Travelling in the company of Old Masters in shifting roles as observer, listener or sometime companion, this page is kept as a quiet pastime. It is part notebook, part informal journal, a collection of phone images and reflections drawn from encounters with old artworks and places where the past still lingers.
All pictures are taken by me, and all thoughts written during slow travels and unhurried visits, where time allows for second looks and quiet returns.The works and spaces gathered here were made in a world different from ours, yet they continue to ask things of us—not answers, but attention; not certainty, but time. These pages offer no final word, only a shared space in which looking, questioning, and returning might still matter.
Yvo Reinsalu

This small painting raises difficult questions about how we assess quality in Old Master works. What does ‘quality’ mean when an artwork has passed through centuries, bearing abrasion, significant pigment loss, structural interventions and other changes? The condition in which a work survives is not separate from its history; it is part of it. Once an artwork leaves the artist’s studio, it begins another life in which it continues to change.

Only around twelve paintings are securely attributed to Carel Fabritius. When set against estimates that roughly 98–99 per cent of Dutch Golden Age paintings have been lost, that number alters the meaning of the period itself. ‘Golden Age’ describes prosperity and output; it does not describe survival. What remains is a narrow and uneven selection shaped by accident, taste and decay.

Conceived for a perspective box and activated from a fixed peephole, the painting was designed as a controlled optical installation. The extreme recession of the Nieuwe Kerk and the radical foreshortening of the viola da gamba cohere only when the viewer’s eye occupies a particular point; outside that position, the image becomes unstable, as it does now. The original perspective box has been lost. What remains is a small painted surface — fragile, yet ethically preserved in the condition in which it survives — a small window into Delft in the 1650s: a well-dressed merchant seated at the turn of the street, his viola da gamba and lute displayed at the stall, the Nieuwe Kerk beyond.

In its present state, it asks whether we are prepared to recognise the quality of the masterpiece within the limits that time and condition have imposed upon it.

The Viola da Gamba Collection of the Musikinstrumenten-Museum, Berlin

The original instrument collection of the Musikinstrumenten-Museum in Berlin was largely destroyed during the Second World War, and the museum rebuilt its holdings after 1945 through systematic acquisitions.

The viola da gamba section includes a small number of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century instruments connected with a range of historical making centres: Königsberg (Gregorius Karpp, active late 17th century), Hamburg (Joachim Tielke, 1641–1719), Berlin (Jacob Meinertzen, c. 1665–after 1732), Nuremberg (Jeremias Würfel, c. 1655–after 1720), London (Barak Norman, c. 1651–c. 1724; Robert Cotton, fl. late 17th century), and Absam in Tyrol (Jacob Stainer, c. 1619–1683).

As Old Master paintings preserve the visible world of their time, these instruments preserve its sound; each endures as a work of rare beauty in its own right, formed by exceptional craftsmanship and the cultivated taste of its age.

The oldest surviving church in Berlin, St. Nicholas Church preserves in its masonry an interesting dialogue between two formative eras of northern German architecture: the 13th century fieldstone Romanesque that emerged during the period of German eastward settlement in the Margraviate of Brandenburg and the later Brick Gothic that developed within the Baltic and Hanseatic sphere.

Around 1220–1230 a stone basilica was established on this site, and substantial portions of its lower fabric remain visible in the base of the westwork and towers. The irregular glacial fieldstones and granite blocks, laid in thick mortar beds, produce broad joints and uneven surfaces that still determine the building’s weight and proportion.

Following the destructive fire of 1380, rebuilding campaigns extending through the late 14th and 15th centuries transformed the building into a three-aisled late Gothic hall church in brick. This typological shift aligned the building with the Brick Gothic architecture widespread across northern Germany. Ribbed vaults reorganised the interior into a coherent structural system; the aisles rose nearly to the height of the nave, reducing the hierarchical separation typical of earlier basilican plans. Pointed window openings, articulated brick buttresses, and stepped gables introduced sharper profiles and a more regular exterior order made possible by standardised brick construction.

The cohesion of this layered architectural ensemble here rests on structural continuity: the Romanesque stone substratum was retained and integrated into the Gothic rebuilding, so that the dialogue between early regional fieldstone construction and later Hanseatic Brick Gothic remains visible within a single architectural body, even acknowledging the significant nineteenth-century neo-Gothic restoration and post-war reconstruction that shaped the church’s present appearance.

