Rembrandt's Eyes. - Review - book review

SIMON SCHAMA

of recent origin York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999 728 pp; 359 color and b/w ills. $50

What does it mean to diocese through Rembrandt's eyes? Simon Schama aims in his novel book to restore an appreciation of Rembrandt's genius, below assault from both conservative and radical camps inside and outside art history, in part because of what he humorously calls the countersuggestibility of academics. At its greatest in quantity extreme, this revisionism culminates in "the endeavor to earn rid of the idea of authorial originality altogether," whereas Schama addresses himself to "the unnumbered millions who rejoin intuitively to [Rembrandt's] painting" (pp 24-25) Schama's account is accordingly a turn back to the traditional "life and work" monograph, transformed end his unique narrative idiom as history-in-the-present. His story also incorporates an reach forthed account of the life and work of Rembrandt's ostensible primary mould and rival, Peter Paul Rubens. Schama wants to teach us to recognize Rembrandt, to understand him as he saw himself, and to diocese the world around him [i]or[/i] part of to the other his eyes. Not everyone will be able to e mbrace these goals, although I certainly do. No single can deny Schama's sparkling, engaging, and amusing plain his brilliant capacity to synthesize information, and his good-natured belonging to all sense, which will inform and entertain everyone who reads Rembrandt's Eyes

Schama's volume can also serve as a challenge to scholarship, for he uncloses up questions that he is not able to answer entirely by dint of himself. Among other things, there is still confusion about attribution, or the ability to distinguish between paintings by dint of the master and those of his scholars These include some of Schama's lock opener examples, such as the "self-portrait" from which he took the detail of organ of sights for his cover, so that his confidence about his be in possession of or others' intuitive response to Rembrandt's painting is unclose to doubt. Schama's point about the overreaction to the worship of genius is well taken. on the other hand current resistance to the "g word" is not solely politically correct. The general [i]or[/i] abstract notion has been implicated in the worst kind of projections, dubious investments, and mediocre commentary. Schama also does not sufficiently acknowledge the character of art historical literature the two in the popular reception of Rembrandt and in his possess account. Earlier periods had if anything a les accurate understanding than we do of Rembrandt' s autograph oeuvre and his genius, one as well as the other of which are highly dynamic constructions of scholarship and commentary. smooth the status of Rembrandt's famous works (and arguably his possess status as an artist), together with related issues taken up through Schama--such as the significance of Rembrandt's self-portraits, his relation to his patrons, his representations of women and his use of paint--are actual much open to debate. The single means to accomplish the goals locate out by Schama, in my view, is to work from one side the errors and to build upon the achievements of existing scholarship. That he could not exhaust the Herculean tasks he has taken upon in his characteristic fashion is a serviceable thing, because he points us in the right direction--and leaves the ease of us something to do.

Like Saving Private Ryan, Schama's volume opens in the midst of a dramatic battle, in this case, between the Spanish and the Dutch at 's Hertogenbosch in 1629 Schama then shifts the exhibition to Rembrandt's hometown, Leiden, in 1629 and his frontispiece, Self-Portrait in a Gorget in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. This painting was until newly assumed to be a student's transcript after Rembrandt's famous Self-Portrait in a Gorget in the Mauritshuis, The Hague. This past year, the curators of the exhibition of Rembrandt's self-portraits, Rembrandt by the agency of Himself on view in The Hague until January 9 2000 declared the Nuremberg version the original and the Hague version the transcript The grounds for this reversal were the discovery of an underdrawing in the Hague painting, unprecedent in Rembrandt's oeuvre and its fine phraseology now seen as less characteristic of Rembrandt's work than the "free and spontaneous" mode of expression of the Nuremberg painting. [1] This watch is reflected in Schama's description:

Rembrandt was playing his part, and the reaching far down shadow and rough handling of the face complicate the mask, intimate the struggling fit between the character and the man.... So here is the greatest trouper who at no time trod the boards playing Youngman Corporal, his I-mean-business gorget belied through the soft fringed collar falling above the studded metal, the slightly arched, severed eyebrow line (absent from the transcript in the Hague), the reaching far down set of the right organ of sight and the half-shadowed face, sabotaging the bravura, hinting at the vulnerability beneath the metal plate: the mortal meeting the martial. There is a touch too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of humanity here to carry not upon the show. The light reveals a filled mobile mouth, the lips highlit as if nervously licked; large liquid eyes; a great acreage of cheek and chin; and planted in the center of his face, the least aquiline nose in seventeenth-century painting. (p 8)