Essay: The Man with the Golden Helmet

Can it be? Rembrandt’s The Man with the Golden Helmet, one of the most famous and most majestic portraits ever painted, now turns out to be not by Rembrandt at all. It is not a fake or a forgery, says Jan Kelch, curator of Dutch and Flemish paintings in West Berlin’s Staatliche Museum, but rather “an independent original in its own right, with its own independent worth.” But what is its independent worth if Rembrandt’s masterpiece is not by Rembrandt? Though people who estimate such things promptly lowered its theoretical value from 20 million marks ($8 million) to about one-twentieth of that amount, what is one-twentieth of something priceless?

To someone who grew up with The Man with the Golden Helmet, it was more than a painting; it was an emblem of serious purpose, of melancholy reflection, of stoic courage. A reproduction hung for years in the living room of his father’s house, over the bookcase. There is a certain kind of scholar, perhaps vanished now, whose entire quality of mind could be summed up in the fact that he kept Rembrandt’s The Man with the Golden Helmet in a corner of his living room, over the bookcase. So somber, so grave, it was the first picture that the professor’s young son grew to love. Before he ever knew who had painted it, it gave him a sense of security. When he finally saw the original in Berlin many years later, it was like re-entering his home and rediscovering his youth.

Many people have experienced the portrait’s strange spell. “This contrast between the splendor of the helmet and the subdued tonality of the face makes one deeply conscious of both the tangible and intangible forces in Rembrandt’s world, and of their inseparable inner relationship,” Jakob Rosenberg of Harvard wrote in Rembrandt, Life and Work. “As in all his greatest works, one feels here a fusion of the real with the visionary, and this painting, through its inner glow and its deep harmonies, comes closer to the effect of music than to that of the plastic arts.”

And now it’s not by Rembrandt at all. Rosenberg and other experts have speculated that the old warrior might have been Rembrandt’s older brother Adriaen, a poor shoemaker in Leyden. But if the painting isn’t by Rembrandt, then we have no idea who the warrior was, just an old man, tough and brave and sad. The experts are trying to learn more by subjecting the painting to a series of technical tests. These include activating some of its neutrons so that they can be compared with the neutrons in authenticated Rembrandts. The experts are always right, as we know, but one can’t help wondering whether they will ever learn who the man with the golden helmet was, or who painted him.

Well, what does it really matter? Hamlet is Hamlet whether it was written by the shadowy figure known as Shakespeare or by Sir Francis Bacon or even by one of those lesser claimants like the Earl of Oxford. For that matter, we know hardly anything at all about the creator of The Odyssey, whether he was a man or a woman, one poet or many. Still, any printed work is a reproduction, one of many. And though even a reproduction of a great painting can have a powerful effect, there is something magical about the uniqueness of the original, the knowledge that Rembrandt applied his brush just here, nowhere else, and never again. Or somebody did. So we wander into that philosophical bramble patch at the edge of the legendary forest where the legendary tree falls and nobody is there to hear whether it makes a sound. Is the famous Etruscan warrior whom the Metropolitan Museum declared a fake some years ago any less handsome than he was back when we thought he was a real Etruscan? Yes, though it is hard to say why, just that he gives us less pleasure than he once did. Even with a genuine work, when it is stripped of its authorship, its identity is damaged, the richness of its context weakened. Could even the Sistine Chapel remain the same in our eyes if we were suddenly informed that there had never been a Michelangelo clinging to the ceiling to paint it? That it was actually the work of some Renaissance craftsman whose name and circumstances were unfortunately unknown?

The Man with the Golden Helmet is as great as it ever was, not the least bit fake. But to be described in the future as a work by “Anon” or perhaps “School of Rembrandt” is to be changed forever. And the change somehow diminishes the picture and therefore diminishes us. This continuous search for truth can be a painful and punishing process. Sometimes it seems that all of education consists of first learning things and then learning that they are not true.

When we were very young, we learned that George Washington had confessed to chopping down a cherry tree because he couldn’t tell a lie; we were still young when we learned that Parson Weems had propagated this little tale in an effort to edify the youth of the new nation, that the chocolate hatchets sold in candy stores on Feb. 22 were all part of the commercial exploitation of legend.

Indeed, the whole course of American history can be interpreted as a series of legends abandoned. Not only did Paul Revere never say “One if by land, two if by sea,” and all that, but he never even got to Concord to warn the Minutemen of the oncoming British. Nathan Hale probably never said on the gallows, “I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Jefferson preached that all men are equal, but he kept slaves, and so did Washington. And Betsy Ross never sewed that first American flag either.

On it goes. Many of the commonsensical scientific facts that were learned in school a generation ago had to be subsequently unlearned. The most healthy diet was once considered to be red meat every day and lots of eggs and milk too. The auto would run for a year on a uranium pill. Babies (the more the better) must be fed on a strict schedule every three hours; no, babies must be fed whenever they cry; no, on a schedule . . . And the sun never sets on the British empire.

The Duchess of Sanseverina, the real heroine of Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, understood all such things when she considered the prospects of her lover and sighed, “J’ai vu tomber tant de choses que j’avais crues eternelles.” (I have seen the fall of so many things that I had thought eternal.) The man with the golden helmet understood that too, no matter who painted him.