Braunschweiger Monogrammist (fl. in Antwerp c. 1525–1545), The Loose Society, c. 1535–1540, Oil on oak, 30,1 x 46,5 cm, Gemäldegalerie

Elusive in identity and known from only a small number of surviving works, the Braunschweiger Monogrammist produced several carefully staged interior scenes. Within this corpus, the Berlin painting is the most complex in its organisation of space and action.

On the left, a long table anchors a compact group of figures: women sit on men’s knees, couples lean into tactile negotiation, glasses are raised, and bodies press together. The barred openings and markings on the wall suggest a commercial rather than a domestic environment.

The right side shifts the tone dramatically. On the floor, two women fight, one forcing the other down. A man bends forward to pour water over them in an attempt to break up the fight, while nearby a woman extends her arm to restrain another man from intervening. Numerous smaller details, charged with coded meaning, are embedded in the setting, so that the brothel interior emerges as a closely observed theatre in which seduction, calculation, possession, and disorder unfold within a single continuous space.

Such ambivalence reflects historical reality. In sixteenth-century Netherlandish cities brothels were condemned in principle yet regulated in practice. Commercial centres such as Antwerp drew merchants, labourers, sailors, and foreign mercenaries. From the time of the Burgundian dukes, and later under the Habsburg crown, pragmatic containment frequently prevailed over prohibition. Brothels functioned as managed outlets within a volatile urban environment.

The painting captures precisely this fragile equilibrium. It moralises, yet it also observes; it entertains, yet it dissects. In doing so, it occupies an interesting position between didactic imagery and the emerging Netherlandish genre painting — a compact genre scene in which moral framing and social observation operate in deliberate tension.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Landscape with an Arch Bridge, c. 1638, Oil on panel, 29.5 × 42.5 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

More than 350 years have passed since the death of Rembrandt, yet few artists remain so vividly present in scholarly debate, in the quiet obsessions of connoisseurs, and in the private reveries of those who stand before his paintings and feel that strange, inward tremor. His legacy is not a fixed monument but a restless field of questions.

His career was a lifelong inquiry. He tested formulas, revised compositions, returned to motifs, corrected himself, contradicted himself. Each artwork feels like an argument conducted in paint. Each carries the trace of preparation and doubt, of experiment and self-evaluation.

This small, melancholic landscape with a bridge was for decades thought to derive from the Rijksmuseum version and was accordingly attributed to his gifted pupil Govert Flinck (1615–1660). Yet Rembrandt resists such tidy narratives. Recent research has established that the Berlin panel predates the Rijksmuseum painting, long regarded as the prototype; it therefore cannot be a later interpretation by Flinck and is most likely the earliest treatment of this rare motif within his oeuvre. The chronology turns quietly, and what once seemed obvious dissolves.

Such reversals are not exceptions in the case of Rembrandt; they are almost the rule. Paintings once doubted return to him. Others once embraced drift away. Dates shift by decades. Surfaces reveal earlier intentions beneath later interventions. The scholar who approaches him with certainty often leaves with questions. In Rembrandt’s world, clarity and contradiction pretty much coexist.

The Marienkirche stands slightly apart from the cleared openness of Alexanderplatz. The fragments of the medieval city remain embedded within a former socialist utopia, where ideology once sought to redefine the past, belief, and even the future itself.
The church emerged in the mid thirteenth century, shortly after Berlin received its town privileges, and its Gothic hall church reflects the sober pragmatism of an urban parish rather than the symbolic ambition of a cathedral.

Its famous Dance of Death fresco, painted around 1484, consists of a long painted frieze on the tower wall showing skeletal Death figures paired sequentially with clerical and lay figures of different social standing, identified through conventional dress and arranged at broadly equal scale. Sequence takes precedence over individuality. Pope, merchant, noble, cleric, child: none are granted visual privilege, none are spared interruption. What collapses here is not simply life, but hierarchy.

The Reformation did not erupt suddenly in 1517; it emerged from a long period of searching already inscribed on church walls. The Dance of Death belongs to that threshold moment, when belief becomes something lived under pressure rather than inherited without question. Seen from the centre of Berlin, a city repeatedly rebuilt on ideological promises, the fresco feels less like a medieval relic than a reminder: systems that claim permanence are always more fragile than they admit.

