Picture This

Rembrandt painting Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer was himself contemplating the bust of Homer where it stood on the red cloth covering the square table in the left foreground and wondering how much money it might fetch at the public auction of his belongings that he was already contemplating would sooner or later be more or less inevitable.

Aristotle could have told him it would not fetch much. The bust of Homer was a copy.

It was an authentic Hellenistic imitation of a Hellenistic reproduction of a statue for which there had never been an authentic original subject.

Aristotle remembered that such busts of Homer were common in Thessaly, Thrace, Macedonia, Attica and Euboea in his lifetime. Except for the eye sockets and the mouth open in song, the faces differed. All were called Homer.

Rembrandt contemplated often as he worked on Aristotle that he was going to have to sell his house or borrow from friends to pay for it, and he knew already that he was going to borrow.

As he added more and more black to Aristotle's robe and put still more mixtures of black in a background of innumerable dark shadings--he enjoyed watching the way his canvases drank up black--he contemplated also that after he had borrowed from friends to pay for the house, he would put the house in the name of his small son, Titus, to protect it from seizure by those friends when he decided not to repay them.

He could not take more money from the legacy of Titus, who was too young to know that his father had taken any money from him at all.

Rembrandt was 47 and facing ruin.

His wife, Saskia, had died 11 years earlier. Of the four children born to Mr. and Mrs. Rembrandt van Rijn in the eight years of their marriage, Titus, the last of the four, was the only one to live longer than two months.

Aristotle contemplating Rembrandt contemplating Aristotle often imagined, when Rembrandt's face fell into a moody look of downcast introspection, similar in feeling and somber hue to the one Rembrandt was painting on him, that Rembrandt contemplating Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer might also be contemplating in lamentation his years with Saskia. The death of a happy marriage, Aristotle knew from experience, is no small thing.

Rembrandt lived now with a woman named Hendrickje Stoffels who had come into his house as a maidservant and was carrying his child.

Aristotle understood that, too.

In his will, Aristotle, who had not neglected to be generous to the woman who was his mistress, had asked to be buried beside his wife.

In 1642, 11 days before her death, Saskia had made a new will naming Titus her heir. In effect, she was disinheriting Rembrandt; but she named him sole guardian and exempted him from accounting for his stewardship to the Chamber of Orphans.

Aristotle, so thorough and correct in drawing his own will, had to wonder occasionally what went on in the mind of the notary who had assisted Saskia van Uylenburgh with hers.

But had she not switched her legacy to Titus, neither father nor son, as it turned out, would have had anything left after Rembrandt filed for bankruptcy.

Aristotle could hear, of course, after Rembrandt gave him an ear--and then, to his enormous surprise and glee, adorned it with an earring whose worth, were it fabricated of real gold instead of simulated with paint, would have been more than nominal in the jewelry markets of the city. And Aristotle heard enough to understand that the artist creating him had more on his mind than completing this particular canvas for Don Antonio Ruffo, the Sicilian nobleman who had commissioned the painting, and the several others in the studio on which he was also working. Rembrandt would turn away abruptly from one painting to another in spells of fatigue or boredom, or impulsively in bursts of renewed inspiration, or while waiting for paint to dry on some while going ahead with a different one.

Often, he would not wait for paint to dry but would intently make up his mind to drag a dry brush through areas still soft to scumble the texture on the surface and enrich with variegation the reflective surfaces of the different pigments.

Rembrandt's best years were behind him and his best paintings were ahead, of which the Aristotle, we now know, would be among the first in the flow of startling masterpieces with which the last sad decades of his life were crowned.

He did his most successful work while living like a failure, and his melancholy anxiety over money began to filter into the expressions of the faces he painted, even those of Aristotle and Homer.

"Why do all your people look so sad now?" inquired the tall man modeling for Aristotle.

"They worry."

"What do they worry about?"

"Money," said the artist.

•

Rembrandt lived in a house and labored in an attic that was overcrowded with students, whom he charged for lessons, and overcluttered with artwork, his own and acquired, and with fanciful articles of dress and ornamentation accumulated fanatically in the more than 20 years since he had moved to Amsterdam.

Soon everything Rembrandt possessed would be offered for sale, including the bust of Homer he was using as the model for the bust of Homer he was bringing to life with paint so stunningly, while Aristotle looked on.

