3
ENCOUNTERS WITH GENIUS
On these early diplomatic journeys, Constantijn Huygens wrote furiously whenever he could. He wrote verse at sea, in bed, on army camp and even on horseback – two-line epigrams, of which he was to write hundreds, were ideal in such circumstances. When he was concentrating on learning technique from the classical poets, he wrote mainly in Latin, but now, encouraged by a meeting with the poet Jacob Cats and perhaps more conscious of his country’s independence, he increasingly chose Dutch.
Towards the end of 1621, between voyages to England, he sent Cats a long work in Dutch, with alternative Dutch and Latin titles, ’t Voorhout or Batava Tempe. The Voorhout was (and is) a pleasant public space in The Hague, too broad to be called an avenue, too irregular to be a square, where the Huygens family lived and under whose lime trees the beau monde gathered to gossip and flirt. With the fondness for a place that often arises from being absent, Huygens boldly reimagines his urban stamping ground as the Vale of Tempe, the rural idyll of Apollo to the Greek poets. Piercing through its ‘roof of leaves’, the evening sun – ‘Thief betrayer, lenses’ friend’ – reveals a surprisingly modern, secular scene, teeming with the city’s youth, as the poet eavesdrops guiltlessly on their amorous exchanges. Hard on its heels came a second, more sharply satirical poem, ’t Costelick Mall, mocking fashion madness, which Huygens told Cats (in Middelburg) ‘may be read just as well in The Hague’.
Huygens was already acquainted with other leading poets through Roemer Visscher, an Amsterdam grain merchant, through whom he had met one of the greatest Dutch men of letters, the historian and poet Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft. These two figures were the leaders of the Muiden Circle, an informal group of writers and artists who met occasionally over a period of more than thirty years. Apart from Huygens, members included the tragedian Joost van den Vondel, Caspar Barlaeus, the professor of philosophy at Leiden, and the architect Jacob van Campen, as well as a noted cartographer and the glass-maker and playwright, Jan Vos, who wasn’t above using his verse in an effort to win commercial contracts.
The group’s name was taken from the turreted castle at Muiden, not far from Amsterdam, where Hooft had the right of residence in his capacity as the town’s magistrate. Hooft modernized the fort for use as a summer home and laid out gardens where parties were held and plays put on. While he conducted his public duties in a fearsome reception hall, he chose a small room in one of the turrets with a panoramic view of the Zuiderzee in which to write his verse. In truth, members of the Muiden Circle met so seldom that the sobriquet – a product of later cultural myth-making – was never justified. Some of the leading members may have coincided with one another, either at Muiden or at Visscher’s house in Amsterdam, only once or twice over the decades. Huygens himself was an infrequent visitor because of his diplomatic duties, and most of the others had similar professional pressures.
The ‘circle’ may have been more virtual than real, but it was nevertheless more than just a literary rubric. The writers collectively felt there was an opportunity ‘to mould manners and emotions, in reaction to the prevailing uncouthness’, and they hoped to do this by exploiting the latent potential of the Dutch language. Their own brisk poetic sparring did much to realize their goal. Even when obliged to resort to letters, an exchange of verse offered a more direct and concise manner of communication, bypassing the elaborate politesse required in conventional correspondence. When Roemer Visscher died in 1620, his position in the group was taken over by his two beautiful daughters, Anna and Maria Tesselschade. The women served as muses to the men and as frequent dedicatees of their verses, but they were also more than capable of responding to chivalrous overtures with verses of their own, which might lead their admirers on or mockingly put them in their place, as the mood took them. It had been Anna who introduced Huygens to Hooft; Huygens afterwards wrote a verse to Hooft characterizing her as ‘wijze Anna’ (‘wise Anna’) and her younger sister as ‘schone Tessel’ (‘beautiful Tessel’), to which Hooft responded, flattering Huygens by comparing him with Achilles. The pair continued to exchange sonnets, cleverly using the same rhyming words in reply each time.
From what little pictorial evidence survives, both women were highly attractive, and both were certainly unusually well educated in literature and languages. Their verses exchanged with Hooft and Huygens matched the men’s for poetic references and allusions. They were, too, skilled in drawing, calligraphy and modelling in clay as well as the more expected music and embroidery. They could ride, and had even learned to swim in the Geldersekade canal that ran by the family home in Amsterdam.
Anna’s speciality was diamond-point engraving, a painstaking Venetian technique of inscribing designs on glass that demands a steady nerve as well as hand. She engraved rummers (the Dutch for this kind of glass is roemer, and she was Roemer’s daughter) with ornate calligraphy, and was one of the first artists to incorporate motifs from nature in this medium. Huygens commissioned one of these glasses from Anna, which shows a dragonfly and various flowers, while another, engraved ‘AEN Constantinus Huygens’ (‘TO Constantinus Huygens’), carries her own verse implying that she turned to diamond-point work when writer’s block struck – an idea that must have appealed to the multitalented Huygens.
Maria was ten years younger than her sister, and had the fatal attraction of her byname, Tesselschade. Three months before she was born, on Christmas Eve 1593, a great storm had struck a large fleet of ships sheltering in the sea-roads by the island of Texel. Roemer Visscher was among the merchants who sustained losses that day, which he remembered when his daughter was christened; Tesselschade means Texel-loss or Texel-damage.