Isaac van Ostade (1621–1649), Winter Landscape with Sleigh and Frozen Boats, c. 1645, Oil on panel, 21.4 × 25.7 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Isaac van Ostade belongs to the generation of painters active in Haarlem during the 1640s. Later historians have often remarked that, had he not died at the age of only twenty-eight, he might well have rivalled or even surpassed his famous elder brother Adriaen van Ostade (1610- 1685) in productivity and range. His surviving paintings, produced within a remarkably short span, do not suggest imitation or dependence but a sustained effort to rethink established models. Rather than repeating familiar compositional formulas, he experimented with new spatial arrangements, reduced figure hierarchies, and alternative balances between genre and landscape, indicating an artist intent on extending the possibilities of the medium.

Winter scenes offered a particularly fertile ground for these explorations. By the 1640s winter genre was well known to Dutch audiences, yet Isaac van Ostade approached it without reliance on stock compositions or anecdotal crowding. In this small painting, movement is present—peasants, horses, dog, and sledges cross the ice—but it is absorbed into the broader spatial scheme rather than staged as narrative incident. Attention shifts toward the organisation of the surface, the articulation of snow, ice, and vegetation, and the measured distribution of light across the scene. Human activity is neither suppressed nor celebrated; it is integrated into a landscape governed by seasonal condition.

Petrus Christus (active c. 1444–1476), Portrait of a Young Woman, c.1470, Oil on oak panel, 29 x 22.5 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

This portrait belongs to a Burgundian world that trusted form more than explanation, and it fixes that trust with unusual finality. The sitter appears fully resolved within the frame, her presence stabilised through dress, posture, and spatial containment. Everything required for recognition is present, while the reasons for the image and identity remain unspoken. Visibility is granted without context.

That sense of completion has long coexisted with historical uncertainty. For centuries the portrait circulated under the name of Jan van Eyck, its refinement acknowledged while its authorship remained obscured. Petrus Christus was recovered as an independent Bruges master only in the nineteenth century through the work of Gustav Friedrich Waagen and later Max J. Friedländer, who reconstructed a small, unusually coherent oeuvre. The painting’s delayed attribution mirrors its visual character: precise, authoritative, and resistant to narrative placement.

The sitter’s appearance conforms to the most exacting Burgundian ideals of beauty in the later fifteenth century, particularly the preference for conspicuously high forehead. This effect was carefully produced. Hair is tightly bound and drawn back to heighten the forehead; the neck is lengthened through posture and dress; the body is compressed into a narrow vertical silhouette. The tall black headdress is a variant of the truncated, or bee-hive, hennin fashionable at the Burgundian court, reinforcing height and linearity rather than softness.

Placed against the cultural condition described by Johan Huizinga in ‘The Autumn of the Middle Ages,’ the image comes into sharper focus. Huizinga characterised late medieval society as one in which fixed forms, ceremony, and outward exactitude carried meaning in their own right. Christus’s portrait can be understood within that framework: it records appearance as a finished social fact, shaped by Burgundian ideals of regulated beauty and controlled display, where meaning is secured through form rather than through narrative or expression.

Attributed to the workshop of Johann Heinrich Harrass (1665–1714), circa 1700, Berlin Cembalo (two‑manual cembalo with 16′, 8′ and 4′ registers, inventory no. 316, Musikinstrumenten‑Museum, Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, Berlin

Discovered in 1890 amid claims—never proven—that it once belonged to Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), the instrument speaks for itself. Its austere form is a quiet sermon: every plain surface, every unpainted line exists to serve, letting the music within it speak. In Bach’s Lutheran world, music was not decoration or spectacle; it was devotion. He wrote that music existed for the glory of God and the recreation of the mind, and in its stripped-down simplicity, this cembalo reflects that belief. Unlike the painted mythologies and gilded excesses of many Flemish, Italian, and French cembalos, it is pared to essentials, showing a culture where sound carried faith, discipline, and inward joy—and where excessive decoration was simply unnecessary.

