Word: rembrandt
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...