Schama on Rembrandt: Masterpieces of the Late Years

There comes a time

when even the most self-absorbed artists look away from the mirror.

When they get old.

Vanity begone.

Prepare for the end.

This was never going to happen to Rembrandt van Rijn.

Right to the last, he could no more do without the mirror

than his brushes and paints.

But he tells it like he sees it - unsparing with the truth.

Every fold and wrinkle, bag, sag and pouch relentlessly described.

And yet, deep inside the ruin were all those other Rembrandts.

The precocious miller's son, mugging for the mirror.

The photo-booth clown trying out all the faces he'd need

to give his painted stories passion.

The up-and-comer, talent spotted by the great -

in demand by all those who counted in Amsterdam.

The Master who's made it big in the richest city of the richest

country in the world - preachers and princes, merchants and doctors

lining up for him - the owner of a swanky house.

The working artist -

getting a bit of flak but just getting on with it,

hearing voices off, disgruntled patrons, critics -

well, what did THEY know about art?

And then, as if to punish the proud, the face of misfortune.

His wife dead.

Losses at sea and in trade, mortgage beyond him.

Rembrandt turfed out and into a small rental.

But he's not going quietly.

Not with a slow fade.

Just the opposite.

The world which thought it knew Rembrandt

hadn't seen anything yet.

I think he saved the best for last - driven by the rage of age,

going out like a meteor.

Thought and feeling welded together, masterpiece after masterpiece.

He achieved things no-one else had dreamt of before him,

and no-one else could imagine until centuries had gone by.

Changing what painting could do - what art IS.

The world had seen nothing like Amsterdam

in its mid-17th century glittering prime.

There was nothing you couldn't get here - the whole wide world

was there for the taking.

Rugs from Turkey, furs from Russia,

spices from the Indies, porcelain from China,

Spanish steel, and home-made beauties too,

silver and glass.

Money talked in Amsterdam.

Without it, you lost status, face, respect.

Rembrandt, who'd flown so high, learned this the hard way.

In 1656, he lost everything he cared about in bankrupt ruin.

Even his house would go.

The next 13 years of his life would be both testing and triumphant.

So, it's...

a little, you know, kind of modest space,

I suppose, by grandee standards

but certainly not by Dutch standards,

by Amsterdam standards.

It is a grand room. It is the reason why he couldn't pay the mortgage.

13,000 guilders is a lot of money for an artist.

So up we go.

So, here's Mr Shopaholic, this is a curiosity cabinet.

You can see the armour, um, and plaster casts, essentially.

There is Socrates, for example, and, yes, there's the head.

That's got to be the Laocoon - the ultimate image of a man in pain.

So, the rest of him would have been entangled in biting serpents

but here we have birds of paradise, feathers.

There's a little caiman crocodile from South America,

there is an armadillo, is it not, wonderful, hanging.

I mean, who would have bought the armadillo?!

I would, actually, is the answer!

Aw!

With his bankruptcy, Rembrandt had lost something even more precious

than his status.

He lost his art collection.

All of this - the paintings, the drawings, his pack-rat collection

of everything imaginable, all the props in the world - helmets,

musical instruments, dressing-up costumes, stuffed animals -

the whole kit and caboodle were knocked down at auction

to settle debts.

Now, somehow, he's got to carry all this around in his head.

But the challenge of this doesn't un-man him.

He's not one to slink off into the shadows.

Instead, we get this...

One thing about this extraordinary self-portrait,

it is the very personification of the authority of art itself.

This is a painter who has been looking up at Titian and Rubens and

Van Dyck with a mixture of respect and ferocious competitive urge.

At the same time, taking on what they would teach him

and wanting to surpass them,

so he portrays himself -

Can you see this? - actually enthroned.

And the dress of art is in fact made of gold,

so it can be mistaken for something that a king or a prince

or a bishop would wear.

Something that you would possibly read as a mahlstick,

the extended stick which you stuck on the work surface

in order to do detail,

has turned into this knobbly, exquisite turned silver cane.

It's a baton, it's the stick of authority again

that you associate with palaces

rather than a dump on the Rozengracht.

And it's frontal! It's frontal.

Look how that belly swells out at you.