Huygens addressed many poems to his two ‘Amstel-nymphen’, and especially to Tesselschade, who remained an active associate of the Muiden Circle even after she married. When he returned to London in 1622, he wrote a long poem to her celebrating the ordinary sights of home: ‘O Scheveningen dune, O Hague butter-meadows . . .’. But in a string of poems to mark her wedding in 1623, and which continued after it, Huygens wrote:
Foe-friendly hand,
From the first you unlocked the chest
To bare my fragile breast,
From the first you set the axe
That has cut down my freedom
Even today, it seems surprising to find material of such passion addressed to a newly married woman. Lines like these are indicative of the social licence that the members of the Muiden Circle allowed themselves. In later years, Huygens’s torment over Tesselschade’s conversion to the Roman Catholic faith would lead him to produce ‘his best prose and poetry’.
Compared to fellow poets such as Hooft and Cats, Huygens’s verse was generally thought ‘difficult’. It required effort to extract meaning and pleasure from it, though most readers felt ultimately that the effort was rewarded. His poetic language was dense but rich, occasionally pompous, but also lightened by self-awareness. He had a weakness for homophones and other wordplay, especially applied to the names of people and places. A journey to Zierikzee in 1618 was excuse enough to invoke the sorceress Circe from Greek mythology, for example. He favoured the iambic metre, which lent itself to Dutch pronunciation with its often unstressed word endings, while his peers aimed for less artificial and more musical rhythms. His imagery and vocabulary drew on his exceptionally broad range of interests, his familiarity with many languages, and the things he had seen on his travels. Acquaintance with scientific topics gave his verse a spice that others lacked, and his rare skill of being able to reveal and describe the wonders of nature was greatly admired by his peers. By his association with the Muiden Circle, Huygens found a way to express his thoughts in poems and plays with a gratuitous wit and an emotional honesty that must have provided a welcome corrective to his life of diplomatic communiqués. He also gained a greater facility and quickness from the teasing cut-and-thrust with other members, and in exchange he left the group, and Dutch literary culture generally, with a poetic language greatly enriched by the new ingredients he had brought.
In 1630, when they were both respectively married with young families, Tesselschade asked Huygens if he would translate some of John Donne’s verses for her. Huygens may have heard the English metaphysical poet when he visited The Hague and preached there in December 1619, but he was certainly introduced to him during his postings in London from 1621, when Donne was instituted as the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. He heard Donne deliver sermons there on more than one occasion, and praised the quality of his oratory. Donne’s poetry was not published in his lifetime, but it circulated in manuscript form among his supporters. Tesselschade must have known that Huygens had copies. Although he was busy working on his own long poem, Dagh-werck (‘The day’s work’, a kind of symphonia domestica to his contented married life), Huygens picked out two elegies and two songs, including Donne’s well-known amatory complaint, ‘The Sunne Rising’ (‘Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?’). A few years later, he made translations of a further fifteen poems, including ‘The Flea’, but he omitted other famous pieces, such as the salacious ‘To his mistress going to bed’.
Huygens valued Donne’s poetry for its darkness and complexity, but these very qualities made translation exceptionally difficult, and he was never entirely satisfied with his efforts. In a short verse of his own accompanying the second batch of translations in 1633, he sought to manage Tesselschade’s expectations:
Translations fall as short of untranslated verse,
As shadows of the life; and shadows are the night:
But let not your discretion these despite;
They are noble maidens, they are daughters of the light.
Hooft’s verdict was that Huygens had successfully ‘preserved the English fruit in Holland’s honey’. But Vondel teased them all:
The British Donne,
That dark sun,
Shines not for all eyes,
Says Huygens without lies.
The language-learnèd Hagenaar.
The epicure of caviar,
Of snuff-taking and smoking,
That set raw brains a-cooking;
But this is a rare compost,
’tis a banquet for the Drost,*
And for our little comrade,
The sweet Tesselschade.
Vondel’s characterization of Huygens may be something of a caricature, but it does suggest that he was more given to the pleasures of the senses than his own writing tends to indicate.
The technical challenges of translation shed light on Huygens’s own priorities as a poet. He was fluent in English and accomplished as a poet in Dutch by the time he approached the task. He chose some of Donne’s more accessible verses that remain among his best known today, and he avoided ones that were deeply involved with theological argument and those containing cruel or vulgar imagery. If Huygens had hoped to find English poetry different mainly in degree from his own, he found it instead more different in kind, possessing a particular intensity of poetic expression. Donne’s emotional spontaneity was something any translator would find it difficult to replicate, and Huygens, more given to calculated cleverness with words, was perhaps not the ideal man for the job.
Donne’s lines are complicated enough in English. Translation into Dutch required decisions over the verse form, line lengths and rhyme scheme as well as individual words as Huygens strove to remain faithful to the overall meaning. His translation of ‘The Flea’, for example, follows Donne’s sense line for line, although Huygens’s alexandrines demand twelve syllables in place of Donne’s alternating eight and ten. The rhyming couplets of the original are kept, but literal accuracy ultimately triumphs over wit. Huygens’s version of ‘The Sunne Rising’ suffers still more, losing the palpable irritation of Donne’s interrupted lover. Donne’s opening lines – ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows and through curtains call on us?’ – emerge when back-translated as hardly more than a gentle enquiry: ‘Busy old fool; what let you shine on us / To rouse from bed through windows and curtains?’ Much of the bad temper of the accusation made towards the ‘unruly sun’ is gone; the passion has been drained away.
