Since the late 1960s, art historians have known that another painting lay underneath Rembrandt’s famous An Old Man in Military Costume (painted about 1630-1631), a compelling character study (tronie) of age and one of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s most beloved Dutch paintings. Until now, however, seeing that hidden image in detail has been frustratingly elusive.

A recent collaborative study conducted by experts from Los Angeles, Antwerp, and Delft, using two complementary, element-specific imaging techniques, has provided the most detailed representation of the underlying painting—an image of a young man wrapped in a cloak—to date.