Self-portrait with breastplate

In 1629 Rembrandt was about 23, still working in his home town of Leiden and barely known beyond it. He owned little, so the steel gorget at his throat here, a piece of a soldier's armour, was almost certainly a studio prop, worn to make a miller's son look like a gentleman. What he was really practising was light. See how it catches one cheek and the metal collar and lets the rest fall away into shadow. For a long time this panel in Nuremberg was dismissed as a copy, the supposed original thought to hang in The Hague. Technical study reversed that verdict: this is the picture from Rembrandt's own hand, and the smoother version elsewhere is the copy.