Rembrandt's Danaë: slashed with acid, resurrected by miracle
A man enters the museum. He throws sulfuric acid on the painting. Then he slashes it with a knife. Danaë, Rembrandt's masterpiece, is destroyed. It's 1985.
By Artedusa
••8 min read
Rembrandt's Danaë: slashed with acid, resurrected by miracle
A man enters the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. June 15, 1985, 11 AM. He approaches Danaë, Rembrandt's masterpiece. He takes out a bottle of sulfuric acid. He throws it on the painting. The liquid burns the canvas, dissolves three centuries of pigments. Then he pulls out a knife. He slashes. Once. Twice. Guards rush in. Too late. Danaë, the golden nude woman who had been waiting for Zeus since 1636, is destroyed.
What follows is one of the most heroic restorations in art history. Twelve years of work. Techniques never used before. An almost impossible resurrection. Today, Danaë is visible again in Saint Petersburg. But she bears her scars. And perhaps that's what makes her even more moving.
Danaë or the erotic golden rain
The myth is simple and disturbing. Danaë, princess of Argos, is locked by her father in a bronze tower. Oracle: her son will kill him. But Zeus, who knows no obstacle, transforms himself into golden rain to penetrate her. From this union Perseuswas born.
Rembrandt paints Danaë in 1636, at thirty. He just married Saskia van Uylenburgh. It's his happy period, rich, triumphant. The painting measures 185 cm by 203 cm — monumental intimacy. Danaë lies on a sumptuous bed, nude, leg raised, hand extended toward the golden light entering from the left.
But where is Zeus? No visible golden rain. Just this warm light, almost palpable, caressing Danaë's body. Rembrandt doesn't paint the myth literally. He paints the waiting, the desire, the instant just before transformation. Danaë smiles, extends her hand, welcomes. It's overwhelmingly sensual.
Her body isn't idealized. Soft belly, full thighs, natural breasts. This isn't an improbable Greek goddess. It's a real woman waiting for her lover. Rembrandt refuses neoclassical canons. He paints living, desiring flesh. In 1636, it's almost scandalous.
The mysterious modifications
X-rays and analyses reveal a secret: Rembrandt repainted Danaë around 1646-1647, ten years after creation. Why? Saskia died in 1642. Rembrandt has a new companion, Geertje Dircx, then Hendrickje Stoffels.
He modifies Danaë's face. Features become Hendrickje's. He transforms the right hand — first closed, it becomes open, welcoming. He softens the light. The painting changes meaning: from erotic mythology to intimate portrait of earthly love.
It's rare for a painter to rework a major work ten years later. Rembrandt fuses two epochs of his life, two women, two conceptions of love in a single canvas. Danaë becomes sentimental palimpsest.
The old servant on the right, pulling the golden curtain, looks at the scene with an indecipherable expression. Complicity? Jealousy? Disapproval? Chained Cupid cries above the bed — symbol of imprisoned or liberated love? Each detail is ambiguous, open.
June 15, 1985: the attack
Bronius Maigys, 48-year-old Lithuanian, enters the Hermitage. Former soldier, unstable psychological profile, obsessed with the idea that Western art corrupts Soviet purity. He prepared his attack for weeks.
11:12 AM. He throws acid on Danaë. The sulfuric liquid spreads over 30% of the surface. Lethal concentration: pH close to zero. The canvas literally sizzles. Pigments dissolve in real time. Rembrandt erases before your eyes.
Then Maigys pulls out a kitchen knife. He slashes the painting's center. Two deep cuts cross Danaë's body. The canvas tears. Three hundred fifty years of painting gutted in ten seconds.
Guards subdue him. He screams incoherent slogans about moral decadence. Legal psychiatry: paranoid schizophrenia. He'll be committed, not judged. But the damage is done. Danaë lies on the museum floor, unrecognizable.
First expert assessment: total loss. Acid destroyed the pictorial layer, attacked the preparation, burned the linen canvas. Lacerations severed fibers. Restoration impossible. They talk of cutting out the healthy part, keeping a fragment. It's a national disaster.