The Greek had not dreamed that such wonders were possible as the one taking place on the canvas or that beauty so moving could come from a person who in all other ways was unimaginative and banal.

Socrates and Plato would not have approved.

Painting was another of the mimetic arts they derogated as imitations of imitations. As with poetry and music, painting would be curtailed by censors in the first of the oppressive Utopias projected by Plato in the Republic and banned just about entirely in the second oppressive Utopia outlined in the Laws.

Socrates would have jeered at this imitation of Homer on canvas in color of this copy in plaster or stone of an imitation in marble of the likeness of a man whom nobody we know of had ever seen and of whose existence there is no reliable written or oral verification. Socrates would have rocked with mirth at Aristotle's long face and ludicrous dress.

So Aristotle, by now, the painting of which he and Homer were part was much more than an imitation. It had a character uniquely its own, with no prior being, not even in Plato's realm of ideas.

While Aristotle watched, the artist added olive brown and green to the white sleeves of his surplice, and the sleeves remained white!

He drew a dry brush with new paint through paint still soft, and suddenly, there were folds in the fabric and the cloth was reflective and rich. He used thick short strokes on top of slender long ones, leaving tracks from the bristles on surfaces made coarse and heavier. With a delicate, fine brush, he tenderly put bags beneath Aristotle's eyes and wrinkles on his brow.

He put more thin glazes over heavy layers of paint to deepen and enrich the abundant jewelry. Using small spots of white, he made the gold glitter on Aristotle's long, heavy chain. As an inspired afterthought, he piled books in the back at the left like a staircase, putting firmly in place a geometric boundary to the painting where none had been formerly, a vertical parallel to the head and hat of Aristotle and to the bust of Homer in between. He moved the pendant with the face of Alexander from one place to another until it hung on the chain exactly where he wanted it, and again and again he changed his mind in respect to the size of the brim of the hat.

What he did to the bust of Homer was an unbelievable revelation to a man who had marveled in antiquity at the paintings of Alexander by Apelles.

Between the lusterless daubs on the Dutchman's palette and the vibrant tones on the statue on the table, Aristotle witnessed a miracle of transformation. Adding charcoal browns to his cream colors, Rembrandt bestowed for Homer an illusion of flesh on an inanimate figure of a human who seemed to grow warm with immortal life beneath Aristotle's hand. Rembrandt clothed Aristotle with brush strokes that were broad and flat and put folds in his garment with darker browns.

It was mystifying to Aristotle that a person so untalented commanded such genius.

•

Of the debt on the house, which now was seven years in arrears, more than 1000 guilders, Rembrandt disclosed to a frequent visitor named Jan Six, was for accumulated interest.

Aristotle kept his mouth shut. Lending at interest was unnatural, he'd written, because the profit gained was not gained through the exchange process that money was invented to serve.

"Of course," said Rembrandt, "I can easily sell the house."

There was a serious recession in the country, said Six. If Rembrandt sold his house, he might not get what he had paid.

"It's worth much more."

"People are cautious about spending," (continued on page 128)Picture This(continued from page 90) said Six. "That may be why the owners of your mortgage now wish to be paid."

Six would know. His family owned dye works and silk mills. Rembrandt heard him glumly. Aristotle did not know what to advise.

Six was younger than Rembrandt, a learned man with aesthetic leanings who was involved actively in the vigorous intellectual life of the city. He had published a narrative poem of his own called Medea for which Rembrandt had provided an etching.

The artwork had been satisfactory, but the etching had lost definition with repeated impressions. The fault of the printer, Rembrandt had said untruthfully. They never took care.

Several years back, he had done an etching of Jan Six reading by a window that had set a standard no one in the city could match. Rembrandt himself did not match it again either, though we do not know whether he took time to try.

That one had not worn well either.

"The printer, the printer," Rembrandt had muttered in blame of the man Six had used to pull more copies. "He didn't take care, and he spoiled the plate."

Rembrandt knew, and refused stubbornly to believe, that etchings were not suitable for printings in large quantities. especially the one of Jan Six. In combination with the lines etched by acid, Rembrandt had inventively scratched directly on the plate with a dry-point needle, raising burr that enhanced the soft accents in countless shadings of black but wore down with repeated impressions more rapidly than usual and left later copies faint.

