Chapter 1

Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer thought often of Socrates while Rembrandt dressed him with paint in a white Renaissance surplice and a medieval black robe and encased him in shadows. "Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius," Plato has Socrates saying after he had swallowed his cup of poison and felt the numbing effects steal up through his groin into his torso and approach his heart. "Will you remember to pay the debt?"

Now Socrates, of course, did not owe a cock to Asclepius, the god of medicine.

And the leather merchant Asclepius, you will find written here, son of the physician Eurymynedes, was as baffled as anyone to learn of the bequest from the slave who appeared on his doorstep in the morning with a live rooster in his arms. The authorities were curious also and took him into custody for questioning. They put him to death when he continued to profess his ignorance and would not reveal the code.

Chapter 2

Rembrandt painting Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer was himself contemplating the bust of Homer where it stood on the red cloth covering the square table in the left foreground and wondering how much money it might fetch at the public auction of his belongings that he was already contemplating was sooner or later going to be more or less inevitable.

Aristotle could have told him it would not fetch much. The bust of Homer was a copy.

It was an authentic Hellenistic imitation of a Hellenic reproduction of a statue for which there had never been an authentic original subject.

There is record that Shakespeare lived but insufficient proof he could have written his plays. We have theIliadand theOdysseybut no proof that the composer of these epics was real.

On this point scholars agree: It is out of the question that both works could have been written entirely by one person, unless, of course, it was a person with the genius of Homer.

Aristotle remembered that such busts of Homer were common in Thessaly, Thrace, Macedonia, Attica, and Euboea in his lifetime. Except for the eye sockets and the mouth open in song, the faces differed. All were called Homer. Aristotle could not have said why a blind man would want to sing.

About the money to be paid for the painting there could be no doubt. The terms had been set beforehand in correspondence between the Sicilian nobleman ordering the work and Dutch agents in Amsterdam, one of whom, probably, should be credited with proposing Rembrandt for the commission and bringing together these two figures significant in the art world of the seventeenth century who would never meet, whose association as patron and performer spanned more than eleven years, and between whom there would pass at least one acrimonious exchange of messages in which the purchaser complained he was cheated and the artist responded he was not.

The Sicilian nobleman was Don Antonio Ruffo, and it is possible that this avid and discriminating collector of art had not laid eyes on anything but prints of Rembrandt's before ordering from him the Dutch painting of a philosopher he wanted for the art collection he was amassing in his castle in Messina. Not for years did Ruffo find out that the man in the painting was Aristotle. He never found out that the bust of the man in the painting upon whose head Aristotle rested his hand was Homer. Today we accept that the face on the medallion suspended from the heavy gold chain presented to the philosopher by the impecunious artist was intended to be Alexander's but might, through slipshod intelligence, have been a likeness of the goddess Athena, whose face, of course, had never been drawn by anyone who had seen her.

No one doing a painting or statue of Athena, not even the sculptor Phidias, whose great figure of the goddess was one of the eye-catching astonishments of the Acropolis, had any idea what she looked like.

The price of the painting was five hundred guilders.

Five hundred guilders was a good piece of money in the Netherlands back in 1653, even in Amsterdam, where the cost of living tended to be higher than elsewhere in the province of Holland and in the six other provinces making up the newly recognized and rather loosely organized federation of the United Netherlands, or the Dutch Republic.

Five hundred guilders was eight times the amount, Don Antonio Ruffo complained angrily in writing nine years later, that he would have had to pay to an Italian artist for a picture the size he had commissioned. He did not know that it was perhapstentimes the amount Rembrandt could then have demanded in Amsterdam, where he was past the peak of his fashionability and facing a financial catastrophe whose drastic consequences were to keep him impoverished for the rest of his life.

Amsterdam, with a population just about one-third that of ancient Athens in the age of Pericles, was the dominant commercial power on the European continent and the nerve center of a far-flung overseas empire more extensive than anything dreamed of by the most ambitious Greek merchant or militarist, other than Alexander.

