“IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, AND THE WORD WAS WITH GOD, and the Word was God,” states the Gospel according to St John. But Rembrandt’s gospel was not the word but the image. What did the boy see that made him decide, apparently quite abruptly and without prior warning, to become a painter? Something must have made an enormous impression on him. Could it have been, perhaps, the most beautiful and most famous painting in the city?
In the mayor’s chamber in the town hall hung the painting The Last Judgement, a triptych by the sixteenth-century master Lucas van Leyden. During the market that was held as part of the annual celebrations of the relief of Leiden on 3rd October, the town hall opened its doors to the public. Crowds of visitors would converge on the triptych to gaze at it.
According to Karel van Mander, the “sublime and glorious painting” by Master Lucas was hung well above eye level; so Rembrandt would have acquired a cramp in his neck from staring up at the images of heaven and hell. His gaze would have been sucked inward, into the cloud-filled depths of the painting, and together with the figure piccole, the tiny, hazy figures of dead souls, over the horizon. The space in the painting seemed endless; all was air and light. Heaven was a vision in light pink, blue and gold.
Besides the sensation of space, the sight of the nudes would have struck Rembrandt like a bolt of lightning. Lucas had emphasized the physicality of the dead souls: he painted them naked, muscular, curvaceous and fleshy. Tangible. The nudes were painted in “sweet flesh tints”.
Even more exciting than staring at the pious dream-lift of angels in heaven was the image of hell, where the dead souls of sinners, as described in the Book of Revelation, are cast into the “lake of fire”. Lucas had gone to town on his devils, with their goats’ heads, sharp claws and bat wings. One monster is screeching, a fat tit with a nipple like a gherkin dangling on its belly. Another sticks out its tongue—in the place where its genitals should have been, an inversion known as fellatio reversibile. Defecating, screaming and roaring with laughter, the demons prod the dead souls with their pitchforks and heave them into the blazing maw of hell.
The moral was unequivocal: no one could escape the Last Judgement. Two priests, identifiable by their tonsures, are tossed into the scorching flames. High-born or high-ranking in earthly life: it all counted for nothing. Yet the moral is not without its light-hearted side. One angel laughs mischievously as she places her arm around the bare buttocks of a salvaged soul.
Sometimes the wings of the triptych were closed, revealing the rear panel paintings of Peter and Paul against the background of an earthly landscape. The saints are conversing, one bearing the keys to the gates of heaven, the other armed with his attributes of book and sword. Karel van Mander eulogized Lucas’s pictures of the two Apostles, ranking them among the great triumphs of art.
It was a miracle that the work still existed. The children of the wealthy local timber merchant Claes Dircksz van Swieten had commissioned The Last Judgement from the artist on 26th August 1526 in honour of their father’s memory. Lucas had accepted the commission to paint this “memorial retable” for the sum of thirty-five Flemish pounds. Upon completion, the triptych was to be hung above the Van Swieten family tomb in the Pieterskerk.
Four decades after the triptych had been borne aloft to the church in a solemn procession through the city, the Iconoclasm erupted. Legend has it that the “iconoclastic mob” took down the altarpiece and carried it out of the Pieterskerk with a view to destroying it outside. At this, it is said, one of the burgomasters purchased the painting from the rabble and moved it out of harm’s way. It is a fine story. However, the triptych, which was painted on panels and encased in heavy wooden frames, weighed a good 400 kilos: even the iconoclasts might have found their knees buckling beneath such a load.
Somehow, in any case, the Van Swieten family managed to save The Last Judgement. It was transferred to St James’s Hospital. In 1572, amid the threat of renewed unrest, it was moved again: this time to St Catherine’s Hospital. Five years later, after Leiden’s Protestant city council had ordered the churches to be stripped of images and painted, the triptych was moved to a permanent place of safety.
This resting place was the burgomaster’s chamber in the town hall, where Isaac Claesz van Swanenburg installed Lucas’s work with the consent of the Van Swieten family. However, under pressure from the Calvinist authorities, the painter-magistrate was compelled to paint over the Holy Father and his colourful aura and to replace him with the word “Yahweh”. Not until the twentieth century, during restoration work on The Last Judgement, was the figure of God rediscovered and carefully restored to his rightful place, high up in the heavens.
In the burgomaster’s chamber, the triptych attracted considerable attention from local townspeople and foreign visitors. In 1602, the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, an avid art lover and collector, tried his best to buy the memorial retable. Rudolf sent an envoy to The Hague, prompting Prince Maurits and the States General to urgently petition Leiden city council to agree to the sale.
So eager was Rudolf to acquire The Last Judgement that he was said to have offered a sum of money in gold ducats sufficient to cover the entire surface of the triptych. A vast fortune. Nonetheless, the emperor’s request was politely, proudly, declined. The city did not wish to let the painting go, wrote Van Mander, “whatever great sums of money were offered for it”.
Rembrandt was undoubtedly transfixed by the beauty of The Last Judgement. Furthermore, he concluded from the stories told of Lucas van Leyden that for a fine painter, the prospect of a golden future beckoned.
Lucas van Leyden, triptych with The Last Judgement, c.1526–27.
A book of portraits of famous Dutch people contained a print by Hieronymus Cock, Lucae Leidano pictori, with as its caption a little Latin poem by Dominicus Lampsonius. The final lines may be rendered: “Let our poem at least spread far and wide / the glory of your name and your city of Leiden.”
Self-portrait in a Cap and Scarf, 1633.
Reproduction of an engraving of a self-portrait by Lucas van Leyden, c.1872.
If Rembrandt could display talent and willpower, he too could become a famous artist. His desire to become a painter rather than a Church minister, physician or scholar, in line with his parents’ plans for him, was not a bohemian whim but a serious professional ambition. The ghost of Lucas challenged him.
A print made of Lucas’s self-portrait in 1620, which circulated in Leiden, bore the following inscription: “Portrait of Lucas van Leyden, the incomparable painter and printmaker, at fifteen years of age, made by his own hand.”
When Rembrandt was fifteen, he would have seen Lucas van Leyden as a shining example. “Among the many gifted, subtle minds in our art of painting who excelled from earliest childhood,” wrote Karel van Mander in his Schilder-Boeck (1604), which describes the life and work of over 250 painters and explains contemporary art theory, “I know not one who was [his] equal with the brush and burin in his hand, and who appears to have been born with consummate skill as a painter and draughtsman.”
Lucas—who bore the same name as that of the guild’s patron saint, and must have seemed to Rembrandt the painter par excellence—was described by Van Mander as not just naturally gifted, but also as one who had been fanatically devoted to his art from an early age. “His marbles and toys were the artist’s tools, such as charcoal, chalk, pen, paintbrush, burin and so forth. His mother often tried to stop him from drawing at night, not so much because of the cost of candlelight but from fear that by constantly brooding and foregoing sleep, he would enfeeble or harm his young, fragile body. He never stopped depicting all manner of things from life—heads, hands, feet, buildings, landscapes, and all kinds of materials, since that too gave him pleasure.”
Lucas van Leyden practised his profession with unflagging dedication. He worked long hours, was constantly sketching from nature and live models, even in the evening, by candlelight. To Rembrandt, the message was clear: to fulfil his own ambition, he must do the same: study with relentless commitment and become proficient in his chosen craft as soon as possible.
In 1629, Rembrandt would paint himself as Leiden’s greatest painter. He sported a cap with a long feather, like the one worn by Master Lucas in one of his famous prints. The feather was a vanitas symbol. The man who wore it was not just flaunting his feathers, but acknowledging that, however brilliant he might be, the feather might be swept away by the wind at any moment.
Like life itself.