Image of Rembrandt’s “Apostle Paul” courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

Today is the feast of saints Peter and Paul, princes of the apostles who stood as early leaders for their faith, so this Apostle Paul (c. 1657) by Rembrandt is up for discussion here. It’s an incredible image (whether you’re Christian or not) by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669), that most-glowing master among golden age Dutch painters.

Paul’s particulars would have been well-known to a European artist working in the 1600s. A Roman citizen, he’d persecuted the “church of God” before his own conversion. The Acts of the Apostles describe how this happened one day on the road to Damascus: Saul (Paul’s original Hebrew name) had a searing vision of the resurrected Christ after being temporarily blinded. For affecting, visceral images of this incident, see here.

For this ponderous picture, Rembrandt focuses on another facet of Paul, which is his writing life. Celebrated as an intellectual and a man of letters whose work would deeply influence Christian thinking, Paul has many epistles attributed to him. So here he sits, surrounded by the tools of his trade, head-in-hand, pen-poised, all evidence of how this artist could enliven even a still image with a dramatic sense of narrative. In Rembrandt’s later works like this one, gestures get less overt, though they’re never less expressive for that.