Contained in the vast network of Dutch trading posts and territorial possessions that extended east and west more than halfway around the globe was an immense stretch of fertile land on the eastern shores of the new world that reached from the Chesapeake Bay in the south up to Newfoundland in the north, the whole of this expanse christened the New Netherland and encompassing in its ranging borders those few precious acres on the west side of Fifth Avenue at Eighty-second Street on the island of Manhattan with which Aristotle was to become joined indissolubly.

For on this parcel, in time, would rise the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the City of New York, a building of deplorable look, in which the paintingAristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homerwould come to rest after a journey of three hundred seven years, an odyssey much longer in time and miles than Homer's original and one richly provided with chapters of danger, adventure, mystery, and treasure, and with comical episodes of mistaken identity.

The details would be fascinating if we knew what they were. For something like sixty-five years the whereabouts of the painting are undocumented.

It vanished from Sicily when the Ruffo line ended. It reappeared in London in 1815 -- as a portrait of the Dutch poet and historian Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft -- the possession of one Sir Abraham Hume of Ashridge Park in Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire.

When the noted art dealer Joseph Duveen bought the painting from the estate of the French art collector Rodolphe Kann in France in 1907 and sold it to Mrs. Arabella Huntington, widow of the American railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, none of the people involved in these transactions knew it was Rembrandt's painting of Aristotle they were buying and selling, or that Rembrandt had done such a work.

In 1961, the cost of the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a record $2,300,000.

For five hundred guilders in Amsterdam in 1653, a busy artisan or shopkeeper could support himself and his family rather well for a full year. A house in the city could be bought for that much.

For the widower Rembrandt van Rijn, who had bought his house for thirteen thousand guilders and who had livedverywell in the ten or eleven years in which his reputation had dimmed and the income he had grown used to had lessened, five hundred guilders was not going to be enough.

After fourteen years, he still owed more than nine thousand guilders on his house, an obligation he was to have satisfied in six. The country was at war with England, her occasional Protestant ally in her long revolution against Spain. And this time it was already clear that the Dutch were not going to win. There was plague in the city. Financial discouragement was epidemic. The economy was poor, capital was growing scarce, and the owners of the debt were insisting they be paid.

Rembrandt's house was a luxurious urban mansion of the Dutch kind in a choice residential area on one of the broadest and most fashionable avenues in the east side of the city, the St. Anthoniesbreestraat. The wordbreestraat,by which the excellent thoroughfare was known in its diminutive, translates literally into "broad street."

It was next to a corner site amid other dwellings of similar restrained elegance in which resided a number of the city's wealthiest burghers and officials, several of whom had been his first patrons and sponsors. When Rembrandt bought it, the initial expenses had been met with money from the dowry of his wife, Saskia, combined with his own considerable earnings in the years he was extolled in Amsterdam and his career as a painter was flourishing.

Between 1632 and 1633, it is reported, young Rembrandt executed fifty paintings in a deluge of commissions he received after moving from Leiden to Amsterdam in 1631, when he was twenty-five. Fifty in two years averages out to just about one painting every two weeks.

If the figure is a lie, it is a very impressive lie, and there is no doubt that Rembrandt and Saskia, who was the orphaned daughter of a former burgomaster of Leeuwarden in Friesland, and the cousin of his esteemed art dealer in Amsterdam, had considerable social legitimacy with the city's middle class. In Holland in the seventeenth century, the middle class was the upper class.

Now, Rembrandt had debts that he could not meet.

Rembrandt contemplated often as he worked on Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer that he was going to have to either sell the house or borrow from friends to finish paying for it, and he knew already that he was going to borrow.

As he added more and more black to Aristotle's robe and put still more mixtures of black into a background of innumerable dark shadings -- he enjoyed watching the way his canvases drank up black -- he contemplated also that after he had borrowed form friends to finish paying for the house, he would put the house in the name of his small son, Titus, to protect it from seizure by these friends when he decided not to repay them.

He could not take more money from the legacy of Titus, who was too young to know that his father had taken any money from him at all.

Rembrandt was forty-seven, and facing ruin.

Saskia had died eleven years earlier. Of the four children born to Mr. and Mrs. Rembrandt van Rijn in the eight years of their marriage, Titus, the last of the four, was the only one to live longer than two months.

