Answer:
Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait With Two Circles is unlikely to be surrounded by cameras if you seek it out at Kenwood House in London. You can gaze into the old artist’s dark eyes as they contemplate you in return. His conscious presence lurks in soft mossy gatherings of muted colour. He uses his brush to create both himself and what looks like an unfinished map of the world. Rembrandt looks noble and flawed, gazing at you as one troubled person at another.
As for depth, it’s a false test to compare a Rembrandt self-portrait with the Mona Lisa. To grasp the real wonder of Leonardo you need to look at his drawings. He finished very few paintings and all are commissions in which self-expression struggles with patrons’ demands. It’s in his notebooks that Leonardo truly soars. In page after page he studies nature, designs machinery, invents weapons, plans fortifications and seeks the secret of flight.
The greatest of all these visual investigations are his anatomical drawings. These are his artistic answers to Rembrandt’s portraits – and they are also miracles of science. He wrote of the dread he felt when he stayed up all night in a dissection room full of cadavers, alone with the dead. Out of these experiments he produced drawings that go – literally – deeper than Rembrandt. Instead of being moved by a face, Leonardo digs and cuts in search of life’s hidden structure. The drawings that record his fleshy discoveries outdo Rembrandt’s greatest portraits as images of what it is to be human. There’s no more moving work of art on earth than his depiction of a foetus in the womb, esconced as if in a capsule bound for the stars.
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