.
But why is he mutilating his painting?
It had been hanging on the walls of the Amsterdam town hall,
but then a decision was made.
Take it down, get something else to fill the space.
So now what's he supposed to do with it? This B-movie flop of a picture?
Maybe, if he can cut it down a little,
there'll be someone out there who might like the centre of the painting,
the bit with the people in.
So under the knife it goes.
It's a brutal punishment, the worst.
And for what exactly is Rembrandt being punished?
For being out of step with modern taste, for painting like a barbarian.
But then he isn't interested in refinement and beauty. It bores him.
He does us, flesh and blood, you and me.
Art that exists to tell the truth about the human condition.
That's his everlasting glory,
but in the end, that's also going to be his problem.
Amsterdam in the 1630s, Rembrandt's on a roll.
Everything he touches seems to come up trumps.
He knows what the patrons want even before they know it themselves
and there's nothing, I mean nothing, he can't turn his hand to.
Great action-packed histories,
heart-pumping stories with pop-eyed bystanders,
books which seem to breathe and lift with the breath of God.
And portraits, spectacular portraits.
They were made for each other, the painter and the city.
Just as no one had ever seen paintings like Rembrandt's,
the world had never seen a place quite like Amsterdam.
In 1600, it had been a backwater fishing port.
Thirty years later, when Rembrandt arrived, the docks were unloading Chinese silks,
Swedish iron and copper,
and the new mass-market addictions, sugar and tobacco.
In one generation, the place had gone from provincial also-ran
to economic lord of the world.
Whatever you wanted, Amsterdam had it,
the discount supermarket of the 17th century.
So, fortunes were made, quick and spectacular.
And those who made them were not shy of showing them off.
So they built elegant houses on these canals,
and into those houses went all the good things.
Gold-stamped leather wall coverings, Delft tiles,
fine mirrors in rich frames, maps of the worlds they were conquering,
and, of course, pictures, especially pictures of themselves.
This is Nicolaes Ruts, and his business is fur.
Russian sable, in fact, the priciest of the lot.
Was it his idea, I wonder, or Rembrandt's, that he should brand himself
by wearing his stock in trade?
In any event, it's a stroke of genius, for this is the hairiest painting imaginable.
All that soft fall of fur dropping down his body, like a river of luxury,
the hairs standing up in a gentle charge of electrostatic,
as if a hand has just sensuously travelled through them.
Yet for all the sumptuousness,
Rembrandt has managed to avoid any impression of idle opulence.
With his fastidiously combed whiskers and sharp eyes,
almost as sharp as those of the animals from whom the pelts were taken,
Ruts' glance is that of a slightly impatient intelligence.
We almost want to say, ''Thanks for giving us a moment. ''
But he's also solid.
The deep shadow cast by the side of his head makes him thoughtful.
The slightly pinked inner eyelids,
as though he'd sacrificed his sleep for the good of the investors.
No wonder JP Morgan bought the picture,
for has there ever been a better portrait of the businessman as hero?
Rembrandt not only understood his rich clients
and the image they wanted to project of themselves,
he was also a virtuoso manipulator of paint.
No one looked harder at the topography of a middle-aged eyelid,
the oiliness of a prosperous nose,
the wateriness of the eye's vitreous membrane,
the shiny tightness of a forehead pulled back into a linen cap.
Look at this, Rembrandt's portrait of an 83-year-old woman
in the National Gallery in London.
Look at the translucent fabric of her bonnet wings,
their edges painted with a single stroke.
Look at her eyebrow and droopy eyelid, done with jabbing strokes,
the slightly unfocused melancholy,
the mood of poignant vulnerability,
everything softening the face of a tough old bird,
wistful in the certainty
it's not long now before she gets to meet the great accountant in the sky.
Not just a painter, then, but a psychologist of the human condition, don't you think?
What's the job of the other big hitters, Velázquez, Rubens, van Dyck?
To paint masks, the studied look of princes and popes.
They know in advance, pretty much, the mask of the day.;
martial resolution, regal care,
pensive melancholy.
But Rembrandt looks behind the pose,
and this is what makes his portraits touch us like nobody else's.
We can see people putting on their faces to the world.
But it doesn't make us less, but more sympathetic to them.
You'd think that with his perfect pitch
for understanding what the rich of Amsterdam wanted,
Rembrandt would have grown up with them.