Huygens admitted these wayside losses. To Hooft, he wrote that Donne’s ‘fabric was so good that it remains pleasing translated even without poetic form’. His efforts were but ‘shadows of beautiful bodies in, which is worse, feeble sunlight, because of the weak rays I project owing to the pressure of many other concerns’. However, if his aim was to communicate the literal sense of Donne’s lines, he succeeded admirably. All the material content is conveyed in only a few more syllables than the original. As working translations, intended to give Tesselschade an accurate sense of what Donne had written, his translations do the job. From here, Tesselschade could employ her own poetic sensibility to infer some of the deeper connections made by Donne. Huygens in any case had had enough. In his covering poem to Tesselschade, he complained: ‘How solid and how square, how white, how hot, how heavy / is this English dish’.
For some reason, it had to go. The old man’s head. His ruddy face turned down to the floor, his bald pate shining, his grey beard spread across his chest like a napkin. He had lots of those. Rembrandt overpainted the largish panel and produced instead the image of an old woman – his mother is assumed to have been the model – in a black velvet hood with an embroidered lining. She stares at us with her grey eyes, tight-lipped and tough, her leathery face etched with the years. The work is tender but not sentimental. The woman is not sick or defeated, and she is certainly not seeking our pity. She is simply old; the painting is an honest, unflinching record of time’s work. Perhaps this was the work that Constantijn Huygens admired most when he first stepped into the peeling studio in Leiden that the twenty-two-year-old Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn may have shared with his younger but already more reputed friend Jan Lievens, for it was soon packaged up and sent to London as a present from Stadholder Frederik Hendrik to King Charles I of England.
The year was 1628, and Huygens had been looking for a Dutch Peter Paul Rubens, a painter who could equal the epic sweep and expressive touch of the Flemish genius, whom he called a ‘prince among painters, one of the seven wonders of the world’, for his master, the stadholder. And now he had found two. He was dumbstruck by their talent, the more so since they were low-born, Rembrandt being the son of a miller, Lievens an embroiderer’s son. ‘If I say that they are the only ones who can go up against the absolute geniuses among the many earlier great names, even then I do not do sufficient justice to the merits of these two,’ he wrote in his autobiography a couple of years later. ‘And when I say that they will soon surpass those geniuses, then I am merely interpreting the expectations that their best connoisseurs entertain based on their astonishing debut.’
As a more than competent draughtsman and painter himself, Huygens was perfectly able to make up his own mind on matters of artistic preference, but on this occasion he was happy to be found in accord with those other connoisseurs. Clearly, Huygens did not ‘discover’ Rembrandt and Lievens, as is sometimes claimed, but he was in an ideal position to transform their prospects and so to speed them on their way to the success that surely lay ahead for them. The way to do that – and to please his master into the bargain – would be to secure their services with some significant commissions for the walls of the stadholder’s palaces.
First, though, the beardless wonders, each ‘more boy than young man to judge by their faces’, needed to be licked into shape. The ‘old woman’ painting was a mere token of their promise. Huygens found Rembrandt superior in ‘accuracy and liveliness of the emotions’. Lievens scored for his ‘grandeur of invention and daring of subjects and figures’, and showed the greater ultimate potential, he felt. But neither, in his opinion, had been properly taught. With schooling in the techniques of Italian masters such as Raphael and Michelangelo, then they might really amount to something. But the two had other ideas. They had no wish to waste time in Italy, they were bursting to get down to work. ‘These men, born to drive art to the pinnacle, knew themselves better!’
For all his carefully calibrated assessment of the two painters, Huygens’s record of this early encounter cannot disguise that it is in fact Rembrandt whose work truly sets his pulse racing – more than he realizes, or is willing to admit to himself, perhaps. His epiphany came when he saw the artist’s large panel painting of a biblical scene, Repentant Judas Returning the Pieces of Silver (1629), which could be ‘set against all Italy, yes, and everything that has lasted there of the wondrous beauties from earliest antiquity’. A single painted gesture in it was enough to unleash from him an extraordinary torrent of descriptive prose:
The gesture of that Judas collapsed into despair (to say nothing of all the other impressive figures in this one painting), that lone demented Judas crying out, begging for the forgiveness he cannot ever expect, and in whose face all traces of hope have been erased; the visage haggard, the hair pulled out, the clothes torn, the arms twisted, the hands pressed together till they bleed, fallen to his knees in one unseeing dash, his whole body writhing in pitiful hideous remorse; all this I set against the beauty of the ages.
And all done by a ‘Hollander who has yet hardly ventured beyond the walls of the city where he was born’!
Huygens’s uncontrolled emotional response – far overstating what was actually painted (there is no torn clothing, there are no bleeding hands) – is surely just what Rembrandt was seeking. It is the first known description of the artist’s work to single out his exceptional capacity for depicting ‘movements of the soul’. Rembrandt would have been flattered indeed if Huygens, a man whose whole professional bearing bespoke discretion and reserve, had been so unguarded when he examined the painting in the artist’s presence.
