In 1633 a miller’s son from the Dutch Republic stopped signing with a monogram and began signing his first name with a silent d, placing himself alongside Michelangelo and Raphael. This episode follows Rembrandt from a religiously divided household in Leiden in 1606, through a university enrollment he abandoned at fourteen, to Amsterdam in 1631, where a booming merchant class wanted portraits that made them look like royalty. Marriage to Saskia van Uylenburgh in 1634 launched him into high society and a 13,000-guilder mortgage on a fashionable house he could not truly afford.

We examine the paradox of 1642, when he completed The Night Watch, transforming a static militia group portrait into a theatrical narrative, in the same year Saskia died of tuberculosis after three infant children had already been lost. We then confront the messy middle: the breach-of-promise lawsuit by Geertje Dircx and his campaign to have her confined in a house of correction, the church censure of Hendrickje Stoffels, the trust fund that kept him from remarrying, and the collecting addiction that led to insolvency in 1656. We reveal the legal loophole by which Hendrickje and Titus formed an art dealership that hired him as its sole employee, and how losing everything freed his late style of thick, rugged paint, flattened backgrounds inspired by Mughal miniatures, and unflinching self-portraits, before his burial in a rented unmarked grave in 1669.

• Why growing up between Catholic and Protestant parents trained him to see nuance
• The Night Watch was never a night scene; the varnish darkened over centuries
• Dismantling the starving-artist myth: a highly paid professional who shopped his way into bankruptcy
• Over 40 self-portraits as a time-lapse of a soul weathering
• How he made chiaroscuro psychological by leaving shadows undefined