Rembrandt's Eyes

viii) REMBRANDT’S EYES Few would disagree that Rembrandt is unsurpassed as a painter of the human face. Regardless of age, gender, station, situation or expression, he is able to distil from each face its own peculiar intensity, and it is hard not to be moved by Rembrandt’s faith in faces. Despite the ceaseless inventiveness of Rembrandt’s face-painting, there is at least one important compositional component that remains fairly consistent – his tendency to brightly illuminate his sitters/protagonists from their right. This convention helps anchor and structure their faces, and lends them a certain gravitas and ‘spiritual’ depth. Those few portraits (mostly etchings) in which the sitters/protagonists are illuminated from the left, and/or turn to their left, usually have a rather different feel. They are more urgently and even indecorously intimate. This dichotomy would suggest that Rembrandt was well versed in the symbolism of left and right. The fact that it is exploited most radically – and creatively - in his late self-portraits shows, I think, that he regarded it as one of the most powerful weapons in the painter’s armoury. These explorations culminate in the great synthesis of the Kenwood Self-Portrait (c1665), where left and right are held together in dynamic equilibrium. *** In three of Rembrandt’s painted self-portraits light falls from the sitter’s left. Two of these self-portraits are classic Zecharian images. The broadly grinning Study in the Mirror (c.1630), which is lit from the right, would partially disprove my thesis, but its attribution is contested. E. van de Wetering, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings iv: Self-Portraits, Dordrecht 2005, pp 165ff, where it is attributed to Jan Lievens. If it is by Rembrandt, it may have been a study for an etching of the same subject, which would explain the ‘reversal’ of the lighting; the same may be true of the similarly lit, but more thoughtful and plaintive, Laughing Soldier (1629-30, Mauritshuis, The Hague): ibid., fig. 128, p 168. Light falls from the sitter’s left in the Self-Portrait as the Prodigal Son in the Tavern (c1635), an updated version of the biblical story with Rembrandt playing the part of the prodigal son carousing drunkenly in an inn, his outsized left hand spread across the lower back of his wife Saskia, who plays a woman of easy virtue perched on his lap. Rembrandt by Himself, C. White (ed.), London 1999, no. 43, p. 159. ‘Rembrandt’ is seated with his back towards the viewer, and so although light falls in the conventional manner from our left, it also falls from the prodigal son’s left. He turns his head sharply to look at us over his left shoulder, but even now the left eye is privileged for the wide brim of his tilted hat casts the right eye into shadow, while leaving the left eye brightly illuminated. In Self-Portrait as Zeuxis (c.1662), Rembrandt in the guise of the great Greek painter Zeuxis paints the portrait of an old lady. Ibid., no. 82, pp. 216-19; A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings iv: Self-Portraits, op. cit., IV 25, pp. 552-61. Although Zeuxis was famed for his portrait of the supremely beautiful Helen of Troy, he had reputedly died by suffocating with laughter while making a portrait of a wrinkled, droll old lady. The story was popular in Rembrandt’s circle, for his pupil Samuel von Hoogstraten mentions it twice in his Introduction to the Art of Painting (1678), and another pupil, Arent de Gelder, painted this same subject in 1685, depicting himself as Zeuxis. Old women were standard buts for derision, and the basic mise-en-scene of Rembrandt’s picture is similar to that of a painting by Sofonisba Anguissola (c.1550) which, when reproduced in a print by the Netherlandish artist Jacob Bos, carried an explanatory inscription: “The beffudled old woman [who is trying to learn the alphabet] moves the young girl to laughter”. C. Grössinger, Humour and Folly in Secular and Profane Prints of Northern Europe 1430-1540, London 2002, pp. 107-29; Bilder vom Alten Menschen in der Niederlämdish Deutschen Kunst 1550-1750, exh. cat. Braunschweig 1993, p. 18. Rembrandt/Zeuxis looks out at us over his left shoulder, and the light, streaming in from his left, illuminates the left side of his face, with its open-mouthed grin, screwed up eye, and extravagantly jack-knifed eyebrow. Girolamo Cardano, in an illustrated treatise on metoposcopy – the science of reading the marks and lines on the forehead - first published in Paris in 1658, interpreted an extravagantly arched line above the left eye as signifying “a man who burns intensely with lust…affected by the vice of avarice and lacking in humanity”. Girolamo Cardano, Lettura della Fronte: Metoposcopia, ed. and trans. A. Arecchi, Milan 1994, p. 41, fig. 51. The painter’s mahlstick rises up from his midriff towards the bolt-upright image of the old lady in a suggestive manner. The painting