Six had had no complaints. He seemed greatly intrigued by Rembrandt's procedures, and he stopped by periodically for no better reason than to stare enchantedly at the changes in the painting of Aristotle and in those of Bathsheba and other figures and to comment on the differences. Almost without realizing what he was doing, he would attempt to come right up to the canvases to assay by close inspection the minute components of the effects in each, which he was finding progressively more fascinating.

"I see that you've changed him again, haven't you?" he said of Aristotle. As an optical phenomenon alone, he said, he marveled that so convincing an illusion of a human in profound contemplation could be constructed so movingly out of bristles and colored paint.

"And my knife and my finger, too," Rembrandt corrected moodily. He sidled with polite determination between Six and the easel, persisting in blocking him from coming too near. He did not want to share his secrets.

"I would like you to do a painting of me," Jan Six said, and added with haste when Rembrandt whirled to gaze at him, "in your own manner, of course."

"My manner?" The artist appeared startled.

"In any way that you choose, I mean. I would not mind if it was like that one."

"A portrait like this one? This is not a portrait."

"I did not say a portrait. I like that harsh texture, all your shadows and blackness and that very broad brush-work. You certainly make clear that an artist has been here, and that he is a much more eminent presence than the subject, don't you?"

Rembrandt chuckled. "I try," he said.

"I recognize the bust of Homer," said Jan Six, nodding. "The robe on the man is modern, I would guess, the gown antique. Am I mistaken?"

Rembrandt didn't know. They were things he had bought.

"You really don't know? I know you don't like to tell. I don't recognize the hat."

"I'm inventing the hat."

"You've changed it, haven't you? You've made the brim larger."

"I'm changing it back. I'm making it smaller."

"I don't recognize the man. Is it someone I should?"

"Aristotle."

"He looks like a Jew."

Aristotle glared.

Rembrandt toned him right down with a small touch of glaze.

"It's the way that I want him," said Rembrandt. "A friend models for me." "In that costume? Aristotle?"

"Don't you like the effect?"

"He looks so sad."

"It's the way I see him. He is growing older. He doesn't know what to do. He's an ancient philosopher and he can't find work."

"The gold in the chain?"

"I'm making it thicker."

"How do you make it look so real?"

"Please, don't stand too close. The smell of the paint will make you sick."

"How much thicker will that be?"

"As thick as I want it to be."

"How much heavier will you want it?"

"I'll know when I know."

"The hands fascinate me."

"I would do yours the same. Would you want them as plain? I can put in detail."

"You've done each one with just a few strokes, haven't you? Yet they're perfectly natural and at rest. I find them amazing."

"I'm not good at motion."

"You don't do people eating or drinking."

"Not often. Would you like me to do a portrait of a herring?"

"Everyone else does."

"I like people who stare. Whenever I finish a painting now of people doing anything else, I'm not sure that I like it."

"How do you begin? How do you decide what you are going to do?"

"The way I decide to. I don't know how. I would do you much differently, in a three-quarter length. Getting dressed to go out on serious business. Wearing a cloak, pulling on gloves."

"I won't go into business. I think I've already decided."

"Then you'll go into the government."

"I'm not sure I want that."

"Then you'll go into government anyway, though you might not do much. Your family is too important, and so are you. I can use more friends of influence. I can use more commissions to help pay for the house. I think you should look older."

"By then, I will look older."

"I will make you look older, the way you are going to look when you're an alderman and a burgomaster." Rembrandt smiled, Six frowned. Rembrandt put down his palette, leaned his maulstick against a chair. In silence, staring past his thumb, he pondered his prospective subject for a minute, bobbing his head once, nodding again, while Six did not move, seemed hardly to breathe. "I'll use much brighter reds and a different gold. I may do your hands with only my palette knife. I'll drag the knife through them before they are dry. I might use my finger."

"And then you might change your mind." Jan Six laughed quietly. "Will you give me your lavish impasto?"

"You might not like it."

"I will not mind."

"Then I promise to give you your money's worth in paint."

"I'll want your chiaroscuro, too, for which you have also become so infamous."

"And for which people make jokes about me now."

"How else will anyone know that I have been painted by Rembrandt?" "It won't be pretty."

"Do you think of me as someone who wants to look pretty?"

Rembrandt sighed with self-approval and spoke with a snarl. "I am glad there is still somebody left in Holland who doesn't care for the classical."

"I want a painting, not a picture."

Rembrandt grunted, pleased. "I'll use more black than here. I'll give much brighter light. I will invent you a hat much better than this one."