It is probable, though, that Huygens remained cautious. He must have worried what this ungovernable talent might go on to produce, and whether he himself could overcome his own somewhat conservative tastes as well as the bias of the court in favour of Flemish and Italian styles of painting to persuade the stadholder to give the young Dutchman a try. The diplomat in him knew that his protégés would find life easier – and so would he – if they painted what was wanted. Although Huygens’s advice was sound and well intentioned, and although both artists knew that he was uniquely positioned to be able to give them the entrée they sought, they persisted in refusing to help themselves. Not only did they shun his recommendation to study Italian painting, but also each impishly chose to paint subjects he had been told the other was better at, with Lievens producing history paintings and Rembrandt, portraits.
However, Lievens did want to paint one portrait: Huygens’s own. Huygens agreed to sit if Lievens came to stay with him in The Hague, which he hurried to do only a few days later, sleepless with excitement about the commission. Because Huygens was busy as always, and the winter days were short, Lievens stayed just long enough to do the clothes and hands before returning home, preferring to work from the imagination to do the face, although he did return in the spring to finish the work. Huygens was greatly pleased with the result, and countered friends who said that the ‘pensive expression’ Lievens had given him belied his ‘geniality’ by saying that he had been weighed down at the time with family matters (Susanna gave birth to Christiaan in the spring of 1629).
At length, Huygens appears to have exerted some influence over the young artists, as he would do later over his own sons. Lievens was packed off to seek his fortune in London, doubtless with introductions from Huygens. Rembrandt, dishevelled and bareheaded in 1628, was by 1631 at least wearing a hat and able to project a presentable image of himself to prospective patrons. Perhaps a man so aware of the power of his own image would not need much tutelage, but it is easily believable that the consummate courtier was able to impart some useful advice to Rembrandt about the performative aspect of human appearance.
In 1632 Huygens visited Rembrandt again and asked him to paint a pair of small panels – one of his brother Maurits and the other of his friend’s son, Jacques de Gheyn III. If it was a test, it was a stern one for Rembrandt to produce likenesses of two men so well known to Huygens. He passed it – though perhaps only just, as we shall see – and shortly began work on a portrait of Amalia van Solms, the wife of Frederik Hendrik. But royal subjects were perhaps not the best for Rembrandt’s truth-telling brush. While his finished portrait of Amalia was quietly swapped for one by a more conventional artist, he was given a very different challenge to produce a pair of paintings of the elevation of the Cross and Christ’s descent from the Cross, which were probably completed in 1633. These proved more acceptable to the prince, and led to a further commission for three new Passion paintings. An Ascension was finished in 1636. A few years later, Rembrandt completed two more paintings on the same large scale, an Entombment of Christ and a Resurrection. The five works were each nearly a metre high with rounded tops, presumably to fit in a series of arched spaces.
Rembrandt’s only surviving correspondence is a set of seven letters that he wrote to Huygens in 1636 and 1639 concerning these paintings, strongly implying that it was Huygens who was responsible for getting him the commissions. Thanks to the diplomat’s efficient filing system, we have the only written insight into Rembrandt’s priorities as an artist and his situation as a supplier in relation to his client. As Huygens’s side of the correspondence has not been kept, the full nature of the relationship between the two men must be divined from Rembrandt’s words alone.
The letters began with high hopes on both sides, but were to end in ‘mutual dissatisfaction’. Rembrandt was fortunate to win a job that held the possibility of much more work to come. However, he was aware that he would have to follow the example of Rubens if he was to live up to the high expectations set for him. The artist wrote to Huygens in February 1636 to inform him that he was working ‘very diligently’ and ‘skilfully’ on the three new paintings. One of them, the Ascension, was already done, while the other two were ‘more than half done’, which as Simon Schama has pointed out may, in the language of the procrastinating freelance, mean no more than ‘nine-sixteenths’ done. Then, perhaps in an attempt to deflect attention from his tardiness, Rembrandt threw the ball back into Huygens’s court, seeking to know whether the prince wanted all three paintings together, or to take delivery of them one by one as they were finished.
Huygens must have replied that he wanted to see the one finished canvas, for Rembrandt’s next letter two weeks later announced that he himself would be following along shortly to see how it looked hung alongside the Elevation and the Descent from the Cross finished in 1633. He requested a fee of £200, ‘but I should be content with whatever his Excellency settles upon’. Allowing for the overabundance of customary courtesies that frame seventeenth-century letters, it is clear that Rembrandt employed a minimal level of politeness in his correspondence with Huygens, whom he clearly felt was prepared to put up with what he calls, without apology, his ‘impertinence’.
It was another three years before Rembrandt completed the two remaining pieces in this second royal commission. On 12 January 1639, he finally wrote to Huygens again, pleased with what he had achieved, itching to deliver the finished paintings for Huygens to see, ‘because these two are the ones where the greatest and the most natural mobility has been observed, which is also the main reason that I have been working on them for so long’. He also promised Huygens handsome personal compensation for his patience, in the form of ‘a piece 10 feet long by 8 feet high’. (This single work, if it materialized, would be almost twice the area of all five of the Passion paintings put together.)
The effect that Rembrandt was drawing to Huygens’s attention was his expression of motion and emotion combined. A sense of action and feeling is vibrantly communicated by the highly theatrical illumination. Light is pooled towards the centre of each painting, an effect that would be naturally accentuated when they were seen installed in their alcoves. Rembrandt’s light does not fall or radiate like natural light, but acts like a vector of the story in each painting: in the Elevation, it slants upward following the Cross as it is raised; in the Descent, it slumps downward with weight of Christ’s body. It slips sideways in the Entombment, it comes down with the angel of the Lord descending from Heaven in the Resurrection, and it rises again in the final Ascension. Displayed in the correct narrative sequence, these different thrusts bring an animating rhythm and an overall symmetry to the series.
Huygens attempted to decline Rembrandt’s excessive gift, but sent word to have the two final Passion paintings brought to him. Rembrandt sent the paintings, along with a demand for ‘no less than a thousand guilders’ apiece. This must have come as a shock to Huygens, since for the first two paintings in the series, completed six years before, Rembrandt had been paid a total of 1,200 guilders. However, the artist had that month signed the contract to buy an extravagant house on Breestraat in Amsterdam for 13,000 guilders, and needed the cash to pay the deposit.
Huygens ignored the claim for a few days until an admirer of the artist in Amsterdam stepped in with a solution to advance 1,200 guilders (the undisputed 600 guilders per painting) directly, before the stadholder’s accounts office in The Hague was ready to process the payment. Preferring some money soon to the doubtful prospect of more money later, Rembrandt speedily, if somewhat gracelessly, accepted the offer for the paintings, ‘since His Highness in goodwill is not to be moved to a higher price, even though they are manifestly worth it, . . . provided that I might be compensated for my outlay on the 2 ebony frames and the crate, which together come to 44 guilders’. Payment of 1,244 Carolus guilders was duly made, and Rembrandt’s relations with Huygens came to an abrupt end.
Rembrandt always remained grateful to Huygens. His letters had repeatedly invoked their ‘friendship’, and in his last communication, he wrote: ‘I shall always seek to repay such to your lordship with reverence, service and friendly regard.’ Huygens may have been disappointed that his great Dutch hope did not appear to care too much for court patronage (although he did paint two more canvases several years later), and he was surely dismayed at the way their personal friendship ended, even though a resolution had been achieved in their business dealings. However, Rembrandt’s art was developing in directions that were no longer in line with Huygens’s own tastes, and so it seems inevitable that a split should have come sooner or later. The diplomat could console himself with the fact that it was not hard to find oneself on the wrong side of Rembrandt. The wealthy Amsterdam official Jan Six, perhaps Rembrandt’s only other important client in terms of the personal interest he took, also fell out with him in the 1650s, and once again it was the artist’s expensive house that was the source of their friction.
But there is a twist in the tale – and a barb at the end of it, too.
Lacking his reply to Rembrandt’s offer of a large painting ‘that will do honour to my lord in his house’, we cannot, of course, tell whether Huygens was truly seeking to deflect the gift, or simply employing excessive politesse, which the artist then misconstrued. Rembrandt sent it anyway, ‘against my lord’s wishes’, with the recommendation that he hang it in a strong light where one could stand away from it, and where ‘it will best sparkle’.
This ‘first memento’, as Rembrandt put it, was also the last he was to give Huygens. What would make a suitable souvenir? What was the subject of this vast canvas? The date, 1636, and the dimensions correspond to The Blinding of Samson, an astonishing work where the harsh light of day seeps from the back of the painting into a cave in which a scene of appalling violence is taking place as the betrayed Samson is held down and stabbed in the eye by one Philistine soldier while another stands by with his dark spear dramatically silhouetted against Samson’s gleaming chest, ready to take him into servitude.
Would Rembrandt have been so insensitive – or so waspishly cruel – as to offer this particular subject to his bespectacled client who fretted often about blindness in himself and others? Many sources accept this version, although the painting was not in the inventory when Huygens’s paintings were sold off nearly a century after his death. The dimensions correspond with those Rembrandt gives, but it is known from the existence of near-contemporary copies that the canvas was once even larger, and Huygens was not entirely averse to gruesome subjects, admiring a friend’s copy of the famously gory Head of Medusa by his beloved Rubens, for example. Huygens would also have been sensitive to the full story of the painting, in which Samson is shortly to repent of earlier sins – in other words, to be restored in his moral vision, which was a theme of his own poems about blindness. Others believe that Rembrandt must have rewarded Huygens with another painting, such as the one now known as Danaë, also painted in 1636, which was similarly cut down from a larger canvas and is, now at least, a little smaller than the work Rembrandt had promised. But perhaps Huygens’s Calvinist mind would have still preferred the message of the biblical story to the soft pornography of this Greek myth.
Huygens kept his misgivings about Rembrandt’s art to himself. In 1632, while the artist was producing his first test pieces in the hope of gaining work for the court, Huygens quietly amused himself by jotting down a number of mocking couplets about the portrait Rembrandt had made of Jacques de Gheyn III. A typical example runs:
Were this at all de Gheyn’s visage,
It would be de Gheyn’s true image.