technique is appropriately coarse, and Zeuxis has rugged, bark-like skin. The pose is a reprise of a sketch made in 1644, which has been given the title Satire on Art Criticism, in which a critic furnished with asses ears, and with a snake coiled round his right arm, sits on a barrel pontificating about a painting held up before him. The Robert Lehman Collection vii: Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century European Drawings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1999, no. 70, pp. 219-28, entry by E. Haverkamp-Begemann. The critic occupies the same ‘laughing-stock’ role as the old woman for just behind the picture that is being judged lurks a man who could well be Rembrandt’s alter-ego: he crouches down to defecate, and smirks conspiratorially at us over his left shoulder. Only his left eye has been depicted – a big black inky blob that has something of the ‘evil eye’ about it. The Self-Portrait as Zeuxis recalls Rembrandt’s early series of expressive self-portrait etchings such as ‘Self-Portrait’, Open-Mouthed (1630) and ‘Self-Portrait’, Smiling (1630). Rembrandt by Himself, op. cit., no. 22 & 23, pp. 127-8. Most of his portrait and self-portrait etchings are lit from the left because he usually just reversed his drawings, which are lit from the right, but if we compare the drawing and etching of Self-Portrait with Beret (c.1635), it is clear that the expression is more severely solemn in the drawing. In the etching, there’s a glint in his eye and the hint of a smile, and the peak of his beret has a more rakish tilt. The portrait etchings are usually lit from the left, and this seems to chime with the more “informal” nature of all his prints: the sitters for his portrait etchings tend to be “relations, friends, colleagues or people with whom the artist had some personal contact”. C. Wright, Rembrandt as an Etcher, New Haven 1999, p. 113. Where a drawing or oil-sketch survives (lit from the sitter’s right) for a portrait that was subsequently made into an etching (‘reversed’ and lit from the left) the etching often feels more spontaneous. Thus the red chalk drawing Self-Portrait with Beret (c.1635-8) is more sedate and unsmiling than the etching; the oil-sketch Portrait of Ephraim Bueno (1647) is more solemn than the frankly jovial etching, and the painting Portrait of Arnout Tholinx (c1656) is more meditative than the print. Rembrandt by Himself, op. cit., no. 44 & 45, pp. 160-1. Rembrandt the Printmaker, E. Hinterding et al., exh. cat. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 58-9 & ct. 82.. Rembrandt’s prints – both of religious and secular subjects - are perhaps his most ‘sublunary’ images. The third painted self-portrait lit from the sitter’s left, Self Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar (1659), is in some respects the exception to prove the rule. For although Rembrandt peers at us over his left shoulder, and the painting of the face is unusually free, the expression is neither especially indecorous nor conspiratorial. However, Rembrandt softens the chiaroscuro by illuminating the face from high up and in front so that both sides of his face are almost equally brightly lit. With this self-portrait Rembrandt was, it seems, after heightened immediacy, not outrage. Rembrandt by Himself, op. cit., no. 73, pp. 200-3; A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings iv: Self-Portraits, op. cit., IV 18, pp. 498-507. In a few early self-portraits, both eyes are in shadow, which P. Chapman claims to signify a man of melancholic temperament: Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth Century Identity, Princeton 1990, pp. 25 & 30-1. Titian’s Self-Portrait (c.1546-7) in which he turns to his left and is let from his left, has a heightened immediacy, and his luxurious clothes and gold chain point to his worldly success; conversely, the later Self-Portrait (c.1560) in which he is shown in left profile, lit from his right, is much more sober, somber and static. They are not Zecharian portraits, insofar as the meaning is conveyed by orientation, dress and illumination rather than by the eyes; but they are antithetical in a similar way. *** The painted self-portraits of the 1660s are unprecedented in the regularity with which they depict the painter with the tools of his trade. Only once before, in The Painter in his Studio (c.1629), had he painted himself in medias res, but in this very small painting he is a far-off, diminutive figure at the back of his studio, observing his canvas from a distance. Rembrandt by Himself, op. cit., no. 17, pp. 120-1; From the 1660s, we have the Self-Portrait as Zeuxis and two other ‘close-up’ half-lengths, both lit from the sitter’s right. In the first, the hieratic Self-Portrait at the Easel (1660), the focus is principally on Rembrandt’s head, Ibid., no. 79, p. 211; A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings iv: Self-Portraits, op. cit., IV 19, pp. 