Rembrandt’s Eyes.

Schama, Simon (author).

Schama’s immense, luxurious, and richly contextual portrait of Rembrandt is not strictly a biography. Instead, like his groundbreaking Landscape and Memory (1995), it is a creative synthesis of history, aesthetics, and spirituality. Erudite and loquacious, he writes at length about Dutch history; Rembrandt’s first patron, Constantijn Huygens; and the artist they both sought to best, Peter Paul Reubens. When Schama does zoom in on Rembrandt himself, he makes great use of the artist’s self-portraits, focusing, as the title suggests, on his eyes, both as subjects emblematic of his vocation and as organs of perception. Light was a paradoxical subject for Rembrandt, who was “fixated” on the conflict between loving the clarity of light in the visible world and fearing “inner blindness,” or the inability to perceive the light of God. Schama chronicles the ups and downs of Rembrandt’s life in vivid detail, and engages so passionately and brilliantly with his paintings and their startling departures from tradition, Rembrandt and his masterpieces seem to be reborn.