"I will want to be painted wearing one of my own," Jan Six told him firmly.

"You will look like a man I would not want to owe money to," said Rembrandt slyly, smiling, and began adding more gold to Aristotle's chain.

Aristotle frowned: A man like Rembrandt would drive him mad.

Rembrandt hummed loudly after Jan Six had left. He could put the house in the name of his son, he said directly to Aristotle as he returned from the door, scrutinizing his subject with hearty delight. "But then he would have to make a will, wouldn't he? But then I could be the beneficiary. I know it's exactly what you would tell me to do, isn't it? Eh? You see, Mr. Philosopher? You're not the only smart fellow in this house, are you?"

Aristotle was livid. Rembrandt drained the color from his face with a mixture of white and raw umber and elongated the hollow far back in his cheek.

There were rumors of food shortages in Utrecht and Zeeland. Six was another, Rembrandt mused out loud to Aristotle, from whom he was sure he could borrow.

•

In 1653, when Rembrandt's Aristotle was just about finished and his Portrait of Jan Six was beginning, the Dutch lost naval battles off Portland and North Foreland in the English Channel and were defeated again in home territory off the island of Texel at the entrance to Holland's Zuider Zee. After that, English ships lay at anchor along the Dutch coast and patrolled the North Sea to intercept vessels attempting to run the blockade.

"Do you think there'll be riots?" asked Jan Six.

Rembrandt asked why.

Six seemed surprised.

Corn prices were rocketing and herring had all but disappeared. Banks failed.

"Even when you've finished with him," Jan Six pointed out once more, speaking of Aristotle, "you will not be able to ship it. There are no boats from here to Texel. There are no ships from Texel to Italy."

Aristotle was stuck. He prayed for peace.

"I am finished with him," said Rembrandt. "I'm waiting for it to dry."

Aristotle felt chilly and wet. Cooped up all day in a studio in a country whose cloudy, damp climate he detested, he could not wait for the war to end. His eyes were rheumy. His look was dejected, his complexion jaundiced. The smell of the paint was making him sick. He had nothing to do.

"It would be a tragedy," said Rembrandt almost casually, "if I stopped to move now when I am working so well." He had already looked at another house. "But I would rather sell my art collection and continue living here."

"It would be a greater tragedy," said Jan Six, "if you tried to sell anything when people don't want to buy."

Tragedy? Aristotle almost sneered. This wasn't tragedy. This was pathos, one of the ordinary miseries of life without the salutary compensations of catharsis that tragedy was said by him to confer. It was tragedy without the happy ending.

Rembrandt said nothing to Jan Six about earnings from new paintings. Or that he owed 17,000 guilders, and 20,000 guilders more, technically, to Titus for the total left to the boy by his mother.

As far as a puzzled Aristotle could ascertain, of the innumerable paintings standing and stacked about the loft, the Aristotle and the Jan Six were the only two for which the impecunious homeowner, artist and father could be sure he would be paid. None seemed ever to be finished, though Aristotle and Jan Six both frequently could not see what there was to be done. Rembrandt altered colors and brushwork endlessly, bringing back canvases he had set aside as completed.

His inattention to time was exasperating.

Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer came close several times to scratching his head, X-ray studies of the painting disclose, but Rembrandt would not allow it and finally determined to extend Aristotle's arm with the hand resting on the head of Homer like a cap, in a pose betokening eternal inquiry.

"I must tell you frankly that I like my painting," said Jan Six, who came frequently now to stand for his portrait and to watch and to chat.

"I do, too," said Rembrandt, pleased.

So did Aristotle.

While Aristotle stood resting on his own easel waiting to go to Sicily, there slowly was emerging on the fresh canvas facing him the fantastic portrait of the younger, widely read man of wealthy family, Jan Six. In life, Six was slender and mild-looking, innocuous, delicate; in art, he gained strength and acquired domineering presence with every touch of the bristles or the palette knife.

Aristotle's heart stopped each time Rembrandt moved near one or the other of them with the palette knife or approached any of the other paintings with the knife in his fist. Six, resting, stepped from his spot and went to the Aristotle to peer inquisitively. Rembrandt tried keeping him back with a hand on his chest.

"The smell of the paint----"

"Will make me sick," Jan Six concluded for him. Six smiled, Rembrandt did not. "Are you really finished with him?"