But he hadn't. He'd grown up in Leiden, a textiles and university town
about 25 miles southwest of Amsterdam,
packed with piety, learning and profit from the cloth trade.
Rembrandt's family were millers. The river Rhine flowed past their mill,
giving the painter his name, Rembrandt van Rijn.
Rembrandt was the bright one in a family of nine children,
the one who went to Latin school and the local university.
So dropping out at 14 to become a painter was, I suppose, an act of faith.
Mind you, no time for teenage masterpieces.
Too busy doing what apprentices had to,
mixing primer, grinding pigment,
suspending it in meaty-smelling linseed oil.
No one, thank God, robbed graves anymore to make black pigment from charred skeletons.
They used soot instead.
All his life, Rembrandt seemed to love the filmy muck of oil paint.
No one in his century ever explored its texture,
from thick and crusty to thin and fluid, more lovingly.
You can see this plunge into the materials of his craft
in this little portrait of himself, done in his studio in Leiden in his twenties.
Here he is in his work clothes, all around him the tools of the trade.
But just look at this place.
The plank floor is cracking,
the plaster in the corner of the room is peeling, and that, of course, is the point.
It's an old place, a dump really,
but it's still the place where a young man connects with an old thing,
the making of art.
And that's why it moves us strangely,
the little gingerbread man in his oversize housecoat,
mantled in the trappings of painting.
But look at him. He isn't painting at all, he's just staring
at something he's hidden from us.
A mystery whose only feature is that intense golden light at the edge of the picture frame.
The fire of an idea.
What we're looking at, the picture seems to say,
is nothing less than a pocket manifesto.
The idea that art is the marriage of craft and imagination.
No wonder, then, that with all this cleverness, Rembrandt was talent-spotted,
singled out by Constantijn Huygens,
the most influential patron in all of Holland,
as the coming man, a diamond in the rough.
And what Huygens saw in Rembrandt
was a superlative storyteller.
Take the story of Samson and Delilah.
Most artists did Samson as a naked hulk, slumped in post-coital slumber.
This is what Rembrandt does.
Instead of nude beefcake, he dresses him.
And, amazingly, makes him seem more, not less, vulnerable.
All his paint wizardry is used on that knot,
which seems to tie Samson to his lover and to his fate.
Delilah lifts a lock of Samson's copper hair, ready to be shorn away,
but as she does so, her other hand idly strokes his tresses.
So in one gesture, Rembrandt gets to the heart of the story,
the tragic inseparability of amorous tenderness and brutal betrayal.
Good as he was, Huygens thought his protégé could be even better if he went to Italy.
But Rembrandt wasn't going to put in time sketching statues, he had bigger fish to fry.
This was, after all, the republic of money,
and Amsterdam whispered to him, ''Come and get it.''
So here he was, doing very nicely, thank you,
turning out stunning story paintings and portraits to order.
And not just a painter either, but also a partner in the art business,
Rembrandt Uylenburgh Inc.
Pupils taken in for a fee, copies made, original paintings commissioned.
So what was it about his partner's niece, young Saskia van Uylenburgh,
with her butterball chins and lopsided, crinkly grin?
A nice girl, certainly, a catch, one would assume,
being the orphaned daughter of a burgomaster of northern Friesland.
She met Rembrandt when she was 21, blessed with a portion of her father's estate.
If Rembrandt could have written poems to Saskia, he would have.
But, instead, he did this precious little drawing to mark their betrothal.
She's a child of nature, the straw hat, the wildflowers.
Only Rembrandt could have done that dangling broken stalk and thought it was perfect.
Whenever he can, he paints her with flowers. She's his flower child.
Mind you, the relatives up north don't like it very much.
They hear stories of Rembrandt and Saskia showing off their jewels
and fur and fancy outfits
and they nod their heads and say, ''Told you so.
''Always knew he was after her money, and now they're spending it like there's no tomorrow.''
For Rembrandt has become a shopaholic.
Oh, a shopaholic in the best possible taste.
He buys paintings by old masters at auctions,
but every so often, he hits the Amsterdam equivalent of the Portobello Road,
and he just can't stop buying.
Japanese armour, Indonesian daggers,
plaster busts of Roman emperors,
and he tells himself it's all for art.
Here's another impulse buy,
a pricey four-storey house in one of the more elegant streets in Amsterdam.
