Word: schama
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...