Danaë
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) · 1636, reworked about 1643
A naked woman raises herself on a great curtained bed and lifts her hand toward a golden light that pours in from the left. Her face is expectant and a little uncertain; an old servant behind her draws back the curtain. Above the bed a gilded Cupid weeps, his hands bound. She is Danaë from Greek myth, the princess locked away by her father because of a prophecy that her son would kill him. Zeus came to her as a shower of gold. Rembrandt leaves out the shower and paints only the light, so the god's arrival becomes something you feel rather than see.
Rembrandt painted the canvas in 1636, early in his Amsterdam career, and then, around 1643, repainted the central figure, changing her pose and turning the gesture of her hand outward, so that she seems to welcome and to hesitate at the same time. Look at her body, which is not an idealised classical nude but a real woman with soft flesh, a slightly rounded stomach and creases at the wrist. Her face is thought to combine the features of his wife Saskia and of Geertje Dircx, the nurse who lived with him after Saskia's death. The bed, with its heavy embroidered curtain and gold fittings, is painted with a jeweller's love of texture.
The painting came to the Hermitage in 1772 with the Crozat collection from Paris. In June 1985 a visitor threw sulphuric acid at it and slashed it twice with a knife, and the central part of the picture melted before the eyes of the guards. Restorers worked on it for twelve years before it returned to view in 1997, and parts of the surface, especially around the figure, are their reconstruction. Notice how, even now, the golden light at the left seems to come from behind the canvas.
Did You Know? After an acid attack in 1985 the painting spent twelve years in the restoration studio before returning to the gallery.
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