IN THE WINTER IT WAS STILL PITCH-DARK WHEN REMBRANDT MADE HIS way to the Latin school. Lessons started at 7 a.m. He had the choice of at least two routes from his house, each one less than ten minutes’ walk. He could go straight on from Noordeinde into Breestraat and then turn right into the long, narrow Schoolsteeg. Alternatively, he could turn right at the Drie Haringen inn on Noordeinde and walk along Rapenburg. That was the more fashionable route, leading past tall, majestic houses with bell- and step-gables whose reflections gleamed in the smooth water of the canal. This was where the wealthiest merchants and most prominent families lived. The Prinsenhof residence, where members of the House of Orange and their princely guests stayed when they came to the city, was also on Rapenburg.
In the morning, Rapenburg was still quiet and you could hear the wind rustling through the leaves of the linden trees. By the afternoon, however, it was buzzing with activity. Wealthy merchants with elegant hats and lavish cloaks hastened home, servants and maids were sent on errands. Just before Rapenburg curved gently towards the Vliet, you would encounter scholars and students rushing off to a lecture or to the university library.
Sometimes a procession of professors would pass by, dressed in black robes with gleaming white collars. Accompanying them was a terrified student on his way to defend his doctoral dissertation, perspiring for all the world like a condemned man on his way to the gallows. At the front of the procession marched the beadle, grasping his staff with its jingling bells. The procession would disappear through the archway between the university building and the bookshop and printing house of Elsevier, which would have the title pages of new publications pasted to its shutters.
When Rembrandt had crossed the Doelenbrug, halfway down Rapenburg, it was just a few steps to the little square outside Gravensteen, a building that had been erected by the counts of Holland in the Middle Ages and was used as a prison and house of correction. Behind the dungeon bars, as thick as a man’s arm, sat the prisoners who had been convicted by the Court of Justice.
At the front of the building lay a square execution yard, planted with grass to absorb the blood. The “patch of green” was surrounded by a ditch to keep the public at a distance. Locals sometimes referred to the square as Schoonverdriet—“Pure Sorrow”. Hangings were rare in Rembrandt’s day, but the city’s executioners frequently administered corporal punishment in public. Convicts were bound to a post, beaten with a stick or branded. The young Rembrandt would have been familiar with the sound of breaking bones and the hissing of scorched human flesh.
Diagonally opposite the field of Pure Sorrow stood the Latin school, a large building endowed with a step-gable as elegant as the one gracing the central carpentry workshop, and windows enlivened by red-and-white shutters. The building had been erected in 1599 after the old school could no longer contain the influx of schoolboys. With the explosive growth of the population and the founding of the university, just a few months after the relief of Leiden, the Latin school was desperately short of space. Daily attendance now stood at over 300 boys.
The old building, which dated from 1431, long known simply as the “Big School” and attached to the parish of the Pieterskerk, no longer met the requirements of the day. The affluent Flemish and French immigrants who sent their sons to the Latin school encountered a physical environment that was badly in need of an upgrade. Where they had come from, all the streets were paved and the roofs tiled.
The city council issued an ordinance obliging burghers to build their houses of stone and to ensure that roofs were tiled to reduce the risk of fire. Renovations were subsidized and those who remained in violation were fined. The city could not remain in violation of its own rules. The old Latin school had a thatched roof. Its wooden structure could not support tiles, so a brand-new building was erected.
Jan Jacob Bylaert, the Latin school, eighteenth century.
Harmen van Rijn must have registered his youngest son Rembrandt in 1613, following the boy’s seventh birthday. This was the customary age for a boy to start school. It was in itself remarkable for a miller to be sending his son to the Latin school, which was a prestigious institution and relatively expensive. Most of the boys came from well-to-do families.
None of Rembrandt’s siblings had attended the school. The boys had all been apprenticed to learn a trade. Gerrit was to take over the mill, but then proved unable to do so. Adriaen was apprenticed to a cobbler, and it was he who eventually took over the mill. Willem started off as an assistant in the bakery and was later employed as a corn-bearer.