This looks like a hostile confrontational torso.

From passage to passage of the painting,

apart from the immense authoritative, ferocious

broad-acred face staring right at you with that beret on top,

there is, of course, the issue of the vast, meaty hands.

The hands which are either going to create a masterpiece

or they're going to strangle the critics.

Those huge hands, which again done with the maximum freedom,

but the whole picture is a symphony of defiance.

"This is the way I paint," says Rembrandt. "Love it or leave it."

But plenty of the most desirable patrons in Amsterdam did just that.

They went elsewhere.

Fashions were changing -

a new, polished style from France was becoming the rage.

What was wanted on their walls, including pictures of themselves,

was brightness, colour!

For them, art was supposed to be all about refinement.

Rembrandt was coming under attack from critics

who held their noses at what they said was his "coarseness",

his "undignified earthiness".

So much BROWN!

Such hideous models - what does he think he's doing,

rubbing our noses in the ugliness of the world?

And what is this reckless, casual way with the brush,

all those dashed-off marks?

Maybe he's lost it?

Maybe, in middle age, his drawing hand has become unsteady.

Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath, London.

I first came here with my mum and dad in the 1950s.

A magic place.

The fake bridge,

the elegant Adam house.

And then, with girlfriends I was trying to impress,

the outdoor concerts by the lake,

lying in the long grass composing a face I hoped would say

"I love Beethoven!" -

when actually it was more like Roll Over Beethoven.

It was here I saw my first Rembrandt

that wasn't on a postcard or in a book,

especially the little Skira pocket books

I loved as a child.

Inside Kenwood, I came across this...

..and then, for ever haunted by it, came again and again and again,

usually by myself.

Just him, and me.

I think because I'd seen, in books, pictures of the old Rembrandt,

fluffy and puffy-faced images of pathos,

like most people I thought of Rembrandt as essentially all heart.

But there was something else going on with this self-portrait.

That gaze is almost confrontational. It's almost saying,

"You think you know me, but here's what I really am."

It's a mighty head

as well as a great heart. It's about the mind.

Just remember, everyone,

that what Rembrandt's being accused of, as an old duffer,

is being kind of sentimental, sloppy.

Someone who can paint, yes - he can do you big, heavy-hearted

expressive uses of paint -

but he can't really draw

like the classical painters of the Renaissance.

That's what the fashionable word was.

Boy, can he draw!

Rembrandt says, "I'll show you."

Those two half-circles

that have produced shelves of PhD theses on what they might mean -

have been said, "Oh, one is the celestial globe, the Heavens,

"one is the Earth"...

Rembrandt knew about the Italian painter Giotto.

Giotto was summoned before the Pope and asked to do an instant painting.

And what Vasari tells us Giotto did

was the most impossible thing to do with a free hand -

he drew a perfect circle.

Rembrandt is saying, "You think I can't draw?"

Here's your modern Dutch Giotto, if you like.

So there is an example of exactness in drawing.

But look at the hand, where it's all supposed to be happening.

It is just a whirr of motion.

People say, "Well, it's an unfinished." It's not unfinished.

"This is the hand that can be as precise, or as expressive,

"as tight, or as free, as I want.

"I'm the person who decides what's finished

"and what's not finished."

And the rest of the painting is this extraordinary explosion

of painterly freedom.

Yes, all the sense of feeling about a truly great artist under attack

is actually there in this picture.

But most of all, it's a picture about the confidence

of the marriage between head and heart.

The idea that Rembrandt couldn't draw is absurd.

In his heyday, his reputation as a draughtsman

travelled all over Europe.

So this is very moving...

This is a room for etching.

Rembrandt loved the actual physical attack,

whether he's painting or etching.

He's the ultimate dirty-hand artist, really.

So this room would have smelled of acid, and um...

There's Christ Brought Before The People, one of the late etchings.

An incredible thing. And he's always having second thoughts,

so there are many different states of the grey etching.

This one is Jupiter And Antiope -

Jupiter, he's just staring obsessively

at the darkened body of Antiope

with the naughty bits in deep shadow.

And it's very nice that the wonderful curators

have put the so-called Three Trees out there.