Rembrandt stood facing Aristotle with a scowl, glowering balefully. Then he struck with the palette knife.

"Did you know when you did that," inquired Jan Six, beaming, "that the green would come out so vividly?" Six put on the spectacles with which he did not want to be portrayed. "Did you know," he continued, charmed, "when you moved your blade through the wet paint just now that the gold would reflect more brightly, and the silk would look deeper with folds?" "I was trying to find out."

"I think you knew."

"I knew I could change it again if I did not like what I saw," Rembrandt answered, sulking.

"When I see things like that," said Six, "I begin to think it so natural that the Dutch lead the world in the science of optics. I think you do know precisely what will appear each time you make a change."

"I'm going to change him some more," Rembrandt said suddenly.

Jan Six looked amused, Aristotle choked back a sob.

"When do you know that a painting is finished?"

"A painting is finished," Rembrandt replied without turning, "when I say it is."

"With my portrait, too?" Six laughed. "I might wait forever."

"With your portrait," said Rembrandt, drifting toward the worktable to take up his palette knife again, his squinting eyes, Aristotle perceived with a slight tremor, fixed back upon him menacingly, "I think you will decide that you will never again want anyone but me painting you and your family."

As it turned out, Six never commissioned another painting from Rembrandt, though he was so pleased that he wrote a verse exalting the finished work, and the portrait may well be the most valuable painting in the world today still in private hands. It is owned by the present heirs of Jan Six and may be seen only when they choose to let you.

Possibly, Rembrandt's Portrait of Jan Six would go for $100,000,0 00 today if sold at auction to a private collector, and probably, there are 100 people in the world who could pay that much.

Hendrickje entered with tea, which was an extravagant commodity, and with biscuits sticky with sugar when the afternoon's work was over. Titus trailed her shyly, sketchbook in one arm; he looked anemic and sleepy. He was a pale, thin child with curly auburn hair, lovely dark eyes and a lonely manner, and he usually came with Hendrickje at least once every day into the workshop with his sketchbook, from which Rembrandt would give him short, impassive lessons in drawing. Hendrickje would stay to watch, smiling to herself in silence, with her tilted head resting on her hand, her cheeks plump and ruddy. Titus tried hard and spoke softly. Hanging back near the doorway now, he waved slyly at Aristotle with a playful grin, made a face, winked conspiratorially and thumbed his nose. He was not quick enough to escape the notice of his father.

"What are you doing?" Rembrandt demanded gruffly.

"He did not."

"I swear to God."

Rembrandt smirked. "You mean like this?" With no warning, Rembrandt flipped a smear of paint into Aristotle's eye, closing the lid. Just as swiftly, he rubbed it away with his thumb, and the eye was open.

Titus giggled.

•

Aristotle could see, once Rembrandt had given him eyes, that the man modeling for him did not look in the least like the person he remembered himself to be: short, bandy-legged, bald, with a bit of the self-approving air of a dandy.

This man was tall, olive-skinned, with a long black beard, black melancholy eyes and Slavic, perhaps Semitic features.

Aristotle contemplating Rembrandt painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer had to wonder often why Rembrandt, who had never studied Greek, was painting him at all and why, of all things, painting him contemplating a bust of Homer, of whose works he had grown weary by the time he had completed his edition of the Iliad for Alexander the Great. He thanked God that Rembrandt had not painted Homer singing or dictating, as he would a decade later in another commission for Don Antonio Ruffo. Aristotle as an adult had not liked being sung to or read to.

Furthermore, in his Poetics, he had downgraded Homer inferentially by rating epic below tragedy, as he had downgraded Plato for the first time in his On Philosophy.

Aristotle grew darker and darker in aspect as the painting of him by Rembrandt progressed. The misty, gray European weather complemented his mood. When the fog was low, the sodden atmosphere of the city was rank with the smell of herring, beer and tobacco. There were times now in Holland when he was as pessimistic as Plato.

All men, Aristotle had written, desire by nature to know. In Rembrandt, he had found an exception.

All Rembrandt wished to know one early afternoon as he laid out on his worktable in two rows the busts he owned of Roman emperors and famous Greeks was how much all of them might bring if sold as a collection.

Would they be worth more individually?' The man posing for Aristotle had no idea.