Girls did not attend the Latin school. One-third of the girls in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic did enjoy some form of education. Rembrandt’s sisters probably had some instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic, but little will have been expected of them beyond a suitable marriage. Until that time, they would help their mother in domestic tasks. Machtelt, who was five or six years older than Rembrandt, did not marry, and continued to live at the house on Weddesteeg until her death in 1625. She probably took on a good deal of the care for her little brother. A clever little boy.
All the children in the Van Rijn family will have spent a short period of time at a private school or have had lessons with a local teacher. Except, perhaps, the youngest, Elisabeth. It seems likely that she was feeble-minded, since her parents had a clause added to their last will and testament specifying that she was to be placed under the supervision of one of her elder brothers after their death. Like Machtelt, she remained single, and lived her entire life at the Weddesteeg house.
Rembrandt probably started his own education at one of these little private or trade schools. The city had dozens of informal classrooms, presided over by schoolmasters from the Southern Netherlands or an occasional immigrant from England or Germany. It was useful for local children to learn some French, to communicate with newcomers. We do not know if Rembrandt had a command of French: we cannot tell from the handful of his surviving letters, the maxims accompanying his etchings or the books he owned, as listed in the inventory drawn up when he declared bankruptcy in 1656. He did read Latin, however, the lingua franca in the world of religion and learning.
That was the whole point of the Latin school: to prepare boys for a position of rank and dignity, starting with an official post in the city. In his Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden, Orlers wrote that Rembrandt’s parents sent him to school “to ensure that he mastered the Latin language… thereafter to be admitted to the Leiden Academy, that he might in due course be able to serve the City and the Public Good with his learning and help to promote its interests”. Harmen and Neeltje must have judged that his future and that of his family would be best served by his becoming a Church minister, a lawyer or a physician.
Boys could enrol in the Latin school from seven years of age. The classes were numbered in reverse order: new boys entered the octava, the eighth class, where they learnt their ABC and were therefore known as abecedarii. Many boys left school once they could read and write. After the octava came the septima, sexta, quinta, quarta and tertia. At this point the boy might go on to university or another form of higher education. Sometimes there was an additional class, the secunda, and the most successful schools had a prima. Rembrandt probably completed the quarta: possibly even the tertia.
The Latin school was a spartan environment with hard wooden benches arrayed in cold classrooms. The pupils wrote on a slate with a slate pencil as the master prowled the room, peering at their work. Latin was drummed into the children by rote: letter by letter, word by word, case ending by case ending. Grammatical rules, cast in the mnemonic form of rhyming lines of verse, were recited and endlessly repeated. Anyone too slow to commit the rules to memory would get a beating. Discipline and order were paramount, in accordance with Proverbs 29:15: “The rod and reproof give wisdom”.
In the classroom, the master wielded the cane, a wooden stick with a flat spoon attached to the underside. A pupil who misbehaved or made too many mistakes when reciting his lessons would be caned on the hand or the back. Some of these punishments must have been ferocious. When the school building later underwent restoration, canes were discovered in an old cesspit. They had ornate handles and a flat disc attached to the other end. The handle of each one was broken in half.
The headmaster of the Latin school was an imposing figure who was held in high esteem in the city. When he strode down the street dressed in his robes, a cane dangling from his belt, men would doff their hats to him. He lived around the corner from the school in a house with a diminutive walled courtyard on Pieterskerkgracht. In 1613 a tympanum was bricked into the wall above the little archway in the courtyard wall with the motto: “TUTA EST AEGIDE PALLAS”: “Pallas Athene is safe because of her shield.”
It is not surprising that we have two known paintings by Rembrandt—and one by his pupil Isaack Jouderville—depicting Minerva, the Roman name for Pallas Athene. The goddess of wisdom and of war—according to the myth, she was born from the head of the supreme deity Zeus, wearing a full suit of armour—was a popular subject in the city. Minerva was the patron saint of both the Latin school and the university.