What's fantastic about Rembrandt is the combo of dramatic effect

and tiny, little weenie touches

of fine motor control,

fastidiousness.

So, quite apart from this sort of drama of the gathering storm -

which is going to pass, because there's a brightness in the sky -

on the horizon is Amsterdam,

indeed, the kind of view Rembrandt would have had of Amsterdam

when he walked into the country and up the Amstel.

And there are figures in there,

but there's just a tiny image of windmill sails, you can see.

And there are tiny little figures

and details there which are just beautiful.

Endearingly, there's even a version of himself, happily at work.

Rembrandt would often escape from the city, and use his walks

along the Amstel River as an inspiration for his etchings.

Once, Rembrandt had had his pick of patrons,

but not quite so many, now that fashions were changing.

He wasn't completely deserted, though.

There were those who gloried in being old-fashioned Hollanders

and some of them were very rich.

None richer than the arms dealers, the Trip family,

their wealth given substance in the biggest house in Amsterdam.

And portraits of Jacob and Margaretha, husband and wife,

were commissioned to adorn it.

What the Trips wanted in the midst

of so much silky, high-coloured vulgarity,

was something that shouted old-fashioned virtue.

What they got was all that,

delivered in a storm of free painting.

Now, Rembrandt, old Rembrandt, he can do old-fashioned.

He revels in being old-fashioned.

He may be almost revolutionary in the way he handles paint,

but he's conscious that he is summoning the old-fashioned virtues

of Dutch painting in its glory days earlier in the century.

Now, Jacob, the patriarch,

actually is already dead when Rembrandt paints this,

so Rembrandt would not have been able to do that one from life.

But, at any rate, it's a kind of an idea in his head

and the idea is someone who looks like almost a Biblical patriarch,

who is venerable, but loaded, he's loaded with substance,

and often, with Rembrandt, it's all about the props.

And in this case, the prop is the fur collar draping the body,

and that fantastic silver cane - the cane of authority.

Next to him is Margaretha,

the matriarch.

She comes from a family of enormous power as well.

Copper, iron, you name it - the De Geers, her family, have it.

And because Jacob is dead,

Margaretha de Geer is allowed to look out directly at us.

If he was still alive, and it was a marriage pair portrait,

she'd have to incline her head just a little bit towards hubby.

Sorry, those were the rules!

But she's a widow, and the Dutch love fierce widows.

So she doesn't have to do that,

she can look straight, actually, out at us.

Granny de Geer is flesh and blood.

And Rembrandt, the old Rembrandt,

understands what time does to your face.

In her case, it sucks in the flesh.

It's so tight to the bone,

you can almost see the skull underneath the cheeks

but he's not that brutal.

What he does very beautifully is have this raw wind of the Dutch

create a kind of rosy-red tip of the nose

and just on the edge of the cheekbone,

and she's not going to wear any make-up to cover that up.

So the face has the sense of rosy raw exposure to the Dutch weather,

which already makes us, I think, feel sympathetic to her.

She, too, has fur around her.

She's also draped

in the kind of old-fashioned substance of her wealth, but

here, everything Rembrandt's done is about a dialogue of textiles -

the dialogue between that ruff,

the bleached, starched millstone ruff,

and that linen hanky she's clutching

in the ropey-veined, mottled hand she has.

So it's the contrast here between the weight of the past

and the sense... Actually there's a note, isn't there, of anxiety,

of the way she's holding this soft fabric of the linen hanky

because her husband's gone,

she is not going to be long for this world as well.

Rembrandt knows exactly how she feels.

She's hanging onto that hanky for dear life.

Patrons like the Trips who wanted old-fashioned

were getting thin on the ground in Holland.

But if his star was dimming a little at home,

it was still shining brightly abroad.

Rembrandt was a bold-letter name in much of Europe,

and especially where you would least expect it, in Italy.

There were Italian patrons who wanted work by the Dutch master,

and one of them was Don Antonio Ruffo of Messina in Sicily.

His palazzo was packed with portraits

of the high-minded philosophers and poets,

all advertising the Don as a figure of taste and reflection.

Rembrandt? Well, yes.

And this is what he produced.

There are actually three people in this painting.

