Rembrandt Relumed

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 24, 2000 | by Michael J. Lewis

Historian Simon Schama looks at the 17th century through the eyes of a great artist.

In the most startling passage of Rembrandt's Eyes (Knopf, $50, 750 pp), Simon Schama takes the reader on a tour of 17th-century Amsterdam, presenting it not to the eyes, but to the nose. Beginning with the brine aroma of the harbor, he conducts an inventory of smells, fragrances and stenches so comprehensive that it amounts to an olfactory map of the city. He repeats the tour for each of the other four senses, conjuring Amsterdam sensuously, rather than geographically. Such set pieces make this history a great read, if not a great book.

The subject of Rembrandt's Eyes is nominally Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69), the Dutch painter and engraver best known for The Night Watch (1642). In fact, Schama is preoccupied more with what might be called the phenomenon of Rembrandt. How is it, he asks, that Holland, the site of the most frenzied art-destroying iconoclasm of the 16th century, produced the most gifted painter of the 17th?

Rembrandt could find no better biographer than Schama, the Columbia University professor who wrote Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. A specialist in Dutch history and art, Schama is among the best narrative historians writing today. Moreover, he is that rara avis, the disciplined archival sleuth who simultaneously is a man of imagination, alive to the poetry of the documents.

In Rembrandt's case, the documents themselves are not terribly poetic, consisting largely of dry legal instruments and bills. The personal documentation is meager. Like earlier biographers, Schama is forced to exploit the paintings themselves, using them to flesh out the bare bones of the records.

But his book comes alive in his close reading of Rembrandt's physical and cultural world, with its odd mixture of provinciality and cosmopolitanism: a tiny and smugly bourgeois republic of seven waterlogged provinces, but whose colonies ranged from Java to Cape Town in South Africa to Manhattan. Rembrandt's life may have been bounded by Leiden and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, but his house was a microcosm of the far-flung Dutch universe, crammed with exotic Mughal prints, shells and stuffed birds from Batavia in Indonesia and Japanese and Chinese costumes.

Rembrandt lived at a time when a new type of Protestant religious art had become fashionable, governed by strict formal principles: a clear division between sacred and secular realms, a prohibition on the depiction of God and, above all, a fierce dislike for the display of writhing contorted flesh. Calvinist doctrine held that man cannot be saved by his own actions but by grace and faith, qualifies that are notoriously difficult to render pictorially. While Rembrandt's established rival, Peter Paul Rubens, delighted in his tumults of convulsive figures taken from Michelangelo and Hellenistic sculpture, Rembrandt could not simply reproduce Rubens; he needed to rethink him.

Schama shows how Rembrandt went about this in a brilliant reading of the painter's Descent From the Cross (circa 1633). Rubens' version stresses the corporeality of Christ's lifeless body, everywhere in tactile, even bloody, contact with those lifting him from the cross -- even the man on the ladder who holds the winding sheet fast in his teeth as he lends a hand. In Rembrandt's variant, the dynamic figures who touch their Savior are replaced by detached "watchers (or swooners and cringers)"; the theme is passive resignation to the will of God.

Through this process of judicious revision, Rembrandt swiftly developed his own introspective, laconic style. By the end of the 1630s, he no longer needed to measure himself, painting by painting, against Rubens. One of the hallmarks of Rembrandt's mature style was his restricted palette of somber earth colors -- yellows and ochers -- in which forms were conceived in terms of tone rather than the full chromatic intensity of Rubens.

Of course, Rembrandt cannot simply be reduced into an austere Protestant version of Rubens; like Shakespeare, the artist is too big for sectarian interpretations. Schama is good at portraying the complexity of the religious life of Rembrandt's Amsterdam, which by no means was a Calvinist theocracy. Crypto-Catholics, Lutherans, Mennonites and Jews all partook of the city's cultural life, and Rembrandt's own family and patrons had a considerable Catholic component.

Certainly Schama is a careful and sensitive analyst of Rembrandt's work. His discussions of Rembrandt's paintings of his wife and later of his mistress are poignant and moving. Schama is particularly eloquent on The Night Watch, an official group portrait orchestrated as intimately as any upheaval of Rubensian flesh. For him, it is the quality of "propulsion" that unifies what otherwise would be a sprawling and additive collection of heads.

Nonetheless, propulsion is a quality too often lacking in this book, and the problem is not so much Rembrandt but his foil Rubens. Scarcely has Schama begun his book than he interrupts it with a heroic 150-page digression on the life of Rubens. Much time is spent, for example, on the scandal of Rubens' father, who had the misfortune to impregnate the Princess of Orange.