Not your usual artist's modest residence, then.
But then, why shouldn't he be extravagant?
Rembrandt is, after all, the most successful painter in Holland,
and his paintings are hanging in the houses of the richest, most powerful men in the world.
What makes Rembrandt's later falling-out with his patrons so surprising
is that in his salad days in the 1630s,
no one could beat him for grasping exactly what it was
the first generation of Amsterdam moneymen really wanted.
What they wanted were two contradictory things.
On the one hand, the portraits of course had to say, ''We are rich. ''
On the other hand, they had to say,
''But we are also God-fearing, plain, simple folk
who know that riches never last. ''
Every Sunday in church they heard their preachers say to them,
''Do not forget the humble place from which you have come.
Do not forget that today's worldly pomp
will be tomorrow's dust and ashes.''
So the paintings had to show them off without making them show-offs.
Rembrandt had this rich-but-modest line down stone-cold.
So, of course, they're lining up for him.
Not just merchants on the make but the créme de la créme,
the family Trip, for example.
You don't get much richer than the Trips,
who had a global empire of iron, copper and guns
and were doing very nicely, thank you, in the endless wars against Spain.
But Elias Trip, head of the dynasty,
thought of himself as a pillar of Protestant society.
Your old-fashioned, sober-sided, church-going arms trader.
So when Rembrandt was hired to paint his hugely rich
and marriageable daughter, Maria Trip,
he knew that the display of wealth had to be crushingly subtle.
The money, then, was in the detail.
Below that milky pud face, with its artless little smile,
is a waterfall of stunning lace.
Just a hint of the Trip millions.
Now, the relationship between the painter and the painted is a devilishly subtle business.
But Rembrandt seemed to be in perfect sync with the money classes,
understanding precisely what they wanted, because he wanted it, too.
And how he wanted it.
He must have thought that this mutual admiration would go on forever.
Here he is in 1640, 34 years old,
dressed to the nines, as if he's one with the greatest past masters.
He's seen Titian's portrait of the Italian poet, Ariosto,
and he's gone and put himself in the same pose.
The oversize, silky, mutton-chop sleeve on the aristocratic stone ledge,
a picture which would be creamy with self-congratulation,
were it not for a trace of wistfulness about his face,
as if he can't quite believe all this success.
Whatever you think about Rembrandt, you've got to admit, he's got nerve.
I mean, just look at him,
from provincial nobody to the cheekiest painter in the history of art.
Always on the edge, Mr Clever Clogs.
But you couldn't rightly call yourself a success in Amsterdam
if you just did single-person portraits, no matter how rich the sitters.
Amsterdam was a corporate town,
a beehive of capitalism, ruled not from palaces but from boardrooms.
So what did the corporate sitters want?
Well, first of all, of course, a good likeness of themselves,
and then they wanted the artist to get their complicated pecking order just right.
The former has to get everyone in,
squeeze, squeeze,jostle, nudge.
What are the choices?
Well, either elasticate the rectangle until everyone's in
or double up the rows so one lot is on top of the other.
Result, the rugby first 1 5.
You could, as Rembrandt's most astute pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten put it,
behead them all with a single blow.
Now, with his insatiable instinct for stripping off social masks,
Rembrandt wasn't going to settle for that.
So, he says, ''Okay let's throw away the boardroom line-up.
''Let's just forget about the stale formula
''and turn cardboard cutouts into real events,
''social dramas.''
And here's the result, The Night Watch.
It was commissioned in 1642 by a company of cloth merchants and part-time militia men.
And as with so many of his paintings at this time, Rembrandt had done the impossible,
made something heroic out of the world of merchants and money.
Now, everyone knew the militia men in this painting weren't real soldiers.
The real war was being slogged out somewhere beyond the frontiers.
These were toy soldiers, Amsterdam's dad's army.
Still, they like to preserve the fiction of the citizen soldier.
They like to think they'd be there to defend the freedom of Amsterdam.
Rembrandt's great idea is flattery.
Now, it's not the kind of flattery that's going to make them younger
or better-looking, it's much more important than that.
It's the flattery of the entire fairytale idea behind the painting.
The idea that a bunch of overdressed textile men
playing at toy soldiers on Sundays were the real thing,
that they were actually alive with martial energy.
So instead of having them pose, Rembrandt has them in action.