The first one, of course, is the embodiment of the philosophical mind

weighed down as it is by wistful melancholy,

as is the case for philosophers,

at least in the classical writing about them.

The second one, Aristotle has his right hand on the lyrical pate,

the beautiful poetic brain of Homer,

but there is a third person on whom the whole story,

the narrative that he hoped Don Antonio Ruffo

would recognise, depends,

and that person is contained in a medal that hangs

on the very end of the enormous golden chain

that dominates the composition.

If you look hard, you will see that there is a little figure

turned in profile.

You can just see his cute, not-very-classical nose,

but above all, you can see the helmet

and the helmet would have told everybody

this can only be Alexander the Great.

Now, the other two figures, Aristotle and Homer,

both are connected

in an interesting way to the figure of Alexander the Great.

Aristotle was Alexander's tutor when he was a child,

and prepared a new translation of the Iliad

for the young, brilliant horse-rider and soldier

to teach him the arts of war.

So, they are all connected by

what was called in the 17th century a golden chain of being.

Both are honoured in antiquity, I need hardly say,

but both also come to sad ends.

Homer, blind, despised.

Aristotle, also, essentially,

sent into a kind of ignominious isolation.

So, in some sense or other

they represent, for Rembrandt,

the complicated relationship

between being acknowledged and being rejected.

And at the heart of it,

weighing on the painting magnificently

as though he's kind of welded it to the surface,

is that bloody great chain.

And if you go up to the painting closely, you'll see Rembrandt

who was brilliant at doing metal all through his life -

he was definitely a heavy-metal artist -

it's there in beads and buttons and gobs and knots

and pools and blisters and warts of paint

which stand out from the picture surface.

This is going to be the way he will operate.

So the chain is telling us something. What's it telling us?

Well, when you were honoured by a great patron,

you were given a great chain of honour.

Rembrandt, ever since he was a kid, has been painting himself

with one of these fancy golden chains.

Does he ever get one? No, he absolutely doesn't.

He's massively chainless for his entire life.

So, a chain will give you honour,

but, of course, a chain also binds you like a prisoner

to the whims of your patron.

And Rembrandt, at this point,

where he's been snubbed by the poets and the painters,

who are all busy quaffing

their malmsey or whatever they were quaffing,

is saying, "Not me, busters, absolutely not."

So, this is a kind of manifesto, isn't it?

It's a manifesto of the thinking mind,

the dashing hand, the poetic instinct.

There is a fourth person, I suppose, as there nearly always is

in a Rembrandt painting, and it is, obviously, himself.

Don Antonio liked what he got well enough to order two more...

..but Rembrandt took his time.

When he finally delivered, in his later years,

the patron felt as if he'd been slapped in the face.

The first one was Alexander,

and was painted on stitched-together bits of old paintings.

Oops.

And the second one was this.

What you see now is terribly damaged by fire, but you get the idea.

And as usual with Rembrandt,

there was an IDEA behind the painting

for which the style was meant to be perfectly suited -

Homer, thought of as the poet of the people, of lyric roughness.

Don Antonio was furious.

"This one is unfinished! Take it back!"

This was more than a snit of egos and business.

At stake was a huge issue -

who gets to say when a picture is finished?

Refinement, or rough poetry?

The taste of the patron, or the instinct

and the intellect of the artist?

Would it prove to be the same old story,

when in the last decade of his life,

Rembrandt gets not one, but two substantial commissions?

Either way, they were make-or-break jobs,

the biggest you could hope for,

and both featured men at a table.

The first commission was a painting for Amsterdam's new town hall,

built to rival any royal palace.

It was Amsterdam's answer

to all the oversized architectural egos of kings.

Here, no grand entrance -

immense rooms open to the public.

The interior screamed classical refinement.

Stony white spaces,

marble floors, rows of tall windows.

The burgomasters wanted to celebrate the heroism of their ancestry

embodied in Claudius Civilis,

the leader of a Dutch revolt against the Roman Empire.

But the Claudius Civilis they wanted to see

was a figure of dignified nobility.

Rembrandt wanted to do something completely different.

He was listening to a different kind of music,

and that music was saying, the republic has gone soft.

