Liquor Jack: The Thirty Pieces of Silver (from Frozen Desire)

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Judas, Repentant, Returning the Pieces of Silver: Rembrandt van Rijn, 1629 (private collection, Mulgrave Castle, North Yorkshire)

The arrangement of the picture is so unique for its age; and though literary description of pictures is like the moving of heavy furniture, laborious and slow when the glancing is easy and quick, I will try to describe this one from its photograph. In the centre of a wood-planked floor, and of the picture, is not a human or saintly figure, but some money: large coins of silver, exactly thirty of them. What coins they are I am not completely sure. They are silver dollars, certainly, torn out of the mountain at Potosí in the High Andes, though whether minted at Mexico or Lima or, more likely, overstruck as leeuwendaalder ('Lion dollars') in the Netherlands for trade with the East, I cannot tell. What is important is their number; already, under the influence of commerce and science, thirty is gaining some precision as a number, and enumeration is displacing appreciation as the pre-eminent mental attitude. (The great tulip speculation is just six years away.)

Above all, Rembrandt recognises their power. They are like grenades tossed into a crowded shelter, scattering the figures, the High Priest and the man wearing the Polish sable kolpak, into the shadows... Of the human beings only Judas can tolerate the propinquity of the coins, but at an unspeakable cost. He has ceased to be human. He has been reduced in his shame to the condition of a dog. He whimpers to be put out of his misery. The detail is shattering. Tiny brush-drips show blood on his head, neck and ear. Flecks of white suggest tears on his closed eyelids, foam on his lips, teeth.

What Rembrandt has understood, and portrayed as nobody before or since, is the strangeness of money: that it breaks the chain of desire and effect. Money provokes people to act, for the sake of payment, in a fashion that, if they knew how the action would turn out, they would not contemplate. Rembrandt seizes the moment when the veil of money is torn asunder and wish and consequence come explosively together: Judas realises that he has assassinated the Son of Man. It is a moment of drama unequalled in painting... For in this flash of recognition, the miller's boy, the Dutchman, saw into the marrow of history: that the divine in man is dead beyond all resurrection; that there is nothing left to us but a few coins on a dusty floor and our bestial natures; and that in every monetary transaction, wholesale and retail, Christ is re-crucified.

from James Buchan: Frozen Desire: An Inquiry Into the Meaning of Money (1997)

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Provenance of the work: by 7 March 1776: Robert Alexander, Edinburgh
between 6 March 1776 and 7 March 1776: sale of the collection of Robert Alexander at Christie's, London
1776: obtained by James Caulfield, 1st Earl of Charlemont (1728-1799), Dublin
1874: obtained by Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (1847-1927)
1927 (?): inherited by Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne (1860-1944)
1944 (?): inherited by Grania Guinness (?)
Unknown date: inherited by Constantine Phipps, 5th Marquess of Normansby (1954), Mulgrave Castle, North Yorkshire (?)

US Treasury paper certificate for five silver dollars, 1896. A controversial note, this Silver Certificate was part of an educational series. It was deemed inappropriate for American children due to its portrayal of a scantily dressed woman, Columbia, who symbolized liberty. The note was quickly removed from circulation: image by BrokenSegue, 27 December 2004