EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

The painting is dark, however, so this version, digitally brightened, makes more of the detail in the background visible.¹ Bathsheba is being prepared for her erotic encounter with King David who can just be seen on the walls of his palace at upper left looking down at Bathsheba. Vision is the theme and the focus Bathsheba's toilette. Here's why.

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The maid, as in almost all great toilette scenes, is the "artist" painting Bathsheba with her paintbrush-shaped tool. Beside the old woman a small saucer filled with water represents her "palette" with what looks like a sponge in it. Artists actually use sponges to paint. Rembrandt's signature is on the raised dais directly below the saucer thereby strengthening the link to the artist. Above her is a large tray and silver jug, the jug's side shaped like a reflective eye. In it lies a gold chain like those given to great artists by their royal patrons. Rembrandt had painted himself actually wearing one he never received in 1629.

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The sketchy "face" with the bulbous nose that Rembrandt formed into The Skater's trousers (center and bottom images) is very similar to the overall form of this much larger canvas (top). Just as one of his "eyes" in The Skater is in the figure's groin to suggest fertility, one "eye" in Bathsheba is a dark grotto for insight and one with King David on his sunlit palace to indicate exterior perception. That David is looking from within Rembrandt's "eye" supports the claim. Even within The Skater (center left) one "eye" is a dark spot, the other a light space. In Bathsheba vegetation growing along the upper contours of the cave further suggests both "eyebrows" and fertility. More precisely, the large spaces for the "eyes" really resemble the orbital cavities of a skull with the actual eyes missing. We are inside Rembrandt's mind. The bulbous-nose shape is fused with the form of his own "skull", just as Leonardo turned his own "skull" into a grotto with orbital cavities in The Virgin of the Rocks (1483-6).

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Here you can see (bottom) in an engraved self-portrait how broad Rembrandt's nose was. In many self-portraits his nose is less prominent; it was, nevertheless, a very significant part of his face as it was for Michelangelo and other artists too. One of the probable reasons is that Ovid's Metamorphoses was for many centuries the most important source of visual stories save the Bible, read in every studio, and Ovid's middle name was Naso, or Nose. Naturally, he was thought to have had a big one. 

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Bathsheba resembles a model on a raised dais lit through a studio window. She performs "on stage"² surrounded by water as a symbol of Rembrandt's androgynous mind. He signed it close to the surface as though the image itself rises out of the depths of his mind.  With one hand touching her breast Bathsheba as a painting "paints" herself though the maids actually "paint" her. Yet even there we know that Rembrandt did. In addition, in placing a king and palace inside his "eye" Rembrandt implies that his inner eye is both pure and royal, an esoteric symbol of spiritual perfection.³

The scene is yet another inside view of an artist's skull.⁴ It is a mental image of his own mind conceiving the composition, fusing symbols of craft (the maid's hands, brushes, sponge, bowl) with conception (the imagined copulation between King David-as-artist and Bathsheba-as-model.) Given that every painter paints himself Bathsheba must be "Rembrandt" too and, as a nude woman, the most fertile part, no doubt, of Rembrandt's mind.