If it ever were attacked, woe betide us

because we're drowning in a kind of swamp of wretched luxury and excess.

So Rembrandt took the opportunity of this particular story

to say, "OK, it's not that important that you're civilised,

"it's incredibly important that you're free."

And this story, the story of your origins,

the story of your ability to rebel against the tyrants of Rome,

is all about the roughness of freedom.

You're going to get this, surely,

because I'm going to paint you the roughest canvas

about freedom, in the roughest possible style you've ever seen.

So he paints a hero with one eye

in exactly the way you're not supposed to do.

You're not supposed to paint any hideous physical deformities,

that's what the classical rules say.

So Rembrandt starts with Claudius Civilis himself,

his one non-eye staring straight out at the beholder,

and the rest of the gang,

the fellow conspirators,

are this bunch of drunken ruffians, basically,

in whom beats the breath of liberty and of freedom.

But this is, above all, an expressive -

one almost wants to say an Expressionist - painting.

Rembrandt paid the people who commissioned it, and us -

generation after generation - a huge compliment.

"It's rough," he says,

"It's rough because that way, I'm pulling you into the action,

"into this immense flare of the light of freedom

"coming off the table, and you will finish the picture

"in your own imagination, in your own mind."

But you will have to work twice as hard,

because what YOU'RE seeing is just a fragment of the immense original.

Rembrandt set his "oath swearing" in a cavernous Biblical setting.

You'd have seen it like a sacred apparition -

yes, this is a supper, but it's the first supper of liberty.

The altarpiece to republican freedoms.

So this was the nature of the gamble.

It turned into a catastrophe.

If he'd hoped the great and the grand of Amsterdam would get it,

wow, they did not get it.

He had to take the painting back,

he had to cut it up in order to try and sell it,

he was never really paid, we think, a cent for all this effort.

But what we have is not just an imperishable masterpiece,

not just a painting whose style is of a piece with its message,

but maybe the first true work of modern art

in the history of Western culture.

He was down, but he was never to be counted out.

There were still people who trusted him to deliver decent likenesses,

and who knew - something extra too.

A spirit of the group, maybe, even of the Drapers' Guild.

Oh-oh - another bunch of men sitting round a table!

If Rembrandt was licking his wounds though,

over going right over the top with the Claudius Civilis,

don't think for a moment he's going to go all quiet and respectful on us

with this extraordinary painting.

I mean, think about this particular subject.

This lot of men are the quality-control inspectors

of the Drapers' Guild having a meeting.

Fantastically exciting? No!

So he has to somehow dramatise it as well,

he can't not bring some kind of energy into the composition.

So, he turns the table round, doesn't he,

so that one corner projects out into our own space.

So we're looking at the group, the entire group,

including the standing figure

who's the live-in civil servant of the organisation,

all facing us. He's also paid some respect to their faces

which are so beautifully, if roughly, painted.

And that's very important that it's done sympathetically

because this lot are different kinds of Christians, and yet

they all hang together as the quality-control inspectors

of the Drapers' Guild.

So we have black, white, black, white, broken up

by this great, hot surge

of magnificent crimson rug sitting on the table.

Look at the angle with which the table sticks out into our space -

notice something?

It's the same angle as those men are looking out from the painting.

They're looking at something. They're looking at SOMEONE.

Who exactly are they looking at?

Something else that's really interesting.

We know, it's been suggested by a very clever art historian,

who noticed that the preparatory drawings are actually -

guess what - drawn on account book paper.

Yes, the same account paper as the ledger book we are looking at,

which brings up the amazing possibility

that what they're looking at inside the book

is a set of drawings made by Rembrandt

of the poses of the figures.

They're looking at the painting in the process of its own composition.

So they are assuming the poses that Rembrandt's given them,

which means they're looking at someone

and they're looking at Rembrandt!

It's Rembrandt who's come into the room,

but we are standing where Rembrandt is.

Rembrandt is us - what a compliment!

Rembrandt knew all about male bonding.

No painter ever had quite such a grip on its psychology.

And no-one came even close to understanding something else

men do all the time...

look at women.

Rembrandt was married for eight years to his first wife, Saskia,

but she dies, aged only 29.

