"[3] Civilis, Tacitus writes, "was unusually intelligent for a native, and passed himself off as a second Sertorius or Hannibal, whose facial disfigurement he shared"—that is to say, the loss of one eye.

[5] In 1659, when John Maurice of Nassau, Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, her two daughters and two daughters-in-law came to see the new building,[6] the council commissioned twelve paintings from Rembrandt's ex-pupil Govert Flinck to fill all the large spaces using a programme drawn up by the poet Joost van den Vondel, but Flink died in 1660 before completing any of the works.

[7] The work was then shared out by the burgomasters Joan Huydecoper and Andries de Graeff, who were certainly decisive, between a number of painters including Jacob Jordaens and Jan Lievens.

There is one sword more in the painting – the one touching the front of the leader's blade – than Batavians holding them;[9] other depictions of the event show handshakes, especially that engraved in 1612 by Antonio Tempesta as one of a set of thirty-six illustrations to designs by Otto van Veen in the book Batavorum cum Romanis bellum on the revolt.

[11] These baroque works had entered the popular imagination as depictions of the revolt, and Flinck's design drew on the engraving of this scene.

A sketch survives (on the back of a funeral ticket dated October 1661) that shows that he had transferred the scene from Tacitus's "sacred grove" to a large vaulted hall with open arches.

[14] The chiaroscuro is typical of Rembrandt's late works, but the "eerie light and shadow and the iridescent greyish blues and pale yellows" are not.

[15] In August 1662, when the painting was still there, Rembrandt signed an agreement giving a "quarter-share of his profits accruing from the piece for the City Hall and his prospective earnings from it.

"[16] By 24 September 1662, however, when the archbishop and elector of Cologne Maximilian Henry of Bavaria was received in the town hall, Rembrandt's painting was gone.

[17] One objection may well have been the incongruous crown that Rembrandt had set upon Claudius Civilis's head and his dominating the scene, hardly features of a consultative, republican attitude.

Rembrandt has evoked the kind of quasi-mythical, heroic-magical past that is the setting for King Lear and Cymbeline, and, as with Shakespeare, this remoteness has allowed him to insert into an episode of primitive grandeur the life-giving roughage of the grotesque [the figures at the extreme sides]".

Peill, who had previously supported the King financially in his coup d'état in 1772, complied, and a plan of the royal collection shows the painting in a central position in one of the galleries.

[26] In the beginning of the twentieth century, a Danish author, Karl Madsen, noticed the sketch from Munich and assumed that Rembrandt—after his bankruptcy—fled to Sweden.