He transforms them in that way from mere human ornaments
into marching, shooting, drumming guardsmen.
So just how do you capture that instant
when your pulse goes whoosh with excitement?
Well, Rembrandt takes a deep breath, he has a what-the-hell moment
and he goes for it.
He changes the usual side-by-side format into a back-to-front action,
so that the company of the officers and men are coming right at us,
3-D from the deep, dark doorway,
right up to the picture frame and into our own space,
blazing with light.
Look at that spear poking into our space.
Rembrandt knows that rough painting
can actually convey the illusion of a three-dimensional object
better than any literal description.
The captain's name is Frans Banning Cocq.
Next to him is his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch.
It's the lieutenant who gets the more dazzling costume.
Somehow, though, his showiness only strengthens the sense of command of his captain,
costumed in black, but ablaze with a fiery red sash.
Banning Cocq is giving the signal to move.
So his order falls as a shadow on the coat of his lieutenant.
They're off, already in motion, the tassels are flying.
At first sight, The Night Watch seems merely chaotic, doesn't it?
But actually it's a hymn to noisy energy contained by discipline.
Freedom and order, miraculously held together,
much as I think Rembrandt thought the Dutch themselves did.
That's the secret of their success. That is the glory of Amsterdam.
But did they see it, the Sunday soldiers?
Did the men who actually paid for the picture get beyond vanity,
beyond their need for a realistic depiction of themselves?
According to Rembrandt's pupil, van Hoogstraten,
some of the sitters were less than thrilled.
Not outraged, just a bit bewildered. You can almost hear them saying,
''Well, it's got to be good, it's a Rembrandt, after all,''
and, ''What do I know about art? But to me it does look a bit of a mishmash.''
Let's just say that the climate went from warm to tepid.
Perhaps Rembrandt felt it, perhaps not.
But for the first time since becoming the golden boy of Dutch painting,
one of Rembrandt's patrons is so unhappy with the painting,
he simply refused to pay.
And not just any old patron either,
but Andries de Graeff, a man from whom jobs and prestige flowed.
We don't know exactly what it was that offended de Graeff so much,
but we can guess, with Rembrandt painting ever more freely,
it didn't quite match de Graeff's stately self-image.
To recover his money, Rembrandt had to resort to something
he must have found deeply humiliating.
An arbitration committee of his peers,
who sat in judgement on the quality of his painting.
Two years later, Rembrandt took revenge in a crude but eloquent little drawing.
It features a bunch of connoisseurs peering at pictures,
one of whom, whose features aren't 100 miles away from de Graeff,
has sprouted ass's ears.
Another figure, surely the artist,
lets us know in no uncertain terms, with his trousers down,
just what he thinks of their judgement.
But it was Rembrandt who all of a sudden seemed to be giving off a bad smell.
The smell of someone from whom the fickle goddess fortune was shying away.
Have you ever felt, at the top of your form,
at the height of your powers,
an odd but distinct sense that the winds just change direction,
that it's blowing a bit chillier now?
Rembrandt's troubles came to him unremarkably,
like the first heavy drops of rain striking a window pane.
A mild disturbance, but then a downpour.
The portrait commissions dry up, the house is loaded with debt
and, inside the house, Saskia is deathly ill with TB,
her body wracked by spasms of bloody coughing.
Death was no stranger to their family.
Saskia and Rembrandt had already buried three of their children.
Only the boy, Titus, was alive.
On the fifth of June, 1642,
a notary was called to the house to record Saskia's will.
Nine days later, she was dead.
Her body was wrapped in a simple cloth
and in a silent little procession it was taken to the outer kirk for burial.
Somewhere in this house, Rembrandt pulled out a portrait of her
that he'd begun many years before, at the playful start of their life together.
It's unusual for many reasons.
One of the only paintings in which there's not a trace of a smile.
Her head is turned in profile,
the outline un-Rembrandtian in its enamel-like sharpness.
But for the last time, he's loaded her with fabric and jewels.
It's as if he can't stop draping her.
But Saskia pulls the fur cape around her,
as if to ward off the chill of mortality.
But it's too late.
Well, then, Saskia had gone
and it was as though a peal of bells had abruptly stopped.
It's too easy, we're told, to say that in that year, 1642,
everything changed for Rembrandt, for his work.
That's the sentimental, romantic version to read art from life.
