ABSTRACT
Men’s faces emerging from the half-light, pertinacious, a conspiratorial defining moment, standing for cabals past, present and future. The Conspiracy of the Batavians Under Claudius Civilis was commissioned by the Burgomasters of Amsterdam towards the end of 1661 for Jacob van Campen’s new town hall – the eighth wonder of the world. Just over 300 years later the picture was the centrepiece in the second major post-war retrospective of the artist in the Rijksmuseum and the exhibition marked the tercentennial of his death. 1 Many more retrospectives would follow in the coming decades. The artist, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), submitted the five-and-a-half metre square canvas in the summer of 1662, but shortly afterwards the work was rejected because he refused to make any alterations. Rembrandt did not depict the conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis against the Romans in a cave, a palace or garden, but in a hall. From the ancient Roman philosopher, Tacitus, he observed that the chief was one-eyed like those other great warriors, Philip of Macedon and Hannibal, although he chose to ignore the forest setting – in het Schakerbos. His realist tour de force of thick impasto, dramatised by chiaroscuro so that the light shone brightly from the robes, chain and crown of the king, was not at all what the civic elders wanted for their newly built Baroque-Classical edifice. It seems that Rembrandt subsequently cut the canvas down to a fraction of its original size in order to make it more saleable. His style was out of fashion by this time and the city fathers must have recoiled at his uncompromising impression of their national hero. Rembrandt was only awarded the commission because of the premature death of one of his pupils, the Classicist Govert Flinck (1615–1660), the man who had succeeded him as mentor in the workshop of his first dealer, Hendrick Uylenburgh. Rembrandt’s butchered painting now resides in Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum, where it has the sobriquet ‘The Night Watch of Sweden’. Our predecessors do not necessarily agree with our assessment of great art. Shifting taste afflicts our perception of the image in each generation.