He then takes up with his son's wet nurse, Geertje,

but when she sues him for breach of engagement contract,

he has her committed to a madhouse.

In middle age, another servant in the house, Hendrickje Stoffels,

becomes his common-law wife and gives birth to a daughter, Cornelia.

It was this household -

Hendrickje, Cornelia, Titus, his son by Saskia,

and Rembrandt himself -

who lived together in the Breerstraat

when his finances began to unravel.

This is incredibly moving, really.

Wow. There's this perfect morning light, and...

..it is sort of overwhelming.

But you have this kind of opal pearl self-diffused light

that falls on your working space.

And this is ridiculous,

it's like sort of the great art director in the sky has said,

"Fine. You want a morning's work with Rembrandt,

"I can do the lighting for you."

So he's done the lighting,

so the light is falling on Rembrandt's easel,

and it's really just unbelievably moving.

That, over there, the two palettes, one hung on top of each other,

appear in the very first self-portrait

when he's a very, very young man in Leiden.

He's a young man mantled in his working tabard,

and his eyes are just two little black circles.

Here are the pigments.

Crushed lapis lazuli for aquamarine,

famously very expensive.

Cinnabar for reds.

But then you suspend all these pigments in oil,

the oils are on the right -

it's all so neat, and linseed oil was a favourite.

I tried making pigments when I was writing Rembrandt's Eyes.

Didn't work out very well.

Cos I wanted to get the smell of it,

and I wanted to get the sludgy texture.

I managed a few of them, but my paintings were sort of crap,

actually, but, boy, the smell of the pectin!

My mother hated them being on the breakfast room table.

But I loved it, really. Loved it.

So, this is very moving,

so stretcher frames,

Dutch stove there.

What a beautiful working space, really.

Oh, and here is Hendrickje with her shirt off. This is so touching.

And one thing Rembrandt plays with all the time is...

He sees acting their role,

he sees what our body language is.

So he's unique in actually giving us our first image

of what it was to model

and still actually being who you are.

So, she's still got her little hat on

and there are two objects on the table in front of her.

One is Rembrandt's drawing desk, slightly angled.

And then there is the cot with the baby in.

So she's both model and she's mummy, as well.

She's nursing her baby. So you have the complete world.

And then, even in this reproduction of that drawing,

exactly the light I was just talking about.

It's just falling on this sort of perfect scene.

Some of Rembrandt's loveliest paintings, warm with intimacy

and sensual anticipation, came from looking at Hendrickje.

At the same time, he understood how complicated how ambiguous

that looking could be. The violation of modesty and how to paint it,

had long been an obsession of his.

In his prime, he'd already painted an astonishing picture

in which WE are turned into Peeping Toms.

Now, the story is an apocryphal addition to the Book Of Daniel.

It's very simple - it's that Susanna, virtuous wife,

is spied on by a creepy bunch of elders. They say,

"Right, if you don't sleep with us,

"we're going to accuse you of being an adulteress."

Bad, bad story,

and it was used constantly as a kind of morality tale,

but, in a lot of Renaissance art, this is the most hypocritical moment

in which women's bodies, instead of actually being seen morally,

were voluptuously turned for the convenience of soft-porn happiness

of the patrons, over and over again.

Famously, images of Susanna -

this is really creepy, everybody, there's no way round the story -

were used as aphrodisiacs for the elderly like me.

This is kind of visual Viagra.

When Rubens is hired actually

to do a painting of Susanna and the elders,

Dudley Carleton, sorry, the British Ambassador here in The Hague, says,

"It is going to be beautiful enough

"to arouse the appetites of an old codger like me!

Now, Rembrandt is no moralist

and he sure isn't a feminist -

the way he behaves with one particular woman proves that.

But he has a staggering psychological grip

that great sexual drama can be made out of telling the truth -

turning the assumptions of what the nude is upside down.

This is not a nude.

This is a story about the observation of the naked.

Instead, actually, of the body being turned voluptuously towards us

it's all really about covering up.

This is a real woman with a real woman's body,

and look at her, she's looking directly at us.

In other words, we are implicated.

Whatever your age, whatever your gender,

you, the viewer, are in a position of being a dirty old man.

