Rembrandt's EyesAlfred A. Knopf, 1999 - 750 pagina's For Rembrandt as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance; the strutting and mincing; the wardrobe and the face paint; the full repertoire of gesture and grimace; the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes; the belly laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle, and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon; to shake a fist or uncover a breast; how to sin and how to atone; how to commit murder and how to commit suicide. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between. More than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt remains the most deeply loved of all the great masters of painting, his face so familiar to us from the self-portraits painted at every stage in his life, yet still so mysterious. As with Shakespeare, the facts of his life are hard to come by; the Leiden miller's son who briefly found fame in Amsterdam, whose genius was fitfully recognized by his contemporaries, who fell into bankruptcy and died in poverty. So there is probably no other painter whose life has engendered more legends, nor to whom more unlikely pictures have been attributed (a process now undergoing rigorous reversal). Rembrandt's Eyes, about which Simon Schama has been thinking for more than twenty years, shows that the true biography of Rembrandt is to be discovered in his pictures. Though a succession of superbly incisive descriptions and interpretations of Rembrandt's paintings threaded into his narrative, he allows us to see Rembrandt's life clearly and to think about it afresh. But this book moves far beyond the bounds of conventional biography or art history. With extraordinary imaginative sympathy, Schama conjures up the world in which Rembrandt moved -- its sounds, smells and tastes as well as its politics; the influences on him of the wars of the Protestant United Provinces against Spain, of the extreme Calvinism of his native Leiden, of the demands of patrons and the ambitions of contemporaries; the importance of his beloved Saskia and, after her death (Rembrandt was later forced to sell her grave, so complete was his ruin), of his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels; and, above all, the profound effect on him of the great master of the immediately preceding generation, the Catholic painter from Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens: "the prince of painters and the painter of princes" with whom Rembrandt was obsessed for the first part of his life, and whose career was the shaping force that drove Rembrandt to test the farthest reaches of his own originality. Rembrandt's Eyes shows us why Rembrandt is such a thrilling painter, so revolutionary in his art, so penetrating of the hearts of those who have looked for three hundred years at his pictures. Above all, Schama's understanding of Rembrandt's mind and the dynamic of his life allows him to re-create Rembrandt's life on the page. Through a combination of scholarship and literary skill, Schama allows us to actually see that life through Rembrandt's own eyes. In overcoming the paucity of conventional historical evidence, it is the most intelligently true biography of Rembrandt that has ever been written, and the most dazzling achievement to date of the art historian whose work has been hailed as "marvelously rich and eloquent" ... "rare, imaginative" ... "provocative" ... "astoundingly learned with verve, humor, and an unflagging sense of delight" ... that of "a master storyteller ... and a master of history."* Quotes from the New York Times Book Review, Time, the New York Times, The Independent on Sunday, and Nature, respecti |
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Pagina 203
... patrician pessimists . They looked around Europe and saw murder done in the name of godliness . And they thought ... patricians shook their heads at both the fury of the fanatics and the credulousness of the people and wondered what they ...
... patrician pessimists . They looked around Europe and saw murder done in the name of godliness . And they thought ... patricians shook their heads at both the fury of the fanatics and the credulousness of the people and wondered what they ...
Pagina 595
... patrician captain who had appeared so prominently in van der Helst's group portrait of the company of crossbowmen celebrating the Peace of Münster . He lent Rem- brandt 4,180 guilders , which in a sworn statement before the magistrates ...
... patrician captain who had appeared so prominently in van der Helst's group portrait of the company of crossbowmen celebrating the Peace of Münster . He lent Rem- brandt 4,180 guilders , which in a sworn statement before the magistrates ...
Pagina 627
... patricians to princes , painting the portrait of the Elector of Brandenburg . Two years later , Flinck painted Amalia van ... patrician , clearly aspired to join their ranks , and saw work in the Town Hall as a way of advancing that ...
... patricians to princes , painting the portrait of the Elector of Brandenburg . Two years later , Flinck painted Amalia van ... patrician , clearly aspired to join their ranks , and saw work in the Town Hall as a way of advancing that ...
Inhoudsopgave
Chapter One The Quiddity | 3 |
Chapter Two Jan and Maria | 41 |
Chapter Three Pietro Paolo | 72 |
Copyright | |
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Amsterdam Anatomy Antwerp Apelles artist body brandt Breestraat brother brush Calvinist Canvas Catholic Christ church classical Claudius Civilis color commission Constantijn Constantijn Huygens court Danaë death drawing dressed Duke Dutch Republic engraving etching eyes face fact father figures Flemish Flinck Frederik Gallery Geertje golden Govert Flinck guilders Hague hand head Hendrickje history painting Holland Huygens Huygens's Ibid imagine Isabella Italian Jacob Jan Lievens Jan Six kind King Lairesse landscape Lastman Leiden Lievens Lievens's light living London look manner Mantua Maria master Museum Netherlands Otto van Veen painter Panel Passion patrician patrons perhaps Peter Paul Peter Paul Rubens Philip picture Pieter Lastman portrait pose Prince prints Protestant pupils Rembrandt Roman Rubens Rubens's Ruffo Saskia scene seems self-portrait sketch Spanish Stadholder studio suggest things tion Titian Titus Tulp turned Utrecht Uylenburgh wife York