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.