The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

When Rembrandt stood before the canvas that had been stretched     across its wooden frame like a sail drawn taut in wind,his paintbrush balanced in the crux between his forefinger and thumb     like the boat's long rudder dipped into the Sea of Galilee,perhaps, as art historians suggest, he contemplated faith and doubt,     the frailty of both the body and belief, and painted fourteen meninside the boat, Christ and the disciples, plus another man     whom scholars believe to be Rembrandt himself in a cameoof hubris or whimsy or fear, as light slashed through the clouds     to illuminate the sea, and the sea rose up to eradicate the light,

Or instead of contemplation, like the two disciples leaning in       to grasp Christ's robe, Rembrandt bent to his work(scientists have analyzed Rembrandt's paint and found he mixed       wheat flour into it as an agent that simultaneously thickenedthe paint and made it more transparent), and when he placed       the fourteen men, the squall that tilts the boat so that the hulldraws a line from the top left corner of the frame to the bottom right       and the mast forms a perpendicular, intersecting line,perhaps he thought only of particulars, the way one disciple hinges       on the railing in the stern, one broad hand across his bald pateas he either vomits his dinner over the rail, or stares down       into the dark water, the grave from which he cannot be saved,even by Christ who's two feet away, while in the bow of the boat,       another disciple, in full light, as if on the high end of a seesaw,stares both heavenward and at the knot he's tying, that breaks loose       as the sail bucks and slacks and fills, whipping in his hands,

And in the stern of the boat Christ looks startled, woken       from sleep (in the Gospel of Mark, the disciples ask Christ,"Master, carest thou not that we perish?" and Christ quiets the sea,       saying, "Peace, be still," before admonishing the disciples—"Why are ye so fearful? How is it that ye have no faith?"—which produces       in the disciples, not an alleviation of fear, but fear transformed:"And they feared exceedingly, and said one to another, 'What manner       of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?'"), and the painting holds forever in this moment, the words unspoken       on the lips of the disciples who reach for Christ's robe,as the figure of Rembrandt (one hand grasping a rope, the other securing       his hat to his head) looks, not at Christ, but out to the tip of the brush,out to the painter, to the audiences that will appear over centuries,       from Amsterdam, across Europe, over the sea itself—the paintingof the ship within an actual ship, roiling on the waves—until it is purchased       in 1898, arriving in Boston in the collection of Mrs. Gardner(whom the socialites call Mrs. Jack, Belle, Donna Isabella, Isabella of Boston),

       While elsewhere in the country Henry Ford founds his motor companyand the Wright brothers take their first flight, and though women's suffrage       is a decade away, Isabella amasses her collection and opens in 1903(her husband died in 1898) a museum, fashioned on the palaces of Venice,       three floors of galleries surrounding an interior, glass-roofed garden,through which she strolls, imagining her son alive again and appearing       before her, the sound of his footsteps on the stone tiles risinglike the patter of water down a fountain (her biographers claim that the loss       of her two-year-old son, Jackie, from pneumonia was the animating forcebehind her collection—unable to have another child, she saw art       and its creators as her family), and so the painting remained,Rembrandt, the disciples, and Christ, on the wall of the Dutch Room,even after her death, through the First and Second World Wars,through the Space Race and televisions opening like cyclopean eyes       in every home, through assassinations of leaders, activists, and a president,each speech played back again and again...