In other words, it was not his face, and no likeness. Huygens was too discreet to publish the epigrams while he was professionally involved with Rembrandt. But five years after their working relationship was over, he did gather seven of the little verses for inclusion in a collection of verse published in 1644, Momenta Desultoria. An eighth couplet that actually named the painter was omitted.
It would have been painfully obvious to Rembrandt that he was the object of the squibs. Others close to the Huygens family, a circle that included very many poets, painters and courtiers, would have known or guessed the fact. Although Huygens carefully prefaced the set with a heading, ‘On Jacques de Gheyn’s portrait, which is quite unlike him, in jest’, and littered them with his usual wordplay, it would be understandable if Rembrandt had been embarrassed and angered by their publication.
5. Rembrandt, Satire on Art Criticism, 1644. The figure sitting astride the barrel with his glasses left at his feet may be Constantijn Huygens.
It seems that he must have read them immediately, for that same year he made a small pen-and-ink drawing known as his Satire on Art Criticism. The sketch depicts an artist squatting on the ground as a succession of his paintings is paraded before a connoisseur arrogantly seated astride a barrel. Various great and good in robes and hats and chains of office hang on the expert’s every word as he pronounces on the works one by one, jabbing his pipe in their direction. Rembrandt’s scabrous intent is apparent from the huge ass’s ears that poke through the critic’s hat, and from the fact that the painter is looking round wickedly at us while wiping his arse after defecating.
The timeless image represents the artist’s frustrating lack of power in relation to all kinds of influential but often ignorant figures – critics, patrons, pursers, connoisseurs, idle followers of fashion. But it is not only a certain resemblance in the angular face that makes it possible that the figure Rembrandt is portraying is a specific one, namely his former champion Huygens. For lying neglected on the ground at the connoisseur’s feet is a pair of spectacles – naturally, he is not using them to examine the work, because he is vain, and because a foolish critic does not truly look.
However disrespectful he was, Rembrandt must have soon regained favour in the Huygens household. For one summer’s day in 1645, just a year after Constantijn Huygens had published his verses on de Gheyn’s likeness, his sixteen-year-old son Christiaan, then studying at Leiden, found himself in a dry-colour painting class staring at Rembrandt’s stock old man, the same one that lay buried beneath the paint of the old woman’s portrait that his father had seen in 1628. How was Christiaan able to copy a painting that had been painted over before he was even born? Perhaps copies of the original were made and circulated in Leiden, when Rembrandt was working there, or afterwards. Or perhaps Constantijn was given a copy, which would then be known to Christiaan, following that first studio visit. Christiaan’s highly competent rendering of the painting in graphite and red-and-white chalk reproduces the shine of the old man’s domed forehead and bestows an enlivening fleck of red on one eyelid. By his own account, the little sketch cost him a great deal of time and effort, and the result must have almost been the equal of Rembrandt’s achievement in oils, since he wrote to his brother Lodewijk, ‘you can hardly see the difference’.
In the spring of 1632 Constantijn Huygens travelled to Leiden, where he visited Jacob Golius, the scholar of Arabic who had been appointed as the professor of mathematics at the university in succession to Willebrord Snel. There, he met the thirty-six-year-old René Descartes. The three men discussed the optical property of refraction. Huygens was greatly impressed by the Frenchman, and his ability to offer convincing explanations of physical phenomena. He felt exalted that his own interpretations were rendered superfluous on the spot. After they parted, he felt he was still being shadowed by this ‘wonderful Gaul’.
From that moment, Huygens became an ardent admirer of Descartes’s physics and philosophy. Already a believer in the power of Baconian scientific reasoning and experiment, he now began to familiarize himself with the Frenchman’s more conceptual approach. Together, the contrasting strategies had the potential to give him a foundation for the pursuit of natural philosophy in both its theoretical and its practical aspects as complete as anybody’s in Europe.
Descartes was no less effusive in his praise for Huygens. He wrote to Golius: ‘There are qualities which occasion one to esteem those who possess them without causing us to love them, and others which cause us to love them without raising our esteem; but I find that he possesses both of these together in perfection.’
Descartes came to the Dutch Republic first in 1618 with a hope of joining the army. He was billeted in Breda, on the southern part of the Dutch ring of defences, but saw no military action as the long truce in the Eighty Years War was still in effect. There was time instead for him to indulge’ his taste in gambling and other mathematical challenges. Puzzles were sometimes put up on posters around the city for anybody to attempt. Descartes fell in with Isaac Beeckman, who translated the notices for him, and a friendship developed between them based on their shared interest in science.
Born in Touraine, Descartes was sent to a new but already renowned Jesuit college in the region, where he obtained a sound liberal education in literature and mathematics. One Père François, who sought to refute claims of occult happenings by exposing them as effects achieved by mirrors and distorting glasses, did much to kindle his interest in optics. His debunking of astrology and magic in similar style gave the young Descartes an enduring taste for rigorous methods of enquiry.
