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Rembrandt's Eyes, by Simon Schama, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, 701 pp.; $50
In the film The Madness of King George, the Puritan pastor charged with monitoring and rectifying the conduct of the crazed George III says to him firmly, ominously, "I have you in my eye, Sir. I shall keep you in my eye." This minatory Puritan takes on a role most Protestants reserve for themselves: keeping an eye on the self. In fact, such self-gazing represents a somewhat paradoxical Reformed obsession.
Reformed theology mandated a focus on the divine, not on the human subject. Yet the need for keeping a constant watch over the potentially vagrant self, fashioned of fallen nature, led many Reformed believers to concentrate increasingly on policing their own inner states: precisely because the self is sinful and wants too much attention, one must gaze vigilantly inward in order to keep the self down and out of trouble. This incessant tracking of possible shortcomings and pitfalls could blur the necessary focus on divine grace.
The distinctively Protestant focus on the self exercised enormous influence in Europe and North America, and not only among Protestants. It was certainly one of the formative influences on the vibrant Dutch culture of the seventeeth century and on the greatest artist that age of great art produced: the painter Rembrandt, the subject of a massively ambitious, richly textured study by the historian Simon Schama. With The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Schama established him self as an expert on early modern Dutch culture. In subsequent works he challenged the conventions of academic history, essaying novelistic speculation. Here, he extends his metier to that of art critic.[1]
"Rembrandt," Schama tells us, "was one of nature's ecumenicals. His mother's family had been Catholic; his father's desultorily Calvinist." Rembrandt himself showed no inclination to pledge confessional allegiance—"which is not to say," Schama adds, "that Rembrandt did not feel his faith as intensely as Rubens did his."
But while Schama is careful not to call Rembrandt a Protestant, he acknowledges the impact of Reformed thought on Rembrandt's painterly scheme. Although all painters of the time, Catholics as well as Protestants, explicated biblical themes, Rembrandt's works in this genre tend to display an especially Pauline influence, an influence most closely associated with the emergence of Protestant theology. His 1638 The Fall of Man shows Adam and Eve in an amalgam of prelapsarian heedlessness and postlapsarian consciousness, demonstrating original sin and the depravity of the human will. Almost bestial in representation, both Adam and Eve show the marks of shame. The painting Susanna and the Elders as well as the etching Joseph and Potiphar's Wife are very graphic in sexual depiction, drawing the viewer in as voyeur, heightening that prototypically Protestant sense of the lure of sin.
Rembrandt's preoccupation with self has a special energy in that he is fascinated by themes of blindness, sightedness, insight, scrutiny, and revelation. A profoundly self-absorbed individual, Rembrandt nonetheless had the capacity to become absorbed in the costuming of the subjectivity of others, especially as it revealed the tension between public self-presentation and private self. Schama reads Rembrandt's masterly Portrait of Jan Six (1654) as displaying just such a tension. In a stunning analysis, Schama concentrates on Six's gloved left hand. While viewers tend to assume that Six is pulling his glove on, preparatory to going out, Schama reads the fine detail and finds that the thumbnail is depicted as tightly pressed against the chamois so that, in fact, Six's hand must already be firmly in the glove, and he is removing it, prior to resuming his inner, and indoors, persona. This interplay of inner and outer reveals a complexity of self-presentation that a less sensitive observer would have missed and is also consonant with the Protestant discomfort with disjunction between appearance and being.[2]
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