While reading Amy Butler Greenfield’s A Perfect Red, I came across Titian’s portrait of Charles V on horseback.

The moment I saw it, I thought of Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider.

That surprised me. I do not know Rembrandt’s work particularly well, and I had never seen the two paintings discussed together. But the connection was immediate. Not scholarly. Not proven. Just visual.

There they were: two riders, two horses, two paintings separated by roughly a century, and something in the structure of one seemed to call out to the other.

Did Rembrandt know Titian’s painting?

I once traveled to California with a friend, where we stayed with some friends of hers. They had a Rembrandt portrait hanging in their hallway—or so they said. When they asked me what I thought of their Rembrandt, I blurted out, “That’s not a Rembrandt.”