QI The Book of the Dead

unmarked grave.
    In the years after Saskia’s death, his favourite companion had been his pet monkey, Puck, and their closeness reveals the side to Rembrandt that we now most appreciate. He cared little for money, as such. He liked what it bought but not what it did to people. He egged on the swanks and grandees who trooped into his studio to dress opulently, making themselves look even more ridiculous and vain. Rembrandt preferred to paint life in the raw: people urinating, wrinkled faces, dimpled thighs. Even in his biblical pictures, like the The Preaching of Saint John , he couldn’t resist painting a pair of copulating dogs in the foreground. When Puck died, Rembrandt was heartbroken. Just as he had painted his beloved Saskia as she lay dying, he immortalised Puck’s memory by painting his corpse into the portrait of a family he was working on. The paterfamilias protested and threatened to withdraw the commission unlessRembrandt removed the offending item. Rembrandt refused, sacrificed the cash and kept the painting, monkey included. Sadly, this masterpiece of simian portraiture has long been lost.

     
    Another painter with a penchant for self-portraits and monkeys was the moustachioed, mono-browed Mexican Frida Kahlo (1907–54). She is often called a Surrealist but she never felt comfortable with the label, referring to André Breton and his gang as ‘coo-coo lunatic sons of bitches’. ‘I never painted dreams,’ she wrote, ‘I painted my own reality.’ From the age of six, when she first contracted polio, this reality was more or less defined by pain.
    On 17 November 1925, when she was only eighteen, Frida was travelling home from school on a bus when a tram hit it broadside on. She broke her back, pelvis, collarbone, ribs and right leg (in eleven places) and dislocated a foot and a shoulder. A piece of metal handrail also pierced her vagina. Although she was expected to die, after more than a year prostrate in bed, she recovered. Her father, a photographer (and an artist himself) rigged up a mirror and various contraptions over her bed so that she could see and draw objects in the room. It was this that led Frida to become an artist. In the remainder of her life, she underwent thirty-five surgical operations (as well as several abortions and miscarriages) and her art almost always revolved about her body, her pain and her suffering, sometimes in shockingly realistic detail.
    As if the physical pain wasn’t enough, Frida also managed to fall in love with one of Mexico’s most flamboyant and difficult men, the Marxist mural painter Diego Rivera. He was twenty-one years her senior (and twice her size) when they married in 1929,and, while it was definitely a love match, it had more ups and downs than the most lurid Mexican soap opera. For all his talent and chutzpah, Diego had a violent temper and was compulsively unfaithful to Frida – even with her own sister Cristina. He happily concurred with his doctor’s diagnosis that he was ‘unfit for monogamy’ and it was said that, for American women visiting Mexico, sleeping with Diego Rivera was as important a part of the tourist itinerary as visiting the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.
    Not that Frida was any slouch in this regard. She, too, had numerous affairs, both with men and women – most famously with Leon Trotsky, a liaison that started in 1937 while he and his wife Natalia were staying as houseguests of the Riveras. Frida called Trotsky her ‘Piochitas’ or ‘little goat’, because of his beard. Later, she tired of el viejo (‘the old man’) and broke off the affair, much to his disappointment. Trotsky’s ice-pick-wielding assassin, Ramón Mercader, was invited over to dinner at the Riveras shortly before his arrest for murder. Frida and Diego remained staunch communists and supporters of the Soviet Union all their lives, and Frida hung photographs of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Engels and Mao at the foot of her bed.
    Their political views didn’t stop them enjoying themselves (or employing a team of servants). Supper at the Riveras’ was a riot of conversation, wine and tequila with guests ranging from the president of Mexico to Nelson Rockefeller and George Gershwin. Though regularly encased in a steel-and-plaster corset to support her back, Frida dressed flamboyantly in the traditional dress of Tehuantapec (an area in southern Mexico she had never actually visited): vibrant floral prints in bright yellows, blues and reds. She never