July 1656, Amsterdam. A clerk goes through Rembrandt van Rijn’s house room by room with a pen, writing down everything in it.
The paintings. The prints. The cabinet of curiosities Rembrandt spent years putting together. Item after item, so that all of it can be sold to pay his creditors. He has declared himself insolvent, and over the next two years the auctions take the rest.
A list like that has one flaw. It can only record what can be carried out of a door.
1659
Three years later, he paints this.
The room around him is brown shadow. The light finds his face and, faintly, his hands. He’s 53, in a beret and a coat with the collar turned up, and he hasn’t smoothed out a single line. No props, nothing to show off. A portrait of a man with nothing left to display, which makes it oddly a portrait of what he did have.
Get close to the forehead and the cheek. The paint is thick and rough, built up by hand. That’s the part of Rembrandt the clerks had no column for.
The Cell
Now go back about a thousand years. Pavia, in northern Italy, around 524. A Roman named Boethius sits in prison waiting to be executed. He had been a senator and a consul, a trusted servant of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, until someone accused him of treason.
In that cell he writes The Consolation of Philosophy.
The book opens with Boethius sunk in grief, and it doesn’t hurry him out of it. Then a woman is there with him: Lady Philosophy. She doesn’t tell him to look on the bright side. She tells him he’s been counting wrong. Office, money and reputation were all loans from Fortune, and Fortune’s wheel turns. That is the one thing about her you can rely on. What Fortune can’t repossess is the part of him that can still think and judge, so that is where the accounting starts.
I know of nothing showing that Rembrandt ever read Boethius. I’ve put them in one room because they’re answering the same question from opposite ends of a fall: what was yours all along?
Two Columns
Try it on yourself. Take a page and draw a line down the middle. On the left, write On loan: everything the past few years handed you that someone else could take back. A title. A salary. Access. One particular person’s approval. On the right, write Mine: what you could still do with a table and a pencil in a different city.
You may find the right column shorter than the left, and tougher than you expected. Rembrandt’s held a hand and an eye. That was enough for the picture above.
The clerks finished their list in 1656. It had everything on it except whatever painted 1659.
What would be missing from yours?
This Wednesday’s paid deep dive turns the audit into a practice you can repeat when the next loss comes. Start the free week.