In Rembrandt’s 1631 painting, the goddess meets our gaze with a fierce, indomitable expression. She wears a long, blood-red cloak. On the table before her are a lute and a book as symbols of art and knowledge. Above her head, a laurel wreath on her blonde hair, hangs her shield displaying the head of Medusa with its coiling serpent hair. Minerva exemplified the pride of Leiden: knowledge as a weapon.
The first headmaster of the Latin school, the Calvinist scholar Nicolaus Stochius, was known for his formidable intellect. Stochius had fled from the advancing Spanish troops to Essen. Following the Relief of 1574, the city council had invited him to Leiden, offering him an annual salary of 400 guilders as well as board and lodging. Under his leadership, the Latin school grew from a city school to a venerable institution. Stochius dedicated himself heart and soul to the school. He died in 1593 and was buried in the ambulatory of the Pieterskerk. His portrait, painted by Van Swanenburg, hung in the school to honour his memory.
Rembrandt’s headmaster was Jacob Letting, or “Lettingius”, a former law professor, who was appointed in 1613. He taught four hours a day: he began the day with a class on dialectics or logic, after which he gave classes on Cicero and Virgil as well as the Greek classics. His duties also included “training the youths in style, declamation, learned debate and other scholarly requisites, and… examining their accomplishments in accordance with the set standards”.
In the twelve years of his time as headmaster, he did not build up the same mighty reputation as Stochius. Whenever his tenure was extended, his reappointment was subject to a pledge to refrain from accepting gifts of money from pupils beyond the prescribed maximum in school fees. This was evidently a live issue, despite his annual salary of 750 guilders and rent-free headmaster’s house. In January 1625, Lettingius was dismissed for heavy drinking and for continuing to accept proffered gifts of money.
He was succeeded in the post by Dirk Schrevel, known in accordance with custom by the Latinized form of his name, Theodorus Schrevelius. Like Stochius, Schrevelius wielded considerable intellectual and moral influence over his pupils. He was initially headmaster of the Latin school in Haarlem, but following the Synod of Dort—Dordrecht—in 1618 he was obliged to sign a declaration of belief in the profession of catechism of the Reformed Church. He requested time to consider before signing, because he had not yet had an opportunity to read the synod’s decrees. However, this demurral aroused so much suspicion that when he indicated his willingness to sign the declaration six weeks later, he was dismissed from his post after all.
In the autumn of 1620, Schrevelius moved to Leiden, where he initially worked as a private tutor, teaching the sons of influential Leiden families such as those of Van der Werff. In 1625, after the death of Maurits and the installation of the much milder Frederik Hendrik as stadtholder, he was appointed as headmaster of the Latin school in Leiden.
Schrevelius was much loved and was admired for the editions he published of the works of Ovid and Homer. Both the wealthy Remonstrant Petrus Scriverius, a humanist scholar with a private income who lived for literature and art, and Caspar Barlaeus, who had lost his position as professor of logic at Leiden University after the Synod of Dort, wrote odes to him. An art lover, he paid close attention to the painters in his city, including Rembrandt, a former pupil of his school.
In 1628 the Utrecht lawyer and art lover Aernout Buchelius was a guest at the headmaster’s house. We know this because Buchelius kept notes on his trips around the country, visiting collectors, art dealers, auction houses and artists’ studios, entitled “Res pictoriae”.
Schrevelius showed the visitor his art collection, including the still lifes by David Bailly and the little portrait that Frans Hals in Haarlem had made of him on an oval copperplate. He also presented him with a gift: a print made by Jan van de Velde after Hals’s portrait of their mutual friend Scriverius.
The two men discussed art, including the work of the young painter who was making a name for himself in the city. The Haarlem inventory of 2nd October 1652, which describes what Schrevelius left to his eldest daughter Brigitta in his will, includes “a small panel painting in an ebony frame, being a fat tronie by the celebrated Painter Rembrandt van Leiden”. Schrevelius saw the promise in Rembrandt. Even so, after his visit to Leiden, Buchelius noted: “The son of a miller is also held in high regard, but that is premature [ante tempus].”
The learning inculcated at the Latin school included lessons in art, cultural civilization and religion. In addition, the 1613 archives name an art master who taught classes in the neighbourhood of Rapenburg for several hours a day: Henricus Rieverdinck. This Rieverdinck was probably the first to instruct Rembrandt in the art of draughtsmanship, the first to teach him how to write his own name in calligraphy.
