Rembrandt, The Night Watch: When Men Stepped Out of Shadow

The Night Watch opens before the narrator like a vast dark doorway with a whole city waking inside it, and a voice from the darkness explains that Rembrandt painted the moment before the men began to move. Chapter by chapter, the figures and elements of the canvas speak: Captain Frans Banninck Cocq with his open hand and its shadow, Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch in pale gold beside the captain's black, the golden girl who carries meaning among the muskets, then the musketeer, the light, the shadow and the drum. Reading the painting as an architect, he finds in it a column of night beside a column of day, a drum beating like column after column and window after window, and an Amsterdam laid out as an urban plan where the captain is an axis, the pikes are lines of perspective and the spaces between bodies are plazas. Time explains that the men are still about to march because Rembrandt painted preparation and left the moment unfinished. In the closing chapter the narrator learns that the hardest watch is the watch over oneself, and the painting tells him it is about the moment a human being steps out of shadow.