The tall, dark-bearded, sad-eyed man posing for Rembrandt as Aristotle had been as surprised as Aristotle to find out it was Aristotle for whom he was going to be the model. He was puzzled now by an inconsistency in logic and what he saw as an incongruity in reasoning and in art. Aristotle looked on unobtrusively while the man scratched his head and, puffing his pipe, gazed quizzically at the two ranks of busts Rembrandt had lined up to contemplate and appraise. In a bass voice that was always slightly hoarse and mildly apologetic, he asked, "Rembrandt, let me try to understand you. You say you have a bust of Aristotle there?"

"And I may want to sell it." Rembrandt smiled complacently, like a salesman certain of his wares. "And there is Homer and here is Socrates, too. I have a dozen emperors. You can read their names. Here we have Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, a Nero, Galba, Otto, Vitellius, Vespasian, Domitian, this one is called Marcus Aurelius, another Vitellius and one more that is unidentified."

"Let me ask you then. Why are you painting me?"

"Why?"

"You have a bust of Aristotle. Why do you want to paint my face as Aristotle's when you have his face right here?"

Rembrandt turned dour. "I like your face better. It looks more real." "More real than his?"

"Yes."

"My face looks more real as Aristotle's than his does?"

"Yes. Are you blind?"

"How can that be?"

"I know what I'm doing."

"Isn't that dishonest?"

Rembrandt did not see why. "It's only art. What do you care? It's not a portrait."

"It does not sound logical. You're painting a picture of me and you're calling it him. Would you paint a picture of him and call it me?"

"I can call him anybody I want to for this painting. As long as I call him a philosopher. For his five hundred guilders, I feel I can give my Sicilian a picture of a philosopher who is a real person."

"Of me? I'm not a real philosopher."

"I make changes in you. You smile more. I put red in your beard. Look at your clothes."

"Were they his?"

"Are they yours?"

"I don't complain of the clothes. I'm inquiring about this painting of me." "It's not of you.

It's a painting of Aristotle."

"Then I'm glad it will not be in Amsterdam, where people would recognize me and believe I am Aristotle. I must admit that I like this picture of me that you will say is of somebody else. But it remains a mystery why you use my face for his when you have his right here. You could dress him up in this same costume."

"His face isn't much."

"He looks sadder and sadder, even as we speak. Why do you make him so sad?"

Rembrandt grunted a contented laugh. "Aristotle's face would not look natural between that hat and that robe. By now, yours is the only one that does. Should I ship to my Sicilian connoisseur a painting of the face of one statue contemplating the bust of another?" The man laughed, too. "And sign it Rembrandt?"

"You're moving my pendant again."

"It isn't yours. I like it better here."

"You never finish. There's a face on it now. Are we supposed to know whose?"

"Alexander's, naturally."

"Who?"

"Alexander the Great."

X-ray studies of Rembrandt's painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer disclose repeated changes in the position of the medallion of Alexander and a growth on Aristotle's liver undoubtedly related to the intestinal distress of which he had complained in the year of his death.

To Aristotle, Rembrandt was not an interesting person or one especially nice, but he had to wonder again at Rembrandt's way with light and shadow and somber tones and his alchemy with gold. All three were charmed with the alterations Rembrandt made in the garments worn by the model when he fitted them on Aristotle in the painting.

"They look better on him," said the man, sulking, "than on me."

"I add color to his," said Rembrandt. "I can't put paint on those clothes you're wearing, can I?"

He scumbled his impasto on the silken robe with bristles, added glazes and enhanced his chiaroscuro. He turned light into gold in Aristotle's billowing sleeves, shot golden rays of reflection through other white areas. He blended more green and blue-green into the folds and ripples.

He molded the gold chain in full relief with thicker additions of white paint, and on top of this white, he laid glaze after glaze of yellows, browns and blacks. That was how Rembrandt manufactured gold for Aristotle.

"The gold looks almost real," said Rembrandt's model.

"It is real," mumbled Rembrandt. He did not glance up. He made changes in the pinkie ring, put tiny yellow-white dots on top of heavy white dots on the surface of the ring and caused it to gleam, as though he were inventing gold out of paint odors and a slender brush that was a magic wand. "Your gold is fake."

"I don't understand you."

"I've painted pure gold."

"Using black, brown and white?"

"What you're wearing is plated. The ring, the earring, the rest. The chain is an imitation in brass. Come closer. Look at the chain and look at the picture. Don't you see the difference? This gold is real."

