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'Rembrandt’s Eyes' by Simon Schama

Biography examines Rembrandt with eye for detail

Sunday, December 12, 1999

By Nathalie op de Beeck

	Rembrandt’s Eyes By Simon Schama Knopf $50.00

According to Simon Schama, “Making an eye was the beginning of art.” In this exhaustive biography of Rembrandt van Rijn, Schama reflects on representations of the human eye in Rembrandt’s emotive portraits and bombastic history paintings.

The author also explores the sense of sight essential to the painter, the observations of the gallery-goer and the blindness with which the scholar approaches historical events.

“Rembrandt’s Eyes” is an immense and at times overwhelming achievement, a comprehensive coffee-table book brimming with illustrations and research.

Schama introduces Rembrandt as one who wanted to be among “those remembered by their first name: Leonardo, Michelangelo; Titian; Raphael. But it seemed that he could only become this ‘Rembrandt’ by way of becoming Rubens. If only he had known how Rubens became Rubens.”

After this dramatic wind-up, Schama plunges all the way back to 1571, more than 30 years before Rembrandt’s birth. The next several hundred pages recount the minutiae of Northern European socio-political life, with Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1642) as central figure. Readers learn in detail how Rubens’ father’s notorious affair with Princess Anna of Saxony influenced the son’s stellar career as an artist and reluctant diplomat in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Rubens matured into a popular Antwerp family man with friends (and customers) in very high places.

Schama appears to have scrutinized every personal artifact, biography, art criticism, and history book related to Rubens and Rembrandt, and traveled all over the world for his firsthand accounts of museum holdings. The resulting double portrait suggests that the gentlemanly Rubens sparkled, whether making a gritty trek from Genoa to Antwerp or painting a massive altarpiece.

Rembrandt, during his lifetime, made a less positive impression.

For example, Rubens practiced tremendous self-discipline: “He rose at 4 a.m., heard Mass, then set to work as soon as there was light, listening to a reader recite from the classics while he sketched or painted. … In a town awash with beer and wine, he drank little, and made sure to take his daily ride ‘on a fine Spanish horse’ in the afternoon.”

When he wasn’t painting, Rubens corresponded with his family and business associates, enabling his biographer to quote eloquent passages along with images.

Rembrandt left visual evidence rather than words. Well-organized illustrations beautifully show how he borrowed from his influences (among them the Italian chiaroscuro painter, Caravaggio) and conveyed earthy personalities. He communicated via his subjects’ mischievous glances, confident gazes, contemplative looks and watery, world-weary stares; he often painted himself in disguise, and his self-portraits unsentimentally tell how he aged.

Schama’s most provocative remarks are those on Rembrandt’s female nudes. The author contends that “it occurred to no other artist until Courbet and Degas, for example, to make the business of nude modeling itself the subject matter of art.”

To him, Rembrandt’s images of “unidealized naked bodies” pose a revolutionary challenge to paintings of the glorious, objectified female nude. He also credits Rembrandt with inventing the “antipose, consciously disassembling the elements of a smoothly integrated representation, exposing rather than concealing the painterly hand itself.”

It’s in these passages that readers see why Schama chose Rembrandt, and not Rubens, as his prime topic.

Other chapters are not so adulatory. Rembrandt was no letter-writer, but he did produce a host of uncharming written documents -- hastily revised wills, legal papers aimed at keeping him out of debtor’s prison and sulky notes demanding extra pay on commissions.

As portrayed by Schama, Rembrandt was the kind of person who got his hands dirty, even as he created works of beauty. The painter emerges as a hard-luck blend of mortal flaws and artistic sensitivity.

As is by now apparent, Schama is nothing if not thorough. Rembrandt and Rubens are under a microscope for 700 pages, their stories inextricably if artificially linked (since they never met).

Any time Schama introduces a teacher, rival, customer, or portrait sitter, he provides intimate back story. In reflections on Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp” (1632) and “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deyman” (1656), readers get to know not only Dr. Tulp, Dr. Deyman, and their colleagues, but the cadavers -- executed criminals -- as well.

Such elaborate biographies-within-biographies make the book seem like a Russian doll. Yet the layers position Rembrandt within a continuum.

Although Schama refuses to speculate much on emotions or relationships, he weaves the hard evidence and visual artifacts into an engaging tapestry. The result is as much a portrait of the volatile Netherlands in the 17th century as it is a biography of one man who happened to live and work there.

Nathalie op de Beeck writes about books for Publishers Weekly and the Riverbank Review.