But, you know, something really had happened to Rembrandt,
an end to flamboyance,
an end to his theatrical mastery of the outward, noisy show of life.
It was as though he'd turned down the volume of the world
and switched on an inner quiet radiance.
The big gestures melt away
and are replaced by a tender simplicity.
Instead of a portrait gallery of the rich and powerful,
a maidservant leaning on a sill,
caught between inside and outside, innocence and sex.
Look at the highlight on her lower lip,
the left hand toying with her necklace.
Here, too, in his drawings,
just a few summary lines here and there
that manage to conjure up an entire scene.
It's a huge compliment, don't you think, making us his partner in completion,
giving us the benefit of the doubt
that we wouldn't want anything so boring as the literal details.
The problem though was that Rembrandt's critics didn't see him as offensively avant-garde.
They saw him as offensively old-fashioned.
Why? Because of a cultural sea change.
For the first time in Holland, sophistication seemed far more important
than simplicity and piety, the qualities the Dutch like to think
had brought them through their war against Spain.
But now, peace had been declared
and by the 1650s there was a perceptible sigh of relief.
So just as Rembrandt's paintings were getting darker,
the mood of Amsterdam was lightening and brightening.
The founding fathers and mothers, modestly dressed in millstone ruffs,
had given way to their children.
The peacock generation, gorgeous in screaming scarlets and coiffed to the nines.
Many of them had been sent abroad as part of their education
and had come back eager to import cosmopolitan stylishness
to the homespun republic.
They weren't interested in austerity, they wanted to be like the Italians,
they wanted pillars.
All Rembrandt's murky browns and golds,
those garter marks and flabby breasts were a downer.
We all know this story, don't we?
The second generation, the inheritors, the trust-fund brats,
so embarrassed by their parents who are so old-fashioned, so parochial,
and all they care about is church and business, business and church.
And what a business, too, trade, my dear, so tawdry.
So off they go and buy themselves country villas,
while some inky-fingered clerk manages the family investment.
This leaves them to concentrate on what they really care about, cultivation.
For art, they think, is not just a report unedited from nature,
and it's certainly not about dwelling indiscriminately on ugliness
just because it happens to be there.
No, art is the divine road to harmony.
It's purity, it's clarity.
Away with the misshapen,
bring on the age of refinement.
And here's Rembrandt. No culture props.
Just those big, meaty hands stuck in his belt.
Everything is starting to look heroically worn.
The coat itself, the eyes pink-rimmed,
the eyes of a man who never stops looking.
And just look at the sketchiness of the whole thing.
He just doesn't care about finish anymore.
In fact, Rembrandt's in the process of doing something
which horrified the classical academicians.
He's abolishing the difference between a sketch and a painting.
And he does it for the subjects he cares most about.
He cares a lot about her.
She's Hendrickje Stoffels, the soldier's girl from the sticks,
who came into Rembrandt's house seven years after Saskia's death.
Rembrandt had already taken his son's nurse, Geertje Dircx, as his mistress,
but then Hendrickje arrived, and it wasn't long before he wanted
her in his bed and Geertje out of it.
Here's Hendrickje looking down into the water,
the break of her legs through its surface a little tour de force of illusionism.
Rembrandt now isn't choosing his way of handling paint just as the fancy takes him,
but to convey sensuous experience.
So Hendrickje's shift pulled scandalously high,
her neckline scandalously low, are painted thickly,
while her skin tones are as liquid as the water itself.
And the way Rembrandt has painted her hands as just an unmodelled smear
almost dares the critics to make an issue of it.
You can hear them, can't you?
''Rembrandt van Rijn? Oh, yes, yes. Very talented, but my God, so difficult."
"He never finishes a painting. I think his best years are behind him, don't you?"
"And what he's doing rattling around in that big old house with his, excuse me,
woman, I really don't know."
"You have heard she's with child, haven't you?"
"The church deacon's quite shocked."
"It's just a bit squalid, don't you think?"
"That might explain why he does those rather peculiar etchings."
"'Just who's going to buy them, I've really no idea. ''
Running out of favours, running out of time,
late with his loan repayments on the house,
the coils of Rembrandt's ruin began to rope themselves around him
ever more tightly.
Finally, in July 1656, Rembrandt filed for bankruptcy.
This is where Rembrandt would have come, to the Chamber of Insolvency.
