Christus vertreibt die Händler aus dem Tempel

Rembrandt painted this crowded little scene in 1626, when he was about twenty and still working in his home town of Leiden, years before the fame and the big Amsterdam commissions. It is one of his earliest signed and dated pictures, and you can feel him trying everything at once. The panel is packed edge to edge with tumbling figures, scattering coins and overturned tables, as Christ swings a whip to drive the traders out of the Temple. For the crush of bodies he leaned on a print by an older German master, Albrecht Durer, borrowing its composition almost wholesale. What is already his own is the light, thrown unevenly across the mob so some faces flare out while others drop into shadow. The face peering out from the crowd behind Christ is often taken to be Rembrandt himself.