Dr. Montalto had apparently been harboring religious feelings strong enough to lead him to renounce his illustrious practice and comfortable lifestyle to declare publicly what he really wanted to be, a Jew. Despite the fact that he had been baptized and had outwardly conformed to Christianity, his deep feelings for Judaism overpowered all his previous history, as well as his secular lifestyle.
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The Florentine envoy Mantauto tracked down the doctor in Venice, requesting to meet with him to ascertain the reasons for his unannounced disappearance. Mantauto filed a report on his meeting with Montalto for the Florentine court, noting that the doctor, “in this ghetto of Venice with his yellow hat [physician’s hat],” avowed his allegiance to the Grand Duke, but that he made his decision to go away only for his own interest and religious zeal, and for this reason he felt he was obliged to leave residences, comfort, and the hopes he had when he was living with a Christian name, and be satisfied instead to live a poor, contemptible life without comfort and little hope in the law.
The envoy said that the doctor had declared his intentions to be wholly pure, and that he would not in any way undermine Ferdinando I:
“He hopes that the Grand Duke is willing to forgive him and excuse him and continue to count him among his servants, even if in the lowest post. He affirms that he did not leave because of persecution or at someone’s request, and that he has never dealt with such matters. He promises never to try to persuade anyone to leave there and come here, as he has done, and affirms that he has never done it or thought about it, and will give to this effect whatever promise or security will be asked of him; and I must confess that he presented his feelings, passions and reasons with such strength, humility, and modesty that I remained as impressed as one can be in such a case.”
Montalto’s decision to leave, according to the envoy, had been hastened when he was passed over for a university academic position, but the doctor had also expressed concern about his future prospects for a livelihood. Although “all of his possessions together are not worth 300 scudi and he has children to support,” wrote Mantauto, “ . . . the fact of the matter is that he won’t lack earnings and material advantages in the ghetto. In addition to other possible ways of making a living there must be six or seven thousand people and apparently no one now really skilled in the medical profession.”
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In the Jewish ghetto of Venice, Dr. Montalto was free at last to assume the public identity of a Jew. In 1612 he moved to Paris, where he soon became the private physician to the Florence-born Maria de’ Medici, the queen consort of France and wife of Henry IV, whom he had met about five years earlier while traveling back from the Low Countries. His service to the queen returned him to a position of importance, but a few years later, in February 1616, while on a diplomatic trip in the city of Tours, southwest of Paris, he fell ill and unexpectedly died. Because there were no Jewish cemeteries in France, by the queen’s order Montalto’s body was embalmed and taken to Ouderkerk for interment alongside his Sephardic brethren.
The Beth Haim cemetery was only about two years old at the time, but it was a measure of progress that the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam, many of them refugees from the Inquisition, finally had a cemetery of their own near the city. Beth Haim had opened in 1614; the meaning of its name, “House of the Living,” reflected the fundamental belief of Judaism that the souls of its people remain alive forever.
Through the limitation of his own mortality, Felipe Montalto disappeared for the last time in the year 1616, but in physical body only. Thanks to the painter Ruisdael, whose own Mennonite religious congregation embraced the New Testament doctrine that the New Covenant of Christ had superseded that of the Hebrew Old Testament, Montalto’s spirit lives on. In an image on canvas, Montalto is symbolically entombed as a self-professed religious Jew. As Dr. Montalto slumbers in eternal repose, his lustrous tomb in Ruisdael’s artistic allegory shines like a first-magnitude star, a beacon in a dim world signaling a timeless message about the dignity and nobility of remaining true to one’s convictions despite the personal cost. The gleaming vault is an allegory of the transcendent qualities of life that Ruisdael himself sought to portray in his painting.
In his Jewish Cemetery, Ruisdael has kept alive not just the memory of Dr. Montalto and all the refugees of Beth Haim, but of suffering souls everywhere and of all times who sacrificed whatever they had to assume the life they wanted to live. Through the power of his art, Ruisdael has preserved that transcendent legacy.