The gold on the canvas looked more authentic.

"I don't think I want to talk about it," the man said unhappily "You speak of imitation," he said tentatively and fell silent, considering whether or not to say more. "Do you know that Govert Flinck is becoming more and more successful with his paintings that are imitations of yours, of you and your style?"

"Flinck was my best pupil," Rembrandt answered graciously, nodding. "He already knew much when he came to me. He learned to paint in my manner in less than one year."

The man nodded also. "They say he is more successful now than you are. And that he gets much higher prices, selling paintings that are imitations of yours."

Putting aside his palette and maulstick with very slow movements, Rembrandt took up a heavy brush, wiping it clean on his tunic, and clasped it with the butt end forward like a sharp weapon. Aristotle feared for his life. Rembrandt looked like a man who might stab him through the chest.

"I don't understand that," he said coldly.

"They say he now gets more money for those paintings than you do for yours."

"For paintings like mine? That can't be true. How can that be true?"

"It's true in Amsterdam."

"That makes no sense. He gets more for his old imitations of my work than I do for my new originals?"

"They're more in demand."

"Why should they be? Why should people pay more money to him for imitations of my work when they can buy my original paintings from me?"

"They say his are better."

When Jan Six came later that day to stand for his portrait, Rembrandt wished to know immediately if the report of Govert Flinck's success was true.

Six thought that it was.

"He was my worst pupil!" cried Rembrandt indignantly.

"His reputation gets better," said Six. "As do his connections. Soon he will control all city commissions."

"There is no logic to it!"

"If it's logic you want," said Six, amused, "you should meet with Descartes. Or perhaps you should talk with your Aristotle there. He perfected the syllogism, you know."

Rembrandt did not want to talk of Aristotle. "Flinck gets more for his imitation Rembrandts than I get for my new paintings? Is that what you are trying to make me believe?"

"You speak too slightingly of imitations, my friend," said Jan Six amiably. "In his Poetics, your Aristotle there----"

"This is not my Aristotle. This is a painting, not a person."

"Nevertheless, Aristotle states that all great tragedies are imitations of an action. I suppose that here in Holland, because there is no other place like this, our tragedies can still be original."

"That is not what we mean by tragedies. Flinck is a tragedy. What yon are telling me does not make sense."

"About Aristotle?"

"About Flinck. I don't care about Aristotle. You are an intellectual man. How can those paintings of his that are in imitation of my style be superior to mine?"

"His surfaces are smooth, his colors are transparent, his lines define forms, his details are precise."

"Thai's not my style!" Rembrandt cried out in pain. "Flinck is an impostor! I don't paint that way."

"Then perhaps you ought to," counseled Six with a smile, "if you want to regain your popularity and get prices like his."

"And then," said Rembrandt with a sneer, "my paintings would be copies of his imitations of my originals."

"Exactly," Six agreed. "Best of all, you would not have to spend time doing any more originals, would you?"

"And what name should I sign to them? Mine or his?"

"You'd make more money, I think, if you signed them with his. Or, if you like, perhaps you can persuade Flinck to sign the name Rembrandt to yours."

"Can he do my signature in my style, too?"

"Oh, yes, he does that, too. He could even do your signature with a more classical hand than yours."

"Should I start with your portrait?" Rembrandt challenged acidly. "I can begin changing it now."

"Continue with mine as you have it, please."

"No, let me change this original of you to make it appear like an imitation of what Flinck will do in imitation of me with the commissions he receives for portraits like yours in the style of the one I am doing of Jan Six after people see yours."

"Leave this one alone."

"I can even date it in the future to make it more valuable, to look like a copy by me of the imitation by him of the portrait of you by me."

"I wish you to proceed with ours exactly as you've begun and exactly as we have discussed," said Six. "I did not know, my friend, that you could be so humorous."

"I am not being humorous."

"I admire my face."

"It isn't yours."

"That one isn't Aristotle's. You've changed it a bit, haven't you?"

"I will change you, too. I'm going to make you look older."

"Harder, I see. Almost ruthless. You're giving me cuffs--and a turned-up sleeve? Will you let me watch? Or will you do all your tricks in secret? Are you making me heavier?"

"Older. You will be more mature. You will not always be that slender, you know, or that young. I will paint you like a man who always makes the right decisions. It's the way you will want to look when you are a regent and a burgomaster."

