Die Vision des Zacharias im Tempel

Rembrandt painted this in 1633, at 27, not long after he moved from Leiden to Amsterdam and began taking on the commissions that made his name. The scene comes from the Gospel of Luke. The elderly priest Zacharias, serving alone in the temple, is told by the angel Gabriel that he and his wife will have a son after all, the child who becomes John the Baptist. Rembrandt gives the angel almost no body, just a burst of light in the upper right that the old man shrinks from. For decades the picture was doubted. It dropped out of the Rembrandt catalogues in 1960 and vanished into private hands, and only in 2026 did the Rijksmuseum examine it again and put his name back on it.