Passing through this door with its frieze of worthless stock certificates
and rats scuttling through empty money chests of the profligate debtor.
You just can't beat the Dutch for wagging their fingers at your wicked ways.
Auction by auction, hammer blow by hammer blow, everything was taken.
This wasn't just furniture, household stuff,
it was also Rembrandt's own personal archive of art.
The drawings and paintings, all the strange, fabulous stuff he'd collected,
all gone.
Then, the house itself.
One thing he did manage to hold on to,
and that was a great mirror in the finest ebony wood frame.
Titus, his son, found a bargeman who said, for a sum of money,
sure, he'd carry it to their new house.
So, up on the bargeman's head it went,
and off through the jostle of Amsterdam, over cobbled streets and bridges.
And at some point, the bargeman begins to sweat.
His hands get slippery, his grip gets shaky,
and then, as the bargeman was stepping off a bridge...
Witnesses who came forward to testify for the bargeman
said he hadn't bumped into anyone, he hadn't fallen down,
the mirror must just have broken all by itself.
But there it was, on the ground, a thousand shards and slivers,
leaving Titus to carry home to his father just a frame with an empty centre.
It's 1658. Rembrandt has lost everything.
So how does he paint himself?
Like a king, like a god, full frontal, mantled in lustrous gold.
And it's the paint, that thick, luxurious paint, which gives him his power, his magic.
No bankrupt's downcast eyes, either,
but a stare coming right at us little people
who fancy we know something about art.
A suggestion of lordly amusement playing about his eyes.
His barrel chest soaks up the light, the belly swelling in front of us like a genie.
The whole body pressing against the picture plane,
challenging it to contain his massive authority.
And if Rembrandt thinks that his way of painting has been part of the problem,
he's certainly not going to abandon it now.
Just the opposite, in fact. This is a painting that bellows defiance
at the apostles of crisp clarity and contour.
''So you think that stuff was a bit much, do you?'' he seems to be saying.
''Just get a load of this.''
You'd think that with painting this free and this rough,
it would be downhill all the way for Rembrandt, but it wasn't.
With almost everything gone, reputation, possessions, house,
he still had a chance for a comeback, the comeback to end all comebacks.
This, the new town hall, had just been built and the cream of Amsterdam painters
were asked to supply pictures for its interior.
Against all odds, Rembrandt was one of them.
''Town hall'' doesn't quite describe this place, does it?
It's something more than clerks and marriage licences.
Though The Hague is officially the seat of government,
everyone knows Amsterdam is where the money is.
So the new town hall is a shameless brag to the world
about the great metropolis,
built on a scale that makes the Doges Palace in Venice look skimpy.
In this solemnly beautiful setting, tone was all-important.
Any new paintings were going to have to be restrained, severely classical,
pictorially well-behaved,
which doesn't exactly spell Rembrandt, does it?
In fact, anyone but Rembrandt.
So, of course, at first, the job went to someone far more reliable,
the painter Govert Flinck.
It was only when Flinck suddenly died,
that someone in the council chamber dared to say the R word.
No doubt greeted by silence, and then, perhaps, a, ''Why not?
''He's broke, he needs the work, he'll behave."
''When has he not delivered the goods when it really counted?''
So, after getting the commission by the back door,
Rembrandt set about work on the painting.
The results would be, I think, the greatest triumph of his visual imagination,
but it would also be his most shocking disaster.
The painting was supposed to hang here,
in one of the great arched spaces by the main hall.
And what the burgomasters wanted was a stirring depiction of a legendary story
of how the Dutch nation came to be born.
It was a history that every child in the Dutch Republic would have known,
as important to them as Boudicca is to us.
The ancient Dutch, known as the Batavians,
had their rebellion against the Romans, too.
And their leader was called Claudius Civilis.
The story goes like this.
Claudius had been fighting on the side of the Romans against his own people.
But, at some point, he has a change of heart.
He decides there's been one tax too many,
his country bled white.
So he switches sides. He summons a meeting of tribal chiefs,
declares a revolt and swears them to join him.
They take the oath, the die is cast, blood happens.
It's a stirring story, but remember who commissioned it.
The Establishment.
Oh, yes, honour rebellion but only when it was a long time ago
and only in the most respectable way.
The assumption was they'd get a respectable painting.
What they got was this.
Ugliness, deformity, barbarism.
A bunch of cackling louts, onion-chewers, bloody-minded rebels.
