Il bue squartato

By 1655 Rembrandt was in real trouble. His grand house in Amsterdam was mortgaged, commissions had thinned out, and within a few years he would be forced to sell almost everything he owned. In that stretch he painted this: a flayed ox carcass, hung by its hind legs from a beam, split open, the ribs and fat catching a low light in a dark shed. It is signed and dated on the wood. There is no story here in the usual sense, only paint pushed thick to become gristle and bone, a butcher's ordinary work looked at with total attention. In the shadow at the back a woman leans through a doorway, a small living presence at the edge of all that dead weight. Later painters kept returning to it, from Delacroix to Soutine to Francis Bacon.