“He left no diaries. No memoirs. No letters besides the occasional plea for patronage. His most substantial contemporary biography, no more than a few paragraphs in all, reveals little beyond the human capacity for understatement. … The entirety of his known painterly philosophy amounts to six words: to produce ‘die meeste ende die natureelste beweechlickheyt‘ — or ‘the greatest and most natural movement’ — a phrase whose precise meaning remains hotly contested to this day. In the annals of art history, there are those whose stories remain shrouded by the passage of time. And then there is Rembrandt.”