508-16. The National Gallery Self-Portrait (1669) originally showed him with paint brush in hand: Ibid., IV 27, p. 571 (x-ray image). but the second, the celebrated Kenwood Self-Portrait (c1665), constitutes Rembrandt’s most ambitious and moving statement about his status and purpose as an artist, and as such it can be paired with the Self-Portrait as Zeuxis. Rembrandt had been declared bankrupt, and his house and extensive art collection sold off in 1657: it is hard not to feel in these self-portraits showing the artist busy at work that the elderly Rembrandt was taking stock and laying claim to his own artistic territory at a time when his commercial star was on the wane. C. and A. Tümpel, Rembrandt: Images and Metaphors, London 2006, pp. 252ff. In the Self-Portrait (c1665) at Kenwood the painter stands before a canvas inscribed with two geometrical forms. C. Brown et al.: Rembrandt: the Master and his Workshop vol 1: Paintings, exh. cat. National Gallery London 1991, pp. 284-7, no. 49; Rembrandt by Himself, op. cit., no. 83, pp. 220-23; A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings iv: Self-Portraits, op. cit., no IV 26, pp. 562-9. . Away to his left is a segment of a circle, truncated by the edge of the canvas, and behind his head, rising to his right, and continuing past his right elbow, is the circumference of another circle. His right hand appears to be tucked into the pocket of his fur-lined robe, and his left hand holds a palette, brushes and maulstick. As can be seen from X-rays, Rembrandt had originally depicted himself standing before an easel, with his brush in his left hand. It is usually assumed that he did this because he was looking in a mirror, and on realising his mistake, reworked the left hand. Yet he seems to have been smiling, in which case it may have been a more restrained reprise of the Self-Portrait as Zeuxis, this time as a deliberately ‘gauche’ artist. The revised version which we see today offers a far more balanced image of the artist. Various explanations have been given for the geometrical forms, none of which have gained universal assent. See note 14 for references. One theory argues that they relate to the circles drawn by calligraphers to demonstrate their skill in drawing freehand – but this is weakened by the fact that they are not complete circles. Another suggestion - that they echo the shapes of world maps that were hung on the walls of Dutch houses - is doubtful for several reasons: the circles are widely separated; the one to Rembrandt’s left has a slightly smaller radius; both ‘circles’ are incomplete and empty. In addition, it is hard to see why Rembrandt would depict himself making a painting that only featured part of such a map. If he wanted to suggest that during his long career he had painted and could paint the entire visible world, why didn’t he just show an actual map on the wall of his studio – as Vermeer did in his Allegory of Painting? An even less convincing explanation is that they are a purely decorative background. The most interesting proposal thus far is that the portrait depicts the Aristotelian trio of qualities that are essential for the artist: ingenium (inborn talent), ars (theory) and exercitatio (practice). J. A. Emmens, Rembrandt en de regels van de kunst, Utrecht 1968, pp. 174-5. Rembrandt, as the embodiment of ingenium, stands between symbols (derived from Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia) of theory and practice: the circle on Rembrandt’s right would symbolise theory, while the segmented circle, with its ‘ruled’ edge, symbolise practice. This argument has been partially rejected (A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings iv: Self-Portraits, op. cit., p. 566) because what we see is the edge of the canvas rather than a ruled dark line, but this strikes me as pedantry: at some stage in the construction of the canvas / stretcher, a ruler had to be used to get that straight line; and Rembrandt needed to paint a ruled line to depict the edge. I am quite sure the circles are meant to be antithetical, but in a rather different way. What doesn’t seem to have been noticed is that if the arc of the ‘circle’ behind Rembrandt’s head were continued downwards, it would pass through the painter’s right eye. This suggests that the self-portrait is a visualization of a credo attributed to Michelangelo by Vasari, and which was well known in the Netherlands, which stressed that it was necessary “to have compasses in the eyes and not in the hand”. Vasari’s letter of 1570 to Martino Bassi. Quoted by D. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, Princeton 1981, p. 370; see also pp. 352-79. The ‘compasses in the eye’ are cited in Van Mander, Den grondt der edel-vry schilder-const, Haarlem 1604, III, 15 (in margin), or from the life of Michelangelo in Het Schilder-boeck, Haarlem 1604, fol. 171 v. The story of Zeuxis dying of laughter also appears in Van Mander, but not in an obvious place – it’s in the addenda at the end of the Lives, not in the life of Zeuxis. So either he, or his contact, knew the book well. The ‘compasses in the eyes’ are cited three times by Rembrandt’s pupil Samuel von Hoogstraten, Inleyding, Rotterdam 1678, pp. 35, 36, 63. A further, possibly fanciful, reference occurs in Jacob Campo Weyerman , De Levens-Beschryvingen der Nederlandsche Konst-Schilders en Konst-Schilderessen, part 1, The Hague 1729, p. 311. The story is taken from the life of Van Dyck. Rubens’ pupils, we’re told, used to gather round the master’s paintings when he’d left the studio to go home for the night, and they would try to work out the mysteries of his technique. While they were doing this one evening one of them slipped and fell against the wet paint of a Madonna, smearing her arm and face. They decided that Van Dyck would have to repaint the damaged section: “Next day Rubens came up to continue painting, and he contemplated that arm and face with unusual attention, according to the report of one of Van Dyck’s fellow pupils, and after he had compared those figures with the other figures, using the sure compass of his eye, he cried out happily, ‘That certainly isn’t the worst thing I painted yesterday afternoon!’ I am grateful to Paul Taylor for all these references. Michelangelo seems to have been attacking the academic notion that it was sufficient for the artist to follow proscribed rules of proportion and geometry, as Dürer had sought to do in his treatise on human proportion; while these ‘rules’ had to be absorbed, it was the eye that had the final say in making the figure appear to breathe, move and feel: the artist had to be able to visualize it in the mind’s eye. The most detailed formulation of this idea occurs in Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte de la pittura (1584): “Michelangelo, that greatest of sculptors, painters and architects, used to say that all the reasons – of geometry, or arithmetic, or proofs of perspective – were no use to men without the training of the eye in knowing how to see and in making the hand do. And this he said, adding that, however much the eye may be trained in these reasons, it is only in its seeing – never mind angles or lines or distances – that one may render properly and make the hand show everything he wishes in the figure, and not differently from what he might expect to see with perspective. So by the habit of training, founded on [the study of] perfect art, one shows in the figure what ever so many deep perspectives may not show. But whoever is trained neither in geometry or drawing, may not reach, or penetrate, or express with his speculations, divisions, proofs, segments and similar things. Because this whole art, to say it in a word, and its whole end, is to draw all that is seen with the same reasons that one sees”. G. Lomazzo: Trattato dell’arte de la pittura, Milan 1584, pp. 262-3. Trans. by D. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, op. cit., pp. 371-2. The Kenwood self-portrait seems to be a declaration that while Rembrandt has mastered the basic skills in art, it is the ‘judgment of the eye’ that has the final say. He makes this point through a bold left-right distinction. The circle on the painter’s left, painstakingly and pedantically drawn, is rather brutally terminated and segmented by a dark line just inside the rough edge of the (depicted) canvas; this line is at an angle to the edge of the picture, and tapers in, so that the segment seems to be tilting over and falling into the picture. The segment, together with the rectilinear implements held up like dividers in his left hand, allude to the practical and material basis of art. This side of his face is in deep shadow and his left eye appears to be squinting if not closed (it could almost be a bruised black eye). Complete vision evidently does not reside here. By contrast, the right side of his face is brightly lit and the eye more fully open. The artist’s hair explodes around his right ear like a puff of white smoke. Because the arc of the circle passes directly behind the painter’s head, it feels as though it has been thoroughly internalized: the compass is in his eye, in his head. In the illustration to Ripa’s ‘Teoria’, the female allegory has the compasses projecting from her head like a pair of horns! Here vision becomes visionary. He has in fact used his own ‘judgment’ to paint the arc of the circle just above his right elbow, for it doesn’t quite align with the higher arc. But we scarcely feel that the circle is incomplete because both arcs seem to emanate from his head and his upper arm like an angel’s wing (in Rembrandt’s paintings, angels usually appear at the subject’s right shoulder, as in his recent St Matthew and the Angel (1661)). Thus Rembrandt’s ‘winged’ eye recalls Vittoria Colonna’s conceit that with the right eye open, and the left closed, “the wings of hope and of faith / make the loving mind fly high”. By contrast, the thicker segmented circle is both more material and more marginal, by being placed well to his left and at the left edge of the canvas. It is also slightly darker than the other circle. The truncated segment to Rembrandt’s left is akin to a half-moon, while the open circle to his right is akin to a sun. For Rembrandt’s possible interest in astrology, in relation to the etching traditionally called Faust, see H. Bevers et al., Rembrandt: the master & his Workshop: Drawings and Etchings, exh. cat. London, National Gallery, 1991, no. 33, pp. 258-60; H. Th. Carstensen and W. Henningsen, ‘Rembrandts sog. Dr. Faustus; zur Archäologie eines Bildsinnes’, Oud Holland, 102, 1988, pp. 290-312. Equipped with his ‘flying’ eye, did Rembrandt think of himself as having almost prophetic powers? If he did, it was certainly a topical subject. During this period the role of prophecy was a central issue in Dutch society. In part this was a legacy of the reformation, for the abolition of mediators and the stress on the individual conscience meant that God was supposed to speak directly to his elect. As a result, ordinary people felt fewer qualms about claiming that God had spoken to them. C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, Harmondsworth 1975, p. 91. See also, K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Harmondsworth 1973, ch. 13: ‘Ancient Prophecies’. In England, the revolutionary decades of the 1640s and 50s (King Charles 1 was executed in 1649) gave rise to “what was almost a new profession – the prophet, whether as interpreter of the stars, or of traditional popular myths, or of the Bible”. C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, op. cit., p. 91. Similar tendencies have been discerned in Holland, which was anyway much influenced by religious currents from England, and the practice of ‘free prophecy’ became prevalent. Competing religious sects debated the role of reason in spiritual life, with radical spiritualists such as the Quakers being extremely hostile to reason. A. C. Fix, Prophecy and reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment, Princeton 1991, pp. 165 ff. Fix quotes Christopher Hill on p. 165. The controversial German mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), whose works were almost all published in Amsterdam and who was extremely influential throughout northern Europe, believed that through faith man could attain a state of “supersensual” harmony and thus merge with God. In The Way to Christ (1623) he writes of the two eyes of the soul in a way which is loosely analogous to Rembrandt’s self-portrait: “Thou perceivest too, doubtless, that it is according to the Right Eye that the Wheel of the superior Will is moved; and that it is according to the Motion of the Left Eye, that the contrary Wheel in the lower is turned about”. Three German versions of Der Weg zu Christo were published in Amsterdam in 1635, 1656 (?) and 1658. A Dutch translation appeared in 1685: Der weg tot Christus, in negen bocken vervat, Amsterdam 1685. The passage appears in #6 ‘Van’t boven-zinnelijhe leeven’, dialogue 2. The perennially popular Imitation of Christ was published together with the Theologia Deutsch for the first time in 1621, and this combination, which featured two left-and-right ‘eye of the soul’ metaphors, gave rise to a Dutch edition in 1631, and a Dutch translation in 1644 with an attractive frontispiece illustration of an open book placed over a cushion-like heart. G. Baring, Bibliographie der Ausgaben der ‘Theologia Deutsch’ 1516-1961, Baden-Baden 1963, no. 69. Earlier editions: 54, 55, 56, 61, 62 (Amsterdam 1630). Rembrandt was intensely involved with the Old Testament prophets in the 1660s. In 1659, he had painted a large, turbulent canvas of Moses holding the tablets of the law menacingly above his head, with only his right eye picked out by the light. In the early 1660s, he painted a series of brooding Apostles and Evangelists, culminating in a Self-Portrait as Saint Paul, which is almost Zeuxis in reverse, minus the grin. A. K. Wheelock et al, Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits, exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2005, no. 11. The frowning quizzicality of this portrait can be compared to Michelangelo’s prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. In 1661, Rembrandt’s Jewish friend and patron Menasseh ben Israel published a book about the Old Testament prophets, which contained numerous apocalyptic references to Zechariah (though not to 11:17). Menasseh ben Israel, Piedra Gloriosa o de la Estatua de Nebuchadnesar, Amsterdam 1661, pp. 134, 164, 182, 220, 241, 243. Rembrandt supplied him with four illustrations of convoluted allegories. They are reproduced and discussed in C. and A. Tümpel, Rembrandt: Images and Metaphors, op. cit., pp. 112-15 Above all, perhaps, he had painted a great mural for Amsterdam’s