The Descent from the Cross

This was a young man's big commission. In the early 1630s Rembrandt, not yet 30 and newly arrived in Amsterdam, was asked by Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange and effectively ruler of the Dutch Republic, to paint a series on the Passion of Christ. It was the kind of prestige work that could make a career. He set the deposition at night, the dead Christ lowered by lamplight while men strain under the awkward weight of the body. One of them, the figure on the ladder with a scowl of effort, wears Rembrandt's own face. He was measuring himself here against Rubens, the great Flemish painter, who had treated the same subject a few years earlier in a blaze of colour. The whole Passion cycle would take Rembrandt the better part of a decade to finish.