There IS a dirty, old man hiding in the shrubbery on the right,

so, it's there, but essentially

the drama depends on us feeling, not kind of getting our jollies,

but feeling unbelievably embarrassed and awkward.

Rembrandt is incredibly interested in modesty.

So, she takes what she can. She grabs a piece of drapery,

and in this complicated way of course covers up her groin,

and in a really wonderful touch,

a classic, brilliant gesture of the young,

endlessly visually inventive Rembrandt,

if you look at the sleeve of her dress,

we sort of see what she was wearing

when she was clothed that got them all excited.

So the hanging-down sleeve almost echoes the arm

that is the covering up, isn't it?

And with the other arm, her left arm is pressed to her breast,

so there's no titillation in any way at all.

This is a woman who's suddenly horrified

at the kind of violation of the gaze.

There are absolutely wonderful little details,

my favourite is that one of those feet

is actually looking for,

and missing, the slipper.

So, it's a fantastic piece of drama -

not so much the embarrassment of being naked

but the vulnerability of being naked.

20 years later, he would come back to the guilt

and pleasure of looking, this time turning voyeurism into tragedy.

The painting tells the story from the Bible

of King David and Bathsheba.

Rembrandt joins together two episodes from the Scripture.

David spying on Bathsheba, the wife of one of his generals, bathing,

and the moment when she receives a letter

summoning her to the royal bed.

Bathsheba is made a vessel of pure tragedy -

the lips on the verge of trembling,

her gaze is both concentrated and distracted,

the eyebrows tightly arched

as though battling against the onset of tears.

Rembrandt makes US the ones doing the looking.

It's us who are accomplices, reeled into the web of desire.

An innocent act of bathing

has been turned into a sinister moment of grooming.

It gets even more complicated when you know that 1654,

when it was painted, was also the year in which the model, Hendrickje,

visibly pregnant,

is hauled up before the Church Court for living in sin

with the artist, Rembrandt van Rijn.

Needless to say, poor Hendrickje shows up

and gets this self-righteous earful -

Rembrandt doesn't bother.

Out of this personal drama fought over Hendrickje's body,

Rembrandt produces one of the most

psychologically complex nudes ever made,

filled with passion and heartbreak.

But it doesn't stop here.

Four years later, he made this extraordinary etching.

Not a nude, but a model between takes.

A woman feeling the cold and warming herself by a Dutch stove.

Real life has crashed into art.

Rembrandt spotted another of art's little hypocrisies.

How paintings could assume the mask of outraged virtue

while delivering the prurient thrill of sexual violence.

Many artists had painted the rape of Lucretia and her suicide

told by the historians of early Rome.

Here she is, the virtuous wife of one of Rome's consuls

in its early days, ruled by the Tarquin kings.

The rapist is the son of the king.

Though she could not be more innocent,

she can't live with the shame and commits suicide.

After the terrible deed is done,

her family swear, not just vengeance and justice,

but an end to the tyranny of kings.

Some artists had painted the rape itself,

where our eavesdropping and the full-on nudity

repeats the violation while pretending to be horrified by it.

Rembrandt does things differently...

It's an honour killing or an honour suicide -

I really don't know which is worse -

but it's drenched in pathos and a sense of impending horror.

This amazing masterpiece

is about the line between being dressed in the mantle of honour -

just look at her, you see how heavy

that responsibility of the physical textile of the mantle of honour is.

On that, Rembrandt has lavished

his most immense dramatic powers of brushwork -

the relationship between that

and the vulnerable nakedness of flesh.

We sense the presence of the brutalised, violated Lucretia's body

from just the openings, the fastening at the top of the body.

But look, actually, at that composition.

It forms a kind of arrowhead, a "V",

it moves down her body

emphasised by this heavy girdle

which is below her waist.

Not a place actually any dress in the 17th century I know of,

emphasises of course the site of her violation.

What is about to happen, inflicted by Lucretia,

who's been crying.

Look at the pinked-up eyes,

very rare, you almost never see that in 17th century

or almost any other painting.

Look at the weight,

the torrent of emotion that's waiting to pour out.