The impossible restoration
The Hermitage restoration team refuses fate. Project leader: Yevgenia Gammer, chief restorer. She assembles fourteen specialists. Chemists, physicists, art historians. Crazy objective: save Danaë.
First step: neutralize the acid. They apply buffer solutions millimeter by millimeter. Too fast: the canvas disintegrates. Too slow: acid continues burning. Impossible balance found after six months of tests.
Second step: fix the fragments. Acid transformed certain zones to powder. They invent a special acrylic resin that penetrates destroyed fibers and solidifies them without changing colors. Process never attempted at this scale.
Third step: reconstruct. Lacerations created material losses. Impossible to repaint Rembrandt. They use revolutionary technique: screened reintegration. Tiny color dots, visible up close but forming the image from afar. Absolute transparency: you see what is restoration.
Twelve years of work. 1985-1997. Each day photographically documented. When Danaë is unveiled in 1997, it's a miracle. The painting is saved. Not intact — scars are visible. But alive.
Scars as beauty
Today, if you look at Danaë closely, you see the wounds. Lighter zones where acid devoured glazes. Vertical lines where the knife slashed. Texture is no longer homogeneous.
Some critics said the painting was "dead," that you only saw restoration. It's false. Danaë still radiates. Golden light still strikes her body with the same intensity. Her smile remains enigmatic. Rembrandt survives vandalism.
But there's something new. This visible fragility. These scars reminding that art can be destroyed in ten seconds and takes twelve years to save. Danaë became meta-work: painting about love bearing traces of hatred, 17th-century masterpiece restored with 20th-century technologies.
Restorers made an ethical choice: not hide the damage. Screened reintegration is visible. You see where Rembrandt stops and 1997 begins. This honesty transforms restoration into artistic act. Danaë wears her history.
Rembrandt and women
Why does this painting obsess? Because Rembrandt paints women like nobody else. No cold mythology, no abstract allegory. He paints inhabited bodies, known faces, true intimacy.
Saskia nude in bed. Hendrickje emerging from bath. The Jewish bride. All these women look at viewers with stupefying presence. They don't pose. They are. Rembrandt captures the instant when the other fully exists before you.
Danaë embodies this genius. She doesn't put herself on display. She waits for someone she desires. We, viewers, are accidental voyeurs of a private moment. This entering golden light — is it Zeus or Rembrandt coming home? Myth becomes biography.
Rembrandt's contemporaries found his nudes too "vulgar." They preferred the polished Venuses of Italians. But today, these academic bodies leave us cold. Danaë overwhelms us because she breathes.
Seeing Danaë today
The painting is at the Hermitage, room 254, permanent installation. You enter the room. Danaë strikes you immediately. This luminous body against dark background. This presence.
Approach. Look at restored zones. You'll see the dot screen, almost invisible at one meter. It's fascinating: involuntary pointillism, science transformed into art. Scars don't disfigure. They testify.
Museum lighting is calculated to reveal surviving glazes. Rembrandt painted in superimposed transparent layers. Acid destroyed some, revealing internal structure. You see how he built flesh: ocher underlayer, pink glazes, white highlights. Anatomy of painting.
Hermitage Museum
Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya 34, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Open Tuesday-Sunday 10:30am-6pm (Wednesday and Friday until 9pm)
Admission: approximately 700 rubles (~€7)
Room 254 (Flemish and Dutch painting)
Advice: come on weekdays, early. The Hermitage is immense, crowded. But at opening, you can have a few minutes alone with Danaë. Look at her frontally, in profile, closely. Each angle reveals something.
Art that survives
Danaë carries several stories. The woman waiting for her divine lover. Saskia become Hendrickje. The insane 1985 attack. The heroic restoration. Each layer of meaning adds to layers of paint.
Perhaps that's what makes this painting essential: it proves art can survive almost anything. Death (Saskia). Time (three centuries). Violence (acid and knife). Oblivion. And resurge, wounded but alive.
Bronius Maigys wanted to destroy what he saw as decadence. He failed. Danaë still exists. She still extends her hand toward light. She still smiles. Rembrandt won.
Rembrandt's Danaë: slashed with acid, resurrected by miracle | Art History