Unidentified follower of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) ?, ‘An Old Man in an Armchair’, mid-17th century ?, Oil on canvas, 111 × 88 cm, The National Gallery, London

The rejection of this painting as an autograph work of Rembrandt was the result of a long process of scholarly reassessment, unfolding from the 1960s onward and reaching a stable consensus by the late twentieth century.
The reasons for rejection are primarily stylistic. While the painting adopts a loose handling associated with Rembrandt’s late works, this handling does not function in the same structurally integrated way. In Rembrandt’s securely attributed paintings of the 1650s, rough brushwork is inseparable from form and perception: light organises mass, strokes respond to the physical resistance of flesh, and painterly freedom arises from necessity rather than display.

Rembrandt transformed Baroque painting by redefining finish as a flexible outcome of looking, not a fixed standard of polish, and by making visible process an expressive tool rather than a flaw. This language proved both liberating and durable. It circulated among pupils, followers, and later artists, often as imitation, but also as participation in a shared pictorial problem. Many works produced within this orbit are distinguished achievements in their own right, even when they fall outside the master’s hand. An Old Man in an Armchair belongs to this continuum. Its ambition lies in testing and extending a painterly idiom that Rembrandt had made available to others. The painting is therefore less a failed claim to authorship than evidence of how powerfully Rembrandt’s visual language endured, inviting artists to work within it, adapt it, and at times stretch it beyond the conditions that had originally given it its force.

Paintings of musicians from the mid-seventeenth century often linger at the threshold between sound and silence. Figures pause as if caught before a note can form, and the instrument becomes a register of temperament rather than performance.

In this period the viola da gamba carried a distinctive cultural charge as the most cultivated of the bowed instruments, associated with private study, intellectual refinement and a quiet, often melancholic composure. Its rich tone, unlike the violin’s brightness or the rustic character of village instruments, made it the favoured companion of scholars and the well-educated. Dutch inventories and contemporary poetry cast it as an emblem of inward discipline and reflective attention, an object whose physical integrity was tied to the steadiness of its player. Emblematic writing often used broken instruments to mark a lapse of judgement or a gift allowed to decay, and in still-life contexts the motif could allude more gently to fragility rather than to outright moral failure.

The viola da gamba in this painting stands at the intersection of these meanings. It is not worn down by time but torn apart by conduct: its upper bass string snapped, its soundboard gashed, its noble voice extinguished. Its owner, already drunk and offered more wine, holds it with the careless indifference of someone already turned away from his own capacities. For a seventeenth-century viewer the meaning would have settled quickly. An instrument associated with learning, discipline and interior balance appears in the hands of a man who has abandoned those qualities. The silence or bad sound it now holds becomes an image of that surrender: the noble voice is gone, and the shattered instrument forms the centre of the scene, a reminder of how swiftly inner steadiness and harmony can falter when judgement is lost and the violence of drink breaks the instrument apart.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669), Woman Sitting Half Dressed beside a Stove, 1658, Etching, engraving and drypoint on laid paper, 6 state of 7, Plate 228 × 186 mm; Sheet 243 × 198 mm, Christie’s, The Sam Josefowitz Collection: Graphic Masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn – Part III, London, 3 December 2025

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669), Self-Portrait with Cap Pulled Forward, c. 1630, Etching with touches of drypoint on laid paper, Plate 50 × 43 mm; Sheet 52 × 44 mm, Sixth state of ten, Christie’s, The Sam Josefowitz Collection: Graphic Masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn – Part III, London, 3 December 2025, lot 2

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669), The Entombment, c. 1654, Etching and Drypoint on Vellum, Plate 206 × 157 mm; Sheet 218 × 161 mm, Third state of Four, The Sam Josefowitz Collection: Graphic Masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn – Part III, London, 3 December 2025

This rare impression is almost entirely black, the plate wiped so heavily that only the thinnest traces of light survive. The mourners’ faces, the curve of Christ’s body and face, and the gestures that support him register only as slight, wavering outlines against the dark. The brightness that grazes the figures is produced solely by the ink thinning enough for the vellum to breathe through. In Rembrandt’s late etchings such near-erasure often carries a devotional charge: the scene is not offered in clarity but allowed to emerge gradually, as if the viewer must enter the darkness before any meaning can take shape. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, impressions like this could invite a meditative way of seeing, where the Passion is approached through shadow, and the remaining light becomes the point at which grief, faith and reflection meet.