This is my theory, and please bear in mind when you read it that it accommodates all the elements involved. And this accommodation used to be the measure of the elegance of theories … before the word “science” came to mean what it means today.

I believe that Rembrandt sold his soul to the Devil when he was a young man. It was a simple bargain. The Devil promised to make Rembrandt the most famous painter of his time. The Devil sent hordes of mortals to Rembrandt for portraits. He gave wealth to Rembrandt, he gave him a charming house in Amsterdam, a wife and later a mistress, because he was sure he would have Rembrandt’s soul in the end.

But Rembrandt had been changed by his encounter with the Devil. Having seen such undeniable evidence of evil, he found himself obsessed with the question What is good? He searched the faces of his subjects for their inner divinity; and to his amazement he was able to see the spark of it in the most unworthy of men.

His skill was such—and please understand, he had got no skill from the Devil; the skill was his to begin with—that not only could he see that goodness, he could paint it; he could allow his knowledge of it, and his faith in it, to suffuse the whole.

With each portrait he understood the grace and goodness of mankind ever more deeply. He understood the capacity for compassion and for wisdom which resides in every soul. His skill increased as he continued; the flash of the infinite became ever more subtle; the person himself ever more particular; and more grand and serene and magnificent each work.

At last the faces Rembrandt painted were not flesh-and-blood faces at all. They were spiritual countenances, portraits of what lay within the body of the man or the woman; they were visions of what that person was at his or her finest hour, of what that person stood to become.

This is why the merchants of the Drapers’ Guild look like the oldest and wisest of God’s saints.

But nowhere is this spiritual depth and insight more clearly manifest than in Rembrandt’s self-portraits. And surely you know that he left us one hundred and twenty-two of these.

Why do you think he painted so many? They were his personal plea to God to note the progress of this man who, through his close observation of others like him, had been completely religiously transformed. “This is my vision,” said Rembrandt to God.

Towards the end of Rembrandt’s life, the Devil grew suspicious. He did not want his minion to be creating such magnificent paintings, so full of warmth and kindness. He had believed the Dutch to be a materialistic and therefore worldly people. And here in pictures full of rich clothing and expensive possessions, gleamed the undeniable evidence that human beings are wholly unlike any other animal in the cosmos—they are a precious mingling of the flesh and immortal fire.