The Descent from the Cross

In 1634 Rembrandt was 28, newly married and newly famous in Amsterdam, and he painted this without a commission, working through the Gospel account for himself. The subject was already owned by one image: Rubens had made a soaring, muscular altarpiece of it in Antwerp that everyone knew from prints. Rembrandt kept the diagonal of the body and threw out the heroism. His Christ comes down at night, a pale dead weight in a white sheet, lowered by ordinary men who strain and fumble under it. The light is a single torch, and most of the crowd is left in brown darkness. Nearly two centuries later the canvas hung at Malmaison outside Paris, in the collection of Josephine, Napoleon's first wife, and it reached the Hermitage in 1814.