new town hall, The Oath of Claudius Civilis (1661), which had been sent back to Rembrandt for modifications but never returned. C. Nordenfalk, The Batavian Oath of Allegiance: Rembrandt’s Only Monumental Painting, Nationalmuseum Stockholm 1982. The subject of the painting was the oath sworn by the Germanic tribe of the Batavians with their leader Claudius Civilis to unite and rise against the Roman invaders in 69 AD, as recounted by Tacitus. Tacitus calls him Julius Civilis. The story of this heroic uprising was treated as a historical precursor to the union of the Dutch provinces in their rebellion against Spain, which ended successfully in 1648. Tacitus reported that Civilis had lost an (unspecified) eye in battle. Rembrandt chose to show him with a missing left eye, and staring out with a far-away look in the general direction of the viewer with his right. This charismatic Cyclops thus appears to absent himself from his co-conspirators at the very moment that they unite. He could almost be a practitioner of ‘free prophecy’. Yet despite the spectacular right-sidedness of the Kenwood self-portrait, our abiding impression of the whole is one of balance and poise – an accommodation has been reached between the spiritual and the rational. Only after we have done a complete tour of inspection of the ‘sublunary’ side of the picture of the picture do we finally home in on the painter’s right eye, with its intimations of an realm beyond the canvas that we are not privileged to see or gauge. Rembrandt’s static, monumental frontal pose, and the background arcs, mean that we scan across the totality of this self-portrait more thoroughly than any other from this period. As such, the picture recalls the opening of a verse letter by the English poet John Donne (1572-1631), who was obsessed by the relationship between faith and reason, and both alarmed and relieved by the immeasurability of the universe (“nor can the sun / Perfect a circle, or maintain his way / One inch direct”). ‘An Anatomy of the World’, in John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith, Harmondsworth 1973, p. 277, l. 263-4; 268-70. Some of Donne’s love poems had been translated into Dutch by the politician, scientist, poet and art lover Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687), who had given Rembrandt qualified support in the early stages of his career. A Selection of the Poems of Sir Constantijn Huygens, trans. & ed. P. Davidson and A. van der Weel, Amsterdam 1996, for the Donne translations. The verse letter, written between 1609-14, was addressed to the ‘angelic’ Countess of Bedford. The poet insists that although ‘right’ is superior to ‘left’, they are in fact mutually self-sustaining: Madam, Reason is our soul’s left hand, Faith her right, By these we reach divinity, that’s you; Their loves, who have the blessing of your sight, Grew from their reason, mine from fair faith grew. But as, although a squint lefthandedness [a distorted adherence to reason] Be ungracious, yet we cannot want that hand, So would I, not to increase, but to express My faith, as I believe, so understand. Therefore I study you first in your Saints, Those friends, whom your election glorifies, Then in your deeds, accesses, and restraints, And what you read, and what yourself devise. But soon, the reasons why you are loved by all, Grow infinite, and so pass reason’s reach, Then back again to implicit faith I fall, And rest on what the catholic voice doth teach…” John Donne, The Complete English Poems, op. cit., p. 225. See also John Donne’s Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels, ed. E. M. Simpson, Berkeley 1963, p. 60: “There are Indies at my right hand, in the East; but there are Indies at my left hand too, in the West”. Donne’s conceit ultimately derives from an idea developed by the inmportant Cistercian mystic William of St. Thierry (1085-1148). In The Nature and Dignity of Love, William argued that the soul has two eyes, love of God and reason, which are complementary: “When one makes an effort without the other, it doesn’t get very far. When they help each other, they accomplish much”. B. McGinn, ‘Love, Knowledge and the Unio Mystica in the Western Christian Tradition, in Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith, ed. M. Idel and B. McGinn, New York 1989, pp. 63-4. Like Donne, Rembrandt allies himself more closely with his right hand than with his left (he stands to right of centre), and thereby seems to disdain a “squint lefthandedness”, as exemplified by the truncated circle, and by his own squinting and shadowy left eye. Yet at the same time, he realises we cannot do without reason, “the soul’s left hand”; it is only when reasons “grow infinite, and so pass reason’s reach”, that “implicit faith” is born. Here the ‘doubleness’ of the human condition is a boon, and is something that deepens rather than dissipates our power. No other self-portrait has such amplitude. PAGE 11