The Descent from the Cross

For a long time this hung under Rembrandt's own name, and it carried a signature dated 1651 to back that up. When the National Gallery of Art cleaned the canvas in the early 1990s, the signature proved to be a later addition and was removed. The handling is not quite the master's either, the impasto heavier, the white shroud laid on in flat planes. Today it is catalogued as the work of his Amsterdam workshop, with the pupil Constantijn van Renesse, who was around Rembrandt between 1649 and 1652, proposed as the likely hand. How much Rembrandt himself set down, perhaps blocking in the composition before a student finished it, no one can say for certain. Rembrandt had painted and etched the Descent from the Cross several times before, and the torchlit night staging here follows those earlier versions.