The paint slashed and stabbed,
caked on like the make-up of warriors.
But that's what rebellion is all about, Rembrandt thought.
He didn't think rebels were gentlemen.
Here's the rebel leader, with a wound in his face where his eye used to be.
So what if the rules of art said you had to hide a blind eye
behind some decorous profile.
Rembrandt says, ''No, I'm gonna stick this blind eye right in the middle of your face.''
That was what wild, rough and free painting did.
Goes together with a sword from hell and a cup, maybe of wine, maybe of blood.
Needless to say, it seems hardly likely that the grand unveiling went down at all well.
I mean,just look at it.
This is a painting drunk on its own wildness.
Nothing refined about this.
So down it came, deposed, disgraced, expelled.
And down on his knees went Rembrandt, chopping up his masterpiece,
hoping against hope that someone would buy a piece of it.
Fat chance.
The Claudius Civilis would not just be the ruin of Rembrandt's comeback,
it would also be the ruin of his greatest vision.
Or so I think. I can't be sure.
None of us can, because we don't really know what the big picture looked like.
What we're looking at here is a fragment a fifth of the original size.
The bit rescued from Rembrandt's knife.
All that we have left of the complete painting
is the sketch Rembrandt made, with prophetic irony,
on the back of an invitation to a funeral.
But this precious scrap is enough
to let us see the visionary grandeur of the painting's design.
With its vast hall open to the trees,
a barbarian king's lair.
No wonder you think ofThe Last Supper when you see this picture,
for Rembrandt has painted a secular altarpiece.
Mysterious, dangerous,joyously profane.
No halo, but a bath of burning golden light.
No candles,just the power surge of freedom.
The fire of an idea.
And you're thinking that it looks unfinished,
aggressively rough, a work in progress.
But Rembrandt's saying, in a voice that's a visual roar,
''That's you, a city, a country,
a work in progress."
''This is my group portrait of all of you,
a portrait of a people, a portrait of who you are,
who you've always been. ''
Let the high and mighty celebrate their greatness
with fastidious etiquette.
Let them even copy the rest of Europe if they must.
But Rembrandt, the bankrupt, the has-been, was their patriotic conscience.
''Smother yourself in fashion at your peril,'' he was saying.
''These are your flesh and blood, rough and honest,
your barbarian ancestry. They made you Dutch,
so banish your embarrassment, embrace them, honour them."
''For everything that you think matters, doesn't."
''The town hall, with all its acres of marble, could go tomorrow."
''Amsterdam can sink back into the sea again."
''As long as you have your rough freedom, you have all you need to stay Dutch. ''
So of course Rembrandt's not gonna paint by the rule book.
Instead, he does the roughest, toughest history painting ever.
An old lion's roar of a picture.
He had every incentive to paint it straight,
but something in him just wouldn't do it.
This is what drives the very greatest art. Contempt for ingratiation.
Now Rembrandt had learnt this the hard way,
when the callow hand of fashion had given him a resounding thumbs down,
and when his relationship with the rich of Amsterdam had turned sour,
and he'd been stripped, not just of his fortune, but of his illusions.
Giving them what they wanted was now beside the point.
Giving them what they needed was more like it.
But they refused to look and that's why he cut up his masterpiece.
One of the very last pictures Rembrandt painted
was Simeon the priest being brought the Christ child by the prophetess Anna.
A story he'd done before, in his youth.
But then, the painting had been sharp.
Now, it was dense and textured.
Almost as if it was woven, not painted.
Out of the face of the Christ child pours a soft, brimming radiance
which falls on the face of the old man, who, with his eyes closed,
understands at last he has, in fact, seen the light.
Rembrandt's patrons, alas, did not.
The painting was one of those found in Rembrandt's house when he died
on October 2, 1669.
It's always been thought of as unfinished.
Somewhere in that dim little house was another painting the world thought of
as shockingly unfinished, a mutilated stump of a picture.
This just may be the most heartbreaking fragment in the entire history of painting.
And just because you can see, can't you, that it looks nothing,
nothing whatsoever like an old master,
that it leaps from the decorum of the gallery wall
into some other world of eloquence.
Rembrandt's Claudius Civilis tells us that the very greatest painting
isn't bound by time or taste.
A reminder, if ever we should need it,
that eloquence doesn't always come with a pretty face.