Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple

This is one of the rare moments in the Gospels where Christ turns violent, and Rembrandt etched it in 1635 as pure commotion. Christ swings a bunch of knotted cords like a whip, and the temple traders scatter. A table goes over, coins spill across the floor, a man clutches his money bag and stumbles, the animals bolt. Rembrandt did not invent the arrangement. He took its bones from a small woodcut of the same subject that Albrecht Durer, the German master of prints, had made more than a century earlier, then loaded it with his own noise and deep shadow. Etching let him draw straight into the wax-covered plate with a needle, closer to sketching than the slow cut of an engraving, and that freedom suits a scene built entirely out of sudden movement.