The subjects taught at the Latin school were based on the humanist tradition and the writings of Erasmus, who insisted that fathers must concern themselves with their sons’ education from an early age. Petrus Bloccius, who served as deputy headmaster of Leiden’s “Big School”, published a didactic poem in 1559, “Praecepta formandis puerorum moribus perutilia”, to teach young children good manners, which he dedicated to his own son. It may be roughly rendered in English as follows:
Study Christ and good manners, my son, and scholarship,
For without these—believe me—life is only death.
Just as Aegeus’ son was helped to flee the Labyrinth
Because Ariadne of Knossos gave him the thread
That showed the way: thus too will this little book
Smooth the path to Christ, to good manners, to Pallas.
A knowledge of the Bible and of the classics, Pallas as well as Christ, constituted the foundations of a boy’s education. We do not know which of the classical authors Rembrandt read at the Latin school, or which textbooks he used. It was not until 1625 that the States of Holland introduced a standard curriculum in a so-called schoolordre. However, we can safely assume that he read Cicero, Virgil and Ovid, although the lessons will have focused primarily on the linguistic properties of the text rather than the content of the stories and the emotions they conveyed, in which he would later excel as a painter.
When Rembrandt painted The Rape of Proserpine in 1631, he knew the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And when he imagined the scene in which Pluto abducts the daughter of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, and spirits her away to the underworld, he could consult Ovid’s own words:
usque adeo est properatus amor. Dea territa maesto
et matrem et comites, sed matrem saepius, ore
clamat
(“so swift as this, is love. The frightened goddess cries out to her mother, to her friends, most of all to her mother, with piteous mouth”).
But Rembrandt did not leave it at that. He also read up on the myth in the popular interpretation by the fourth-century poet Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae. In Claudian’s epic, Pluto drags the girl off brutally and slams her into his chariot. Proserpine’s hair dances in the wind as she thrashes with her arms and shrieks in vain to the clouds for help.
The Rape of Proserpine, c.1631.
Pieter Claesz Soutman, after Peter Paul Rubens, The Rape of Proserpine, 1616–57.
Rembrandt also used a print by Pieter Claesz Soutman after a painting by Rubens. The latter too shows Diana, goddess of hunting, clinging to the skirts of Proserpine. Rembrandt tries to surpass Rubens in his painting, and indeed succeeds. Instead of painting demi-gods and sterile, idealized figures, he depicts a real woman who is seized and hurled onto the chariot. In Rembrandt—unlike Rubens—Proserpine’s gold cloak is close to ripping under the strain, and as Diana and Minerva hold on they are dragged along through the splashing water.
Rembrandt learnt at school that artists would base a new work on the centuries-old classical and Christian tradition and on famous examples. He was taught that painters and writers work in a three-stage process of translatio, imitatio and aemulatio: translation, imitation and emulation. The process itself was an imitation of antiquity: had Virgil not taken Homer’s Odyssey as his example when writing the Aeneid, and successfully moulded it into his own creation?
All learning began with imitation. Borrowing was seen not as a refined kind of theft but as a tribute. The yoke of tradition did not weigh Rembrandt down, but he was always exhilarated by the prospect of competition and rivalry, even with celebrated predecessors. When he drew an etching of Leonardo’s Last Supper, Rembrandt made a few essential alterations to the Apostles’ positions relative to Christ.
Painters think with their hands. At the Latin school he learnt to think with his head. Knowledge preceded understanding and intuition. Rembrandt would develop into an ingenious painter who felt intuitively what needed to be done. But he also possessed a keen intellect. He was intelligent and erudite. It is scarcely possible to overstate how much he would draw on his knowledge of Latin and his familiarity with stories from the Bible and classical sources in his work as a painter.
He made contact with poetry and tradition, just as Aristotle placed his hand on the sculpted head of Homer—a scene that Rembrandt depicted magnificently in a painting he produced in 1653: scholarship bows to art.