After college, Descartes sampled life in Paris, but found the social scene tedious. He tried the city again after travelling abroad, but nothing had changed, and he made a permanent withdrawal to the Dutch Republic in 1629. Although the attraction of such a move might be thought to be its religious toleration and greater freedom of thought, the Republic was for Descartes above all a boring place, where, as he told friends, they were only interested in trade, and he would be free to sleep easy and long. He settled first in the university city of Franeker in the province of Friesland, but soon moved to Amsterdam, which is where he was living when he met Huygens. Later though, he was to retreat from the city once more, to the tiny coastal village of Egmond-Binnen in North Holland, where he would turn from specific problems in physics and begin to consider the universal principles underlying them, and write his first important philosophical works, Discourse on Method and the three treatises, on meteorology, optics and geometry, to which it formed an extended introduction.
Descartes lived in the Dutch Republic for twenty years, until he was lured away to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden in 1649. He died in Stockholm the following year, unable to bear the cold and the early risings necessary to make his tutorial appointments with the queen. Shortly before he left for Sweden, Frans Hals painted the portrait of him that has become our standard image of the philosopher. He is looking grimly out of the frame at us with a broad mouth and set jaw, and lank brown hair flowing over his collar. An apparently disembodied hand just creeping into the bottom corner of the painting, holding his hat, could almost be a joke at the expense of the philosopher’s ideas of mind–body separation.
Discourse on Method set out the philosophical approach that came to be known as Cartesian doubt. In it, Descartes’s starting point is to doubt everything that can be doubted; except that, in order to be able to do this, the one thing we cannot doubt is our own existence. This is the origin of his dictum cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. In order for the world to be known by the human mind, it first must be sensed. However, doubt enters here, too, for what our senses tell us may not be true. Objects may be no more than sense perceptions, and our senses may not perceive accurately. Since sight is the most important of our senses, as well as the sense that seemed during Descartes’s time the most susceptible to scientific investigation, it is possible to see why optics became an important part of Descartes’s project, even leading him to perform his own dissection of bulls’ eyes.
Consider the puzzle posed by the production of optical images – images of the sort that Drebbel produced with his camera obscura that so entertained Constantijn Huygens in London perhaps, or images like those which Descartes’s teacher Père François was able to prove were not the devil’s work. How is the appearance of an object seen in one place transmitted to another place? How do the two object-images differ? What sort of reality does each possess? The question need not even involve mediation by a manmade instrument. Every now and again, through a ruffled surface of water, you might glimpse a fragmented image – a reflection of a sunlit branch that suddenly appears as if snapped in two, say, or a stick emerging from the water that appears to kink abruptly just at the water’s surface. How does this discontinuous image arrive at the eye? Is it sent out whole and perfect only to become broken in transit, as it were? Or is it disassembled in some way and then imperfectly reassembled at the end of its journey, if indeed it is right to describe its translation as a journey? Optical reflections were, of course, familiar, and could be said to be understood at a basic level. However, the refraction that causes the stick in the water to appear kinked defied human intuition (and the work of Harriot and Snel was not widely known).
Now, imagine the viewer of a planet through a telescope or of a microbe through a microscope. This person sees an image made large, brought close to the eye, as if they could reach in through the eyepiece of the instrument to grasp it in their fingers. How is this apparition made at this new size? Certainly the glass lenses through which the viewer has had to look have been carefully fashioned to a particular shape, and carefully positioned along the line of sight. It is clear that these simple glass shapes alone must perform the trick. But before the ray diagrams that could at least begin to explain the change of scale between object and image, it was not uncommon for people to believe that the optics actually generated a kind of replica of the object.
These questions had exercised ancient Greek and Arab philosophers such as Empedocles and al-H·asan ibn al-Haytham (often known as Al-Hazen). But it was the invention of the telescope, which had not required any fundamental theory of optics to bring it into being, that gave them new impetus. Descartes was distressed that such an innovation could be made without reference to an underlying scientific principle at all. With the benefit of this missing guidance, he thought, it might be possible to construct telescopes with limitless powers of magnification. However, Descartes was not satisfied simply with establishing an empirical rule of refraction, the so called ‘ratio of sines’ (of the two angles made by light bending at the interface between one medium and another), which was useful for building optical instruments. He also, characteristically, wanted to trace the ultimate cause of light bending in this way.
Descartes’s practical engagement with optics was guided by his friendship with the versatile Middelburg engineer Isaac Beeckman. Their relationship was one of bright apprentice to accomplished master as Descartes brought ideas about the theory of lenses into contact with Beeckman’s matchless expertise in making them. At the same time, Descartes also hoped to bring to Amsterdam a Parisian artisan, Jean Ferrier, whom he had engaged to build a machine that he hoped would be able to grind more perfect lenses. He warned Ferrier that it would be hard graft, but there would be great rewards: ‘if you were to take a year or two to adjust yourself to all that is necessary, I would dare hope that we would see, by your means, whether there are animals on the moon’.
The difficulty in obtaining optical perfection appeared to lie with the precise curvature of the lenses. Despite their apparent geometric ideality, spherical lenses (whose surface or surfaces, convex or concave, follow the curvature of a sphere) do not bring rays of light that pass through them close to the rim to the same focal point as more central rays. In addition to this spherical aberration, they also produce chromatic aberration, owing to the glass of the lens acting like a prism and separating the light passing through it into colours. To a geometer and theoretician such as Descartes, the knowledge that a spherical lens does not produce a single focal point immediately set the challenge of finding a form that did. The presumption was that such a form, even if not spherical, would still have its basis in ideal mathematics. Influenced by his knowledge of the geometry of conic sections, Descartes reasoned that another mathematically generated perfect curve, the hyperbola, might be the answer.
