Rembrandt in Eyes of Beholder

Rembrandt left behind more self-portraits than any artist before or since. With his new book Rembrandt's Eyes, historian Simon Schama has added a new portrait of the artist, this one in meticulously and exhaustively researched, rhapsodically written prose.

Schama's heavy tome, some of whose content the author originally delivered as lectures at Harvard, makes every attempt to be a definitive work on the painter, and it succeeds. First and foremost it is a narrative of the life and work of Rembrandt van Rijn, although calling it a "biography" somehow sounds reductive. It is equal parts analysis of Rembrandt's painting, documentation of his life and history of 17th century Holland, so sections of the book can be read with profit by anyone studying the artist, his art or the social history of the times.

The history of the times is largely a history of the Dutch fighting the Spanish, the Protestants at war with Catholics. In the arena of art, the focal conflict is the war between the Dutch Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens, the most popular artist of the previous generation and a court painter of the Spanish Habsburgs. A good chunk of this thick, richly illustrated book is about Rubens' background and family; Rembrandt himself is barely mentioned for an entire chapter. Schama compares paintings and history to show the anxious influence at work between Rembrandt and his older, more popular precursor. Rembrandt, Schama says, was the Great Dutch Hope, the painter whom Holland sought to "transform the physically unprepossessing specimens of the European dynasts... into so many Apollos and Dianas," just as Rubens had for the Habsburgs.

The Rembrandt of Schama's book is a complex man, with hubris, greed and an enormous talent for portraiture. Early on he takes the monumentally cocky step of signing only his first name-no "van Rijn"-as if he knew his paintings would be studied for centuries to come. His understanding of humans and their personae was without parallel. Schama writes, "No painter would ever understand the theatricality of social life as well as Rembrandt. He saw the actors in men and the men in actors."

As his title suggests, Schama finds special messages in the eyes of Rembrandt's subjects. He notes that in art education painters were taught to put special care into their depiction of the whites of eyes, yet in many of Rembrandt's works-Schama points to "The Artist in his Studio" (1629)-the eyes are dull, dark pits. "When Rembrandt made eyes," Schama says, "he did so purposefully." And so, in _Rembrandt's Eyes_ he continually returns to the haunting eyes in the artist's paintings.

In his analysis of "Balaam and the Ass" (1626), for example, Schama notes how Balaam's eyes differ from previous depictions in other portraits. In the story from the book of Numbers, Balaam's donkey sees an angel and goes berserk. Previous painters, following the Dutch master van Mander's advice, had illuminated Balaam's eyes with shock, but Rembrandt is far more restrained:

And then there are Balaam's eyes. Rembrandt's eyes. Lastman has followed the van Mander prescription. The prophet is amazed to hear his donkey speak. Follow the stage direction. Make his eyes pop out with astonishment. Give the customers dilated pupils, white sclera, and lots of it. With a stroke of perverse genius (excuse the term), Rembrandt has done the opposite, painting Balaam's eyes as dark crevices. For this is, after all, the moment _before_ God opens those eyes to the angel and the light of truth.

Most of all, Schama's book is a meditative, entranced attempt to get behind the faces we see in Rembrandt's self-portraits. Schama reads Rembrandt's self-portraits in various costumes-as a merchant, as a soldier, for example-as indications of his elusiveness, as if each portrait were meant to conceal rather than reveal its subject. In analysis of one self-portrait, Schama writes that the painter "has disappeared inside his persona," inscrutable beyond the dead dark eyes of the painting. The artist's disguise hides his true self, and the critic is left to speculate. It seems that in this case Schama is grasping (as art historians must) at facts and attitudes that can never be certainly known, constructing and imputing elaborate guesses that fail precisely because the painter has succeeded.

Schama is particularly careful, sometimes even painfully self-conscious, of the use of the term "genius"-"the G-word," as he calls it-although Schama does say that we "intuitively" call Rembrandt a genius. Nevertheless, Schama clearly wishes his book to be a tribute to Rembrandt. He makes no claim to objectivity in his scholarship, and he does not hesitate to call this or that painting "sensational." He jealously defends Rembrandt against recent scholars' charges that he was a pawn of his patrons or the product of the social conditions of the day.

Schama's reverence for Rembrandt and art in general winds up being both a virtue and a vice. The book begins with an epigraph from Paul Valry: "We should apologize for daring to speak about painting." It is difficult to imagine a guide through this world who is more well-versed and in love with his subject. But do we really want our biographers to be respectful to the point of silence? Nobody wants to learn about the masters from a guide who finds them too sublime to defile with comment. Granted, a hefty book like this is hardly "silence," but Schama's hushed tones do get distracting.

Schama, a professor of history and Mellon professor of the social sciences at Harvard before leaving to teach at Columbia in 1993, has made a career out of smoothly blending history and art history. In his most recent book, _Landscape and Memory_ (1995), Schama sought to explain what nature and geography has meant to culture, myth, art, and consciousness. In _Dead Certainties_ (1991), a book of two stories about the early United States, he analyzed the political and cultural significance of a painting by Benjamin West. (The other part of the book, "Death of a Harvard Man," dealt with the murder of a Brahmin by a Harvard professor in 1849.)

This book, while not of the same trans-historical interest as "Landscape and Memory," has the virtue of being as close to exhaustive about its subject as one could hope. There is little psychological interpretation that Schama leaves undone, and little consequential biographical detail that he leaves unmentioned. _Rembrandt's Eyes_ will be a definitive work on the painter and his work, a mammoth book that takes on with grace the equally mammoth task of explaining what is behind the brooding eyes of Rembrandt's portraits.