Art, power and the stories we prefer not to see
This text is not only about art.
It’s about people.
About money.
About power.
About self-image.
And yes, about politics – not the loud kind with slogans, but the quiet kind that runs underneath things when we believe we are “just talking about art”.
If you are looking for a neat timeline – when Rembrandt was born, how many self-portraits he painted, why his light looks so beautifully golden – Wikipedia does that better than I ever could.
I’m interested in something else.
I’m interested in why Rembrandt paints the way he paints-
and why it still doesn’t let us off the hook.
The myth of the quiet genius
Rembrandt is often presented like a perfectly aged red wine.
Deep. Serious. Meaningful.
A man who supposedly understood the human soul better than anyone else.
What rarely gets mentioned:
Rembrandt was not a solitary figure quietly working away in his studio.
He was an entrepreneur.
A self-stylist.
A director.
He knew how attention worked.
And he worked constantly on his own image.
This becomes especially clear in his self-portraits.
More than eighty times he painted his own face – young, old, proud, tired, wealthy, ruined.
This is often romanticised as self-exploration, as if Rembrandt were keeping a painted diary of his inner life.
That reading doesn’t convince me.
What Rembrandt seems to be doing instead is testing roles.
Soldier. Beggar. Scholar. Prophet. Fool.
Rembrandt plays Rembrandt – and we are the audience.
This is not private introspection.
It is public performance.
He doesn’t paint who he is.
He paints who he could be.
Or who he needs to be – depending on who is paying.
Amsterdam: not a backdrop, but a system
To understand this, we need to look at Amsterdam itself.
Not the postcard version with quiet canals and mirrored façades,
but Amsterdam in the 17th century as a system – efficient, restless, and relentlessly productive.
A trading system.
Spices, sugar, tobacco, porcelain, people, ideas, money – everything moves.
The city doesn’t understand itself as a place of belonging, but as a site of exchange.
Amsterdam is not a home. It is an operation.
Within this logic, art is not an ornament.
It is infrastructure.
Paintings do not exist to be admired for their beauty alone.
They mark status.
They signal membership.
They make power legible.
Rembrandt is not painting at the edges of this world.
He is fully embedded in it.
Trade, colonial power and the invisible engine
Behind this world stand the trading companies – most notably the Dutch East India Company.
Not a state.
Not a king.
But a corporation.
With its own ships, soldiers, contracts – and the right to wage war.
This was new.
And radical.
People invested money and expected profit.
Not morality.
Not responsibility.
What is often glossed over is that the Netherlands were a colonial power.
Perhaps less territorially rigid than others, perhaps shorter-lived in some regions – but fully involved.
Trade posts in Asia.
Colonial entanglements in Africa and the Caribbean.
A world not only travelled, but organised, measured and exploited.
This matters.
Because the world was no longer seen as distant – but as a resource.
Something that could be priced, transported and owned.
Art grew inside this logic.
Not despite trade – but because of it.
Knowledge as spectacle: the anatomy theatre
One place reveals this especially clearly: the anatomy theatre.
These were not secret rooms or quiet laboratories.
They were public spaces, often circular, with steeply rising seating.
In the centre lay the body of an executed criminal.
Around it stood doctors and scholars.
Above them sat spectators – students, city officials, paying guests.
People came to watch.
Dissections were social events.
Knowledge was staged.
The body was opened not out of respect, but out of curiosity, control and the desire to impose order.
Visibility was everything.
Those who could see belonged.
The body in the centre had no name, no voice, no story.
When Rembrandt disrupts the order
When we look at The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, we are not looking at a medical image.
We are looking at hierarchy.
The dead man lies unnamed.
The living stand clothed, identified and paid.
And then Rembrandt disrupts this order.
He paints movement.
Attention.
Uncertainty.
The question becomes not “What do we learn?”
But “Who is allowed to learn?”
Light is central here.
Rembrandt’s light is not atmosphere.
It is a decision.
Who is visible?
Who dissolves into shadow?
Light becomes hierarchy.
And suddenly the dead body is the centre – not the doctors.
This is not moralising.
It is more unsettling than that.
Women in Rembrandt’s world
The same complexity runs through Rembrandt’s depiction of women.
Saskia, Hendrickje Stoffels, the prophetess Hanna – they are undeniably present, yet never neutral.
Their visibility is always charged with meaning.
Saskia often stands for status and stability, her image embedded in a language of wealth and social security.
Hendrickje appears differently. She is painted with intimacy and care, yet marked by social judgment, shaped by a relationship that remained officially illegitimate.
Her body carries meanings that extend far beyond her as a person – moral, religious, social.
Even in moments of tenderness, she does not escape projection.
Rembrandt does not invent this structure.
He operates within it.
Art, in his world, is not separate from society.
It is inseparable from it.
Why this still matters
Rembrandt had students, a workshop, and a style that was immediately recognisable.
Over time, that style became something like a brand.
Eventually, it became difficult to tell what was truly his and what emerged from his workshop.
That feels familiar.
I’m not suggesting Rembrandt was an activist.
He wasn’t.
But his paintings make visible who is allowed to speak – and who is reduced to mere presence.
And that is political.
Always.
Just as it is political today who gets to tell stories, and who is spoken about instead.
Perhaps Rembrandt painted himself so often because, in a world driven by anonymous profit, the face is the last thing one can still claim.
Identity, in such a context, is not something you simply have.
It is something you perform.
Looking again
If this felt uncomfortable, that’s the point.
Next time you look at a Rembrandt, don’t ask whether it is beautiful.
Ask why it looks the way it does.
And who benefits from that.