Il ponte di pietra

Rembrandt made his living from faces. In a career of hundreds of paintings he left only a handful of pure landscapes, and this small oak panel from around 1637 is one of them. It is barely the size of a sheet of paper. A stone bridge curves over a canal beside an inn with a red gable, a couple of men poling a little boat underneath. What makes it his is the light. A sudden shaft of sun breaks under a bank of dark cloud and lights up the trees at the centre, while a storm gathers on the left. It is almost certainly not a real place. He built the scene from things he had seen, the way he built the drama in his portraits, out of light falling exactly where he wanted it.