The conversations always seemed to Aristotle to take a more intellectual turn when Six was there, especially when he talked of Aristotle.

"In his Poetics, you know, Aristotle praises you for this portrait of me," commented Jan Six, and Aristotle pricked up his ear. Rembrandt moved in at once with an ebony overglaze and sank the ear back into the shadows where it belonged. "Not by name, of course. He talks of painters."

"He doesn't say Rembrandt van Rijn?"

"Nor does he say Govert Flinck. Aristotle instructs dramatists to follow the example of good portrait painters. He says that they, while reproducing the distinctive forms of the original, make a likeness that is true to life and yet more beautiful. I think you are doing that with me. I think that your Aristotle seems in a lighter frame of mind today than I have ever seen him. He looks almost cheerful, as though he enjoys hearing me talk about him. Have you changed him again? He looked morbid before."

"He'll look morbid again," vowed Rembrandt. "Sometimes I go too far in one direction and have to go back to the other. I have a question about business that I think you should be able to answer. Among the paintings that I own are more than seventy by me that I can put out for sale."

"Sign them with Flinck's name," joked Six, "and you will be a wealthy man in Amsterdam."

"Should I do that?" inquired Rembrandt seriously.

Six shook his head. "To sell a product for money, says Aristotle, is not the proper use of that product. A shoe, for example, is made to be worn."

That was easier for Aristotle to say, replied Rembrandt crossly, than for any of them to do. With a cloth he went back to the canvas and wiped what looked like a smile off Aristotle's face.

And as he listened that afternoon, Aristotle shuddered with the memory of the time earlier that year when, eavesdropping, he had suddenly wished he had someplace to hide. Six was telling of Descartes and Spinoza, and Rembrandt interrupted to ask to borrow 1000 guilders. Aristotle cringed when he offered to pay interest.

"When I lend you the money, my friend," Jan Six chided softly, "it will not be to earn interest."

When Six married, the portrait he commissioned for his wife was not by Rembrandt but by Govert Flinck. And sometime before 1656, Six sold the Rembrandt debt for 1000 guilders at discount to a man who demanded payment, eventually forcing Rembrandt into bankruptcy.

We don't know why.

Neither Six nor the second man needed money.

Aristotle was no help.

•

By then, he was already in the castle of Signor Ruffo in Sicily. Aristotle was glad to be going from that sinister, dark land of northern Europe when he finally set sail. With the Treaty of Westminster, his dreams of liberation had come true. He felt free when wrapped from head to toe for his sea voyage and packed inside a wooden crate. He looked ahead bravely in keen anticipation to the new world that awaited him.

He left Amsterdam by tender on June 13, 1654, with a shipping order consigning him to the captain of the freighter Bartolomeus, which lay at anchor at the port of Texel, and departed on June 19 of that year, bound for the city of Naples as the first port of call. In August, the Bartolomeus docked at last at the port of Messina in northeastern Sicily.

Aristotle rejoiced unnoticed when he heard he was there. He remembered Messina from his reading of Thucydides about the disastrous Athenian expedition to Syracuse that had been championed by Alcibiades.

The crate containing Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer was unloaded, claimed and then carried by cart up a bumpy road to the castle of Don Antonio Ruffo, where its arrival was awaited with rambunctious and tremulous suspense.

Aristotle held his breath while the crate was hammered open and his painting was unwrapped and lifted out. His reception could not have been better. There were cries of amazement and delight when the people saw him. Aristotle, who was known to have been vain, was exhilarated beyond measure by his warm welcome and the exclamations of excitement and cheer with which his appearance was greeted. These people were expressive! There was no doubt from the first that they liked his looks. The painting was lifted high and rushed eagerly to the archway of the balcony to be admired in sunlight. There was effusive Italian praise for his attire and his jewelry, for the gold chain first, the medallion, his earring and his pinkie ring, for the excellent detail in the fine brushwork of the eyes and the reflections of light in the hat and the dark beard. Aristotle glowed with pride, with immodest self-satisfaction, basked without shame in their unrestrained adulation. At last, he was with friends who could truly appreciate him.

"I wonder who it is?" he heard one gentleman say.

"Albertus Magnus?" another guessed.

"He looks like a phrenologist."

Aristotle was speechless.

"Rembrandt sidled between Jan Six and the easel. He did not want to share his secrets."