Rembrandt's Reading: The Artist's Bookshelf of Ancient Poetry and History (review)

Scholars, sighing with relief or regret, have had to put aside the fiction that Rembrandt was a misunderstood genius out of sync with his contemporaries after Seymour Slive scrutinized the Rembrandt historiography in his 1953 Rembrandt and His Critics, followed by Jan Emmens in his groundbreaking Rembrandt en de regels van de kunst fifteen years later. Since then, authors have labored to plant Rembrandt deeply within the soil of his time and place. Gary Schwartz dug up impressive piles of evidence about the master's background and interactions with patrons, Svetlana Alpers reevaluated the trademark of "individuality" he promoted successfully through his art and studio practice, Perry Chapman proposed that the artist himself introduced the Romantic notions of isolation and individuality through artifices he invented for his self-portraiture, and recently historian Simon Schama produced a tour-de-force of cultural embedding richly laced with personal musings about the man and his motives. All wish to know, as Chapman put it, "who was Rembrandt?"

In this book, Amy Golahny comes down firmly on the side of a thoughtful man with a serviceable humanist education and high-minded goals for narrative representation. She wants to know what Rembrandt was reading in order, modestly, to "demonstrate what was commonly available" and then, more ambitiously, to "recreate concisely the literary material that fueled his image-making process in his narrative secular themes" (14). Specifically, she tackles the twenty-two books — some identified discouragingly only by subject or, worse, size — listed in the 1656 inventory of Rembrandt's possessions before he sold them off to pay his debts. In three chapters she sketches the history of book culture in the Netherlands, Rembrandt's likely training in learned subjects through his schooling, artistic education, and influence from scholarly acquaintanceships (concluding that the artist could find sources in vernacular texts he did not own for esoteric subjects), and finally, in an expansive last chapter, compares Rembrandt's library and its probable purposes to those of other artists. In the four chapters forming the heart of the book, Golahny studies the known books, dwells on their illustrations, and does difficult detective work to propose some likely candidates for the others. Her initial goal of recreating literary material that informed Rembrandt's art is not exactly achieved, for she finds only slim evidence for subjects from the books she cites. Nevertheless, in weaving in selected examples of art by Rembrandt and his students to make a case for one book or another, she traces the sticky strands forming a fragile web of evidence that might guide scholars toward what Rembrandt read and capture the ineffable: how it helped him to make art.

Despite the author's clever inversion of the title of Mieke Bal's provocative 1990 tome, Reading "Rembrandt", Golahny chose not to engage directly with the issues Bal raised about how exactly words and images relate, though some reflection on the subject might have solidified the shifting ground of Golahny's underlying assumptions. For example, is the most important function of pictures to illustrate texts? To give her credit, Golahny frequently and honestly points out the divergence of image from text, and often qualifies her thