Seeing an unfamiliar painting by Rembrandt is a life event: fresh data on what it’s like to be human. A remarkable case in point is “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver” (1629), now on rare loan from a private collection in England to the Morgan Library, where it headlines the show “Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece,” augmented with drawings and prints. The artist completed it when he was twenty-three, still living in his native Leiden and sharing a studio with his friend Jan Lievens. When Constantijn Huygens, the secretary to the Prince of Orange, visited the studio, he declared Rembrandt’s picture equal to “all the beauty that has been produced throughout the ages.”
In the smallish canvas, Judas kneels, writhing in anguish, amid a circle of elders in a busy temple. The coins—count ’em, thirty—lie strewn in a pool of light on the floor. Judas’s head is bloody; some of his hair is torn out. His open mouth, showing teeth, suggests an utterance less coherent than his words in the Gospel of Matthew: “ ‘I have sinned,’ he said, ‘for I have betrayed innocent blood.’ ” Rembrandt similarly intensifies the elders’ cynical response—“What is that to us?”—with recoiling postures of fear and disgust.
Light pours in from an unseen source to the left, casting sombre shadows, illuminating an open Torah and glinting, here and there, on iridescent fabric or reflective metal. To the right, beyond an archway, an oblivious man ascends stairs.
A masterpiece? The overused honorific distracts. Never mind congratulating the painting. Look at it. No, the ovoid space in which Judas kneels doesn’t fully convince. The tyro artist went for broke, straining at limits he would soon enough overcome. The work impresses as an audition piece, proving its maker to be the hands-down choice for whatever employment would arise.
Profoundly, the unusual subject projects a personal and philosophical identification. Rembrandt embarked not only on an art career but on an extended plumbing of souls, including his own. Has anyone in the annals of human experience been more alone than Judas at the pictured moment? Abandoned to bottomless guilt, he appeals to the only human contacts left to him. He tries to change the terms of their relationship from financial to forgiving and redemptive. The pathos burns like acid. After this, Judas will leave the temple and hang himself.
How did the young Rembrandt know so much about existential extremes of emotion? The answer is that he didn’t. Rather, whenever he put brush to canvas, pen to paper, or burin to metal, he posed some puzzle to himself about the meaning of a particular story, social order, or person. As he worked, a solution would come to him, but without finality. It pended completion in other eyes, minds, and hearts: our own, now. ♦
