Rembrandt’s House

I follow through one of Valéry’s essays on Leonardo da Vinci and suddenly have to close it, lost in memories. I read “painting” and the word evokes in my mind the day I fell, by chance, by tremendous and unprecedented luck, into Rembrandt’s House. I entered the museum and did not even know who Rembrandt was, I was incapable of a single biographical note. And then, at the very first painting, I was violently attacked: I stood in front of the work, perplexed. I had never been struck by a painting before, and that day I was able to measure my lack of culture. I remember that, like an idiot, I kept approaching and moving away from the paintings, first noticing the effects when observed from a distance, and then the details, the individual brushstrokes, with features that reminded of the Indians in their first contact with the Europeans. I disconnected from what was going on around me and was impressed by the depth, the creativity in the arrangement of the planes, and the emotional charge of the canvases. When I was startled, the museum was about to close and the clock was telling me that I had spent four hours in the house, which, if crossed at a leisurely pace, takes no more than ten minutes of the visitor’s time. “He had never been in a museum”—the employees must have been commenting among themselves, while they were getting rid of me. But that day, an illiterate left a museum convinced that he had been, for four hours, in the presence of the greatest painter of all time. And he never forgot it.