You don't just look at this painting - we've heard her speak,

possibly through a choke of sobs,

about the demand to actually to avenge this hideous crime

by ending the corrupt kingdom of Rome

and replacing it with a republic of liberty.

So we've listened to her.

This is the moment between the speech and the suicide,

everything is in suspense.

So the genius of the way he has actually executed

this extraordinary moment of drama

is to take us from this incredible crust of dark green paint

to the single pearl drop at her throat.

This is the sign of chastity, of honour, of purity,

and the implication that beneath the whiteness,

the perfect whiteness of that pearl,

will come a traumatic effusion of blood.

And then, a bit later, we don't know how much later,

but perhaps 1666, three years before he dies,

he goes at the subject again and this time, everything has changed.

There are so many painted Lucretias.

But never like this.

Never with the blood POURING out of her.

She's dying. Fast.

Her face is a terrible, sallow colour.

The blood is on the dagger.

And suddenly, we can feel two wounds.

The one made by the rapist,

and the one made in tragic desperation by the suicidal woman.

The depth and violence of both...

..and the blood.

No-one has painted blood like this before.

Taken so much care with it.

This isn't prop blood, art blood, stage blood.

Rembrandt, the great thickener of pigment, has thinned it out...

and he makes it dry, clot, then leak.

It's sticking to her shirt,

which is stuck to her and it's leeching her life away.

You just look,

helpless.

She's dying, alone.

Rembrandt, too, at the end, is quite alone.

There are some friends, the dwindling band of supporters,

but, except for his daughter Cornelia....

the family have all died -

most heartbreakingly, one suspects, his son, Titus.

Titus's wife, Maddalena, Hendrickje...

It's just him now, rattling around in the little house

in the bad part of town.

So, towards the very end,

he turns away from all those scenes of voyeurism,

the estrangement of men and women,

the sacrifice of torn bodies,

to something like its antidote -

the warm connection of family love.

In October 1885, 220 years later,

an aspiring young artist,

one who spent much of HIS desperately lonely life

searching for affection, would walk into the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam,

make a beeline for a particular painting and stand there,

eyes wide, heart pumping,

sweaty with the fever of adoration.

"I would gladly give ten years of my life

"to stand before this painting for ten days,

"with only a dry crust of bread to eat."

What was it about The Jewish Bride that made Vincent van Gogh

believe that the old Rembrandt had painted it, as he wrote,

"with a hand of fire"?

I think I know why Van Gogh was so overwhelmed by this painting.

It does what every great masterpiece does,

it attacks us viscerally

and he was a very physical painter, and this, above all,

is a painting about the physical embodiment of love.

It's a painting about what it means to be touched.

At the heart of it is a play of hands,

a hand on a heart which is also a hand on a breast,

a hand touching that hand, a hand round the shoulder.

It is, above all, a play of hands testifying to trust,

to confidence, to simplicity within the shelter of love.

What this painting does is actually deliver more than it describes.

Let me give you an example.

The clothes, the outfit - Rembrandt had a huge wardrobe of costumes,

he loved dressing himself up, dressing everybody else up.

The paint is absolutely trowelled on

and inside that paint, there is the entire world.

Bits of egg have been found in it, sand, silica, grit, earth.

He's kind of attacked the paint like a feverish modernist,

like the great-great-granddaddy Jackson Pollock or someone.

What you've got is this immense, clotted,

coagulated crust of coloured paint

that is the most physical thing you could possibly, possibly think of!

Now, it's probably painted, we don't know the exact date, around 1665.

Hendrickje has died in 1663.

This is not Hendrickje, this is not a memory of Hendrickje,

but even though we're not allowed ever to be sentimental

about Rembrandt - he would not have liked that -

is it not possible, everybody,

that if you want to retain the memory of what connects

being physically touched with emotionally touched,

you do it with massive, massive substance?

Underneath the mantling of all this paint

is incredible tenderness.

Rembrandt is aware of mortality,

of the perishability of life.

All great painting is about an attempt to stop time,

to make memory physical,

brilliantly coloured.

What he wants to do with this particular vision of love

is make it imperishable.

So, if all of you out there worry about forgetting

what it is like to be deliriously, confidently,

trustingly in love,

stand in front of this.

This is THE painting of love.