Aristotle contemplating Rembrandt contemplating Aristotle often imagined, when Rembrandt's face fell into a moody look of downcast introspection, similar in feeling and somber hue to the one Rembrandt was painting on him, that Rembrandt contemplating Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer might also be contemplating in lamentation his years with Saskia. The death of a happy marriage, Aristotle knew from experience, is no small thing, nor is the death of three children.

Rembrandt lived now with a woman named Hendrickje Stoffels, who had come into his house as a maidservant and soon would be carrying his child.

Aristotle could understand that too.

In his will Aristotle, who had not neglected to be generous to the woman who was his mistress, had asked to be buried beside his wife.

Aristotle emancipated his slaves. His daughter, Pythias, and his sons, Nicanor and Nicomachus, had outlived him. A tear welled in his eye when he remembered with longing the satisfying family life he had once enjoyed. Rembrandt brushed it away.

The year after Rembrandt and Saskia married, each made a will appointing the other sole legatee.

In 1642, nine days before her death, Saskia made a new will naming Titus her heir. In effect she was disinheriting Rembrandt; but she designated him sole guardian and exempted him from accounting for his stewardship to the Chamber of Orphans.

A smarter woman would have known by then that Rembrandt could not manage money. He had a passion for status and for buying paintings, drawings, sculptures, and exotic garments and other curiosities of all description, and the artist was a familiar sight stalking avidly the auction rooms and galleries of the city.

When Saskia was alive, both she and Rembrandt had been dubbed extravagant by a near relation of hers with a residual interest in her inheritance, and they had sued for libel and lost.

A mercantile society, suggested Plato, was inclined to be quarrelsome and litigious, and this was especially true of the mercantile society of which Rembrandt was a member.

Under the common law of Holland, half of everything in a marriage belonged separately to both partners. In leaving her share to Titus, for whose upbringing Rembrandt was responsible, Saskia left him half the total; when Rembrandt's half was gone, everything spent for either came from the share left the child.

Of the twenty thousand guilders estimated retroactively to have been the value of the inheritance of Titus, he was able, as a young adult, to recapture less than seven.

When Titus obtained that money, he committed it with endearing filial devotion to the support of himself and his father, until he married at twenty-seven, less than one year before his death.

There is reason to suspect that Rembrandt, in debt, sold paintings abroad secretly to evade paying his creditors, complicating still further for posterity the task of separating genuine Rembrandts from fakes.

Aristotle, so thorough and correct in drawing his own will, had to wonder occasionally what went on in the mind of the notary who had assisted Saskia van Uylenburgh with hers.

But had she not switched her legacy to Titus, neither father nor son, as it turned out, would have had anything left after Rembrandt filed formally for bankruptcy.

Aristotle could hear, of course, after Rembrandt gave him an ear -- and then to his enormous surprise and glee, adorned it with an earring whose worth, were it fabricated of real gold instead of simulated with paint, would have been more than nominal in the jewelry markets of the city. And Aristotle heard enough to understand that the artist creating him had more on his mind than completing this particular canvas for Don Antonio Ruffo and the several other paintings in the studio on which he was also working. Rembrandt would turn away abruptly from one painting to another in spells of fatigue or boredom, or impulsively in bursts of renewed inspiration, or while waiting for paint to dry on some while going ahead with a different one.

Often he would not wait for paint to dry but would intently make up his mind to drag new paint on a brush almost dry through areas still soft, to scumble the texture of the surface with more impasto and enrich with variegation the reflective surfaces of the different pigments.

Rembrandt's best years were behind him and his best paintings were ahead, of which theAristotle,we now know, would be among the first in the flow of startling masterpieces with which the last sad decades of his life were crowned.

He did his most successful work while living like a failure, and his melancholy anxiety over money began to filter regularly into the expressions of the faces he painted, even those of Aristotle and Homer.

"Why do all your people look so sad now?" inquired the tall man modeling for Aristotle.

"They worry."

"What do they worry about?"

"Money," said the artist.

But that kind of tremulous solemnity was absent from his own face in the domineering self-portrait of 1652 on the opposite side of the attic, in which Rembrandt stood upright in his working tunic with his hands on his hips and appears defiant and invincible today to any onlooker who dares meet his eyes in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Pensive torment he reserved for his paintings of others.