Descartes soon fell out with both Beeckman and Ferrier, but he persisted in his wish to grind a hyperbolic lens. His initial encounter with Huygens was timely, therefore. Huygens was not able to contribute theoretically since his mathematical knowledge was largely confined to accountancy. But he did have first-hand experience of lens-grinding from Drebbel, and many useful connections. Unfortunately, he was only able to devote time to the project in 1635, upon his return from that summer’s army campaign. He assured Descartes that his enthusiasm for helping him had not cooled, and told him that he had found a turner in Amsterdam who could do the job. Between them, they agreed the dimensions and the desired optical properties of the lens, which was to be flat on one side and convex on the other, with a focal length of fourteen thumbs. Huygens then made a tracing of the hyperbolic curve they had sketched together for the turner. After a few weeks, Huygens was able to write to Descartes, proudly enclosing the lens made ‘out of my Hyperbola’, punning that ‘not without real hyperbole, for the first attempt, I think it is well done’. But Descartes found the lens came to a focus at many different points and was therefore useless. Not wishing to hurt his new patron’s feelings, perhaps, he suggested that the turner might not have followed Huygens’s drawing; the turner blamed the drawing.
The two men issued new instructions, this time using a hyperbola drawn by Descartes, but this lens, too, proved unsatisfactory. For their third attempt, a year later, Huygens enlisted the mathematician Frans van Schooten, a young acolyte of Descartes, to draw the troublesome curve. The figure was mathematically accurate, but once again the resulting lens did not produced a clear image. After two years of effort, Descartes and Huygens had failed to match the craftsmanship of Ferrier a decade earlier, and their collaboration in practical science came to an end, with Descartes remaining convinced that the artisanal hand was the source of error, and hoping to find a mechanical way to accomplish the task.
Huygens’s eagerness to be involved at the forefront of new thinking is well displayed in this unhappy episode, but so too is his naivety in thinking that such a fundamental problem in optics could be resolved so expediently. However, there were more important ways in which Huygens was able to make himself useful to the French philosopher. Descartes had held back from publishing previous work in 1633 when he heard that Galileo had been put on trial for heresy in Rome in the wake of the controversy that had arisen following the publication of his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. His reluctance seems surprising since he would have run into no such difficulties in the Netherlands, where his ideas, as well as those of Galileo, were not considered dangerous.
Huygens was not a man to pit theology and science against each other. He regarded Descartes as a beacon of rationalism, and was prepared to help his friend in any way that he could when the Discourse was ready to be published. He wrote to him full of praise for the work: ‘I devoured your discours de la Méthode, which is truly the best, the most daring, and, as I think the Italians keenly express it, la più saporita [the tastiest], piece that I have ever seen. If it matters that you should know my opinion, I protest that it satisfies me in every way.’ He persuaded van Schooten to comment critically on the manuscript, and to provide the figures for the scientific and mathematical sections of the work. The Discourse was published anonymously in June 1637 by Jan Maire of Leiden. Huygens was able to use his diplomatic privilege to smooth its path to publication in France, too, by forwarding Descartes’s letters to Paris colleagues via the Dutch embassy in that city, and by negotiating guarantees that the Dutch publisher’s interest in the work would be respected there. Thus, a Dutchman acted as the midwife to one of the most important of all works of French philosophy in its own country.
Later, when his ideas did come under attack in the Dutch Republic (though never to the level of existential threat faced by Galileo in Italy), Descartes was able to turn to Huygens to ask for the stadholder’s intercession to guarantee his safety from his intellectual adversaries. However, the Frenchman may not always have grasped quite how robustly the machinery of Dutch tolerance turned. It is true that his views were sometimes subject to legal strictures and local bans, but he was wrong to interpret these actions as personal assaults. Rather than caving in to these furious condemnations, he might have done better to treat them as an exhortation to rejoin the fray with greater force. For all the difficulties that he faced, he always remained free to work and to publish in Holland, and the Cartesian way of thinking steadily gained ground there during the middle years of the seventeenth century.
In the Dutch Republic, Descartes found himself the beneficiary of a set of conditions unique in Europe. True freedom of thought was evidenced in the constant eruption of conflicting ideas and the sense that almost anything was thinkable. The soporific country he had sought out that wished only to trade, wished to trade in ideas too. Science was not confined to established universities where it could be easily smothered by orthodoxy, as it was in the Italian cities or in Paris. Instead, following the pattern set by Simon Stevin, it arose most vigorously in the civic setting, with the expectation that it might offer practical benefits, whether these were for the defence of cities, the creation of new agricultural land or the accelerated movement of people and goods for increased trade. The sight of new canals and polders of farmland claimed from the marshes stretching in grids to the horizon demonstrated a potential for the control of nature that surely excited and sustained Descartes during his Dutch years, while the cities harboured a cultured citizenry ready to assist in the dissemination of new ideas, and among whom Descartes had found a veritable paragon in Constantijn Huygens.