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The Reformed emphasis on the preeminence of God's Word inspired and challenged Rembrandt as well: here the energizing tension is between word and image. The Calvinist pastor in the Portrait of Johannes Cornelisz Sylvius (1646), for example, protrudes over the edge of the frame sketched around his image, as though to show the power of his expository word—reflection of divine Verbum—to cross boundaries and make contact. The image becomes a motor, a dynamism for the display of verbal potency rather than figurative exactitude. Drawn to the Mennonite sect by his own religious inclinations, Rembrandt's sensitive Portrait of Cornelis Claesz. Anslo and His Wife, Aeltje Gerritsdr. Schouten (1641) confers gravity and dignity on the couple, while animating as if by divine breath the pages of the Bible they consult. The real energy here, Rembrandt seems to say, is verbal and is generated by the self dwelling on the Word. Schama concludes that "Rembrandt … could make the things of this world hymn the sanctity of the world to come, yet manage, somehow, not to trespass impiously across its borders. He had created what the preachers had said was impossible: Protestant icons."
The spotlight on the self, and its good or bad choices, is reinforced by Rembrandt's emphasis on subjectivity. Schama excels in progressively displaying a veritable portrait gallery of Rembrandt's self-depictions, examining their evolution over time and what they have to say about the painter's character and position in the world. He notes, for in stance, in The Artist in His Studio (1629) that the artist's eyes are deeply shadowed, almost blacked out, as though he were wearing a mask. Rembrandt, on the threshold of his career, has not yet devised his own identity: hence, the eyes reveal an emptiness to be filled. But this vacuity is not negative; rather, Schama sees the painter posing as the very emblem of imagination or ingenuity, as Painting's own copious powers of invention, yet to be unfurled. Schama observes that Rembrandt's focus on eyes in all the portraits is a brilliantly simple rehearsal of draftsman techniques: "when the student, child or adult, was given an exercise in drawing a specific feature of the physiognomy, first and always came the eye."
The material quality of Rembrandt's settings and backgrounds—so vividly evoked by Schama's lustrous verbal images—may also have a Protestant derivation. In Sources of the Self, philosopher Charles Taylor compellingly argued that one reason for the strength of Reformed faith was its willingness to explain Scripture using events drawn from quotidian existence, to elevate the ordinary occupations exercised by believers in the world to the status of a spiritual vocation. The world here-and-now possesses dignity. The Calvinist revolution in Holland, Schama observes, brought about the "replacement of a flamboyantly poetic manner with an unapologetically prosaic one; a coming down to earth."
Just so, Rembrandt's elaborate canvases, embroidered with detail like genre paintings run amok, offer a visually dazzling cornucopia of stuffs and substances, textures, implements, exotica, gadgets—compasses, astrolabes, butter churns, document boxes—some with symbolic valence or allegorical intent, but most present simply to authenticate lived experience and to enhance the pictorial illusion.
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