Ars longa vita brevis

Abstract

It is therefore nothing short of frustrating that the passing on 4 October 1669 of Rembrandt van Rijn, long considered the greatest among seventeenth-century Dutch painters, has left scarcely any traces. In her essay Stephanie Dickey reconstructs the circumstances of the artist’s death. Her piece amounts to a cultural history of death and burial in Protestant Amsterdam. Rembrandt was buried like any other citizen. No elaborate funeral ceremony took place; no eulogies were composed; no funeral monument was erected. He ended up in a rented grave with two other men. The now lost stone slab probably only included his name. The exact location in the Westerkerk went unrecorded. As Dickey almost ruefully concludes, ‘(…) Rembrandt’s modest burial suited his standing as one established artist among many in the busy city’.