Nemesis or Fortune

c. 1502

Engraving, 332 x 232 mm

Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

Taken in itself the ' Danae ' is a picture absolutely of the first order, representing the art of painting at its zenith ; yet when we compare the figure that gives the piece its name and character with a later effort in the nude of about twenty years after, we see that the art of Rembrandt could rise, as it were, above itself, and carry us to a height of pictorial achievement from which even the Danae looks immature. The reference is to the worldfamous Bathsheba of the Louvre of 1654.