Book Description
For Rembrandt as for Shakespeare, all the world was
indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics
of its performance: the strutting and mincing; the wardrobe
and the face paint; the full repertoire of gesture and
grimace; the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes; the
belly laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked
like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle, and to console; to
strike a pose or preach a sermon; to shake a fist or uncover
a breast; how to sin and how to atone; how to commit murder
and how to commit suicide. No artist had ever been so
fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his
own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence
or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits
and the whole rowdy show in between.
More than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt remains
the most deeply loved of all the great masters of painting,
his face so familiar to us from the self-portraits painted at
every stage in his life, yet still so mysterious. As with
Shakespeare, the facts of his life are hard to come by: the
Leiden miller's son who briefly found fame in Amsterdam,
whose genius was fitfully recognized by his contemporaries,
who fell into bankruptcy and died in poverty. So there is
probably no painter whose life has engendered more legends,
nor to whom more unlikely pictures have been attributed (a
process now undergoing rigorous reversal). Rembrandt's
Eyes, about which Simon Schama has been thinking for
more than twenty years, shows that the true biography of
Rembrandt is to be discovered in his pictures. Through a
succession of superbly incisive descriptions and
interpretations of Rembrandt's paintings threaded into this
narrative, he allows us to see Rembrandt's life clearly and
to think about it afresh.
But this book moves far beyond the bounds of conventional
biography or art history. With extraordinary imaginative
sympathy, Schama conjures up the world in which Rembrandt
moved -- its sounds, smells, and tastes as well as its
politics; the influences on him of the wars of the Protestant
United Provinces against Spain, of the extreme Calvinism of
his native Leiden, of the demands of patrons and the
ambitions of contemporaries; the importance of his beloved
Saskia and, after her death (Rembrandt was later forced to
sell her grave, so complete was his ruin), of his mistress
Hendrickje Stoffels; and, above all, the profound effect on
him of the great master of the immediately preceding
generation, the Catholic painter from Antwerp, Peter Paul
Rubens:
"the prince of painters and the painter of princes"
with whom Rembrandt was obsessed for the first part of his
life, and whose career was the shaping force that drove
Rembrandt to test the farthest reaches of his own
originality.
Rembrandt's Eyes shows us why Rembrandt is such a
thrilling painter, so revolutionary in his art, so
penetrating of the hearts of those who have looked for three
hundred years at his pictures. Above all, Schama's
understanding of Rembrandt's mind and the dynamic of his life
allows him to re-create Rembrandt's life on the page. Through
a combination of scholarship and literary skill, Schama
allows us to actually see that life through Rembrandt's own
eyes. In overcoming the paucity of conventional historical
evidence, it is the most intelligently true biography of
Rembrandt that has been written, and the most dazzling
achievement to date of the art historian whose work has been
hailed as "marvelously rich and eloquent" . . .
"rare, imaginative" . . . "provocative" .
. . "astoundingly learned with verve, humor, and an
unflagging sense of delight" . . . that of "a
master
storyteller . . . and "a master of history."*
*From the New York Times Book Review,
Time, The New York Times, The Independent on Sunday, and Nature.