It is mildly ironic that it was not until 1936 that this distinguished painting of Aristotle was given the name by which we know it now.

Not until 1917, one year after the Ruffo archives were opened, could the work be positively identified as the one commissioned from Rembrandt by Don Antonio Ruffo in 1652 and the man in it authenticated as Aristotle.

There is nothing in papers anywhere that we know of to verify that the bust is Homer.

It is ironic too that one of the best of Rembrandt's worst paintings was to become his most famous and the one for which he is praised most widely.

This painting is an outdoor group portrait in daytime showing eighteen armed members of the civic military company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq moving forward into a glaring patch of yellow sunlight.

It is calledThe Nightwatch.

The desire of some men for immortality, as Plato says, finds expression in doing things that will cause them to be remembered with favor by succeeding generations. With Egyptian royalty it could occasionally be a pyramid. With Americans it sometimes takes the form of a museum. With the Dutch it was staid portraits, usually in black, of figures who were dignified, stern, and substantial.

Of the eighteen gentlemen who had paid one hundred guilders each for the privilege of being included in the Rembrandt paintingThe Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq,we can guess that at least sixteen could have had grounds for dissatisfaction.

They had subscribed to an official group portrait of the kind most familiar throughout the city, one in which the figures are as formal as playing cards and the face of each sitter is large and bright and instantly noticed and recognized.

What they got was a picture of embarrassing theatricality in which they are costumed like actors and are as busy as workmen. Their faces are small, turned, obstructed, or in shadows. Even the two central officers striding into the foreground, Captain Frans Banning Cocq himself and his lieutenant, William van Ruytenburch, are subordinated too much to the wishes of the artist, according to one contemporary critic, who predicted, nevertheless, that the picture would survive its competitors.

The Nightwatchsurvives.

It is the work by which Rembrandt's genius as an artist is most generally verified and, even by baroque standards, is absolutely awful in almost every pertinent respect, including the conception of the artist in his dramatic break with tradition. The colors are garish, the poses operatic. The chiaroscuro is diffuse, the accents dissipated. Caravaggio would have turned in his grave had he been alive to see it.

The painting is the most popular single attraction in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

In 1915 a shoemaker, unable to find work, cut a square out of Lieutenant van Ruytenburch's right boot.

Experts restored the canvas by repairing the boot. The offer by the repentant shoemaker to do the job free was declined by authorities.

And in 1975, a former schoolteacher assaulted the lower section of the canvas with a serrated bread knife taken from the downtown Amsterdam restaurant in which he had just eaten lunch, making vertical cuts in the bodies of Captain Banning Cocq and Lieutenant van Ruytenburch. The painting was slashed in a dozen places. On the right leg of the captain, a strip of canvas twelve by two and a half inches was ripped away. The attacker told bystanders he had been sent by the Lord.

"I was ordered to do it," the schoolteacher is quoted as saying. "I had to do it." Newspapers related a history of mental illness.

A decade later the schoolteacher died by his own hand.

A description of the damage to the painting reads like a coroner's report. The painting was cut twelve times with a knife and from the nature of the damage it was deduced that the stabs and cuts were inflicted with great force. Probably as a result of the force, the blade of the knife was bent slightly to the left, some of the cuts being pressed obliquely inward and all the cut edges being frayed. In the area of Banning Cocq's breeches a triangular piece was cut out and fell off the painting to the floor.

The breeches were mended by a tailor from Leiden and the rest of the damage was repaired by professional art restorers of highest caliber.

To this day, there are superstitious covens in abandoned small churches in Amsterdam convinced the vandal was the reincarnation of one of the discontented musketeers who paid one hundred guilders to be memorialized with dignity and found himself reduced to a detail in oil paint in a garish illustration that could have served as a poster for a comic operetta.

There are others who say it was Rembrandt.

Saskia died in that year ofThe Nightwatch,1642, and Rembrandt painted her features on the gamboling little girl who is darting through the crowd from left to right with her face illuminated. She died at thirty.

It probably is no more than coincidence that the year in which Rembrandt lost his wife was the one in which his fortunes took their downward turn, and biographers do not assert there was anything more.

Excerpted from Picture This by Joseph Heller
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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