To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books Nov. 18, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/11/18/schama "Rembrandt's Eyes" by Simon Schama A new biography charts the troubled painter's rivalry with the worldly, successful Peter Paul Rubens. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Matthew DeBord It's unlikely that Simon Schama will ever produce a book anyone accuses of being too short. The Columbia University history professor and author of the widely praised "Landscape and Memory" and "Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution" is among the reigning champions of the lush and massive tome. Schama doesn't so much write books as deliver immense objects to his readers. His latest undertaking, an investigation of Rembrandt van Rijn's intricate connection to another 17th century master, Peter Paul Rubens, is close to the heftiest volume I have ever read. This is a 728-page book, sized to fit 359 illustrations. The pages, when not simply walls of print, are walls of print broken only by densely painted Baroque masterpieces, reproduced in full color. Visual overload is always just a licked fingertip away. Which is just the way Schama wants it; overload is his accomplice. This is the kind of monumental undertaking most historians would gladly trade their rustbucket Volvos for a shot at. But would their ambition be the equal of their envy? Schama, after all, is the jet set, the Mac Daddy of historians. He gets to write gargantuan books because he delivers the goods. He made his mainstream reputation in 1987 with "An Embarrassment of Riches," a you-are-there channeling of life in the Netherlands in the 1600s. It's another gigantic book -- 698 pages -- but, really, the Netherlands? Who cares? We should, argued Schama, because in the burgher republic of the Dutch Golden Age, we can find the seeds of our own current lifestyle, our embrace of plenty and our neurotic misgivings about whether all that plenty is somehow robbing us of our souls. Rembrandt -- the most important artist to emerge from this milieu -- was certainly sensitive to the tension between the desire for excess and the penalties that excess invites. As talented as he was extravagant, Rembrandt was the perfect painter for Calvinist Amsterdam of the 1630s and '40s: Apparently predestined for greatness, he became, by the end of his life, an anachronism laid low by his foibles. This is far from the whole story Schama has to tell in "Rembrandt's Eyes," however. He makes the case that Rembrandt's career was shaped by an anxiety-of-influence relationship to the then-greatest painter in the world, Peter Paul Rubens. True to form, Schama is anything but direct in the way he details this connection. They were night and day, Rubens and Rembrandt. While the older painter was the soul of taste, a stoic and a devout Catholic, Rembrandt was a Calvinist vulgarian. "Rubens's most ardent admirers ... [celebrated] the Flemish painter's commitment to discrimination," writes Schama. "Rembrandt, on the other hand ... had no idea when to avert his gaze." Fittingly, Rubens died a painter-aristocrat who dabbled in diplomacy and was universally mourned. Rembrandt went bankrupt and expired penniless in a hovel just seven years after he had disinterred his wife's bones so that he could sell the grave to stave off his creditors. Rubens painted only four self-portraits, Rembrandt more than 40. "Unlike Rembrandt's restless makeovers," Schama writes, "Rubens's sense of himself was constant." The irony here is that Rubens was the more overtly flamboyant painter. Rubens' "Christ on the Cross" (c. 1613) gives us the Savior as a martyred Catholic muscleman. Rembrandt's 1631 painting of the crucifixion, by contrast, depicts a scrawny hippie: "A Calvinist image of the body," in Schama's estimation, "pathetically slight, broken, and bleeding." Rubens, the more practical man, had his head in the Platonic clouds. Rembrandt, the captive of his own appetites, had his eyes focused on the Aristotelian everyday, "the piebald, the scrofulous, the stained." His most famous painting, "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp," depicts an autopsy. Of course, where Simon Schama is concerned, one takes comfort in simple dualities at one's peril. Partly this is a function of his style, which is both elliptical and intense. No one can match him at translating visual detail into scholarly porn, but neither can anyone veer more maddeningly from the straight path of historical narrative. I used to think "Citizens" was the most willfully disorganized book ever written. I now realize that Schama just can't help himself. The man thinks entirely in codas and arabesques. But fighting to keep up with Schama is worth the struggle. Rembrandt was among the most complex, compelling -- and flabbergasting -- artists who ever lived. He is well served by an equally daring biographer, one who isn't afraid to take some chances in the service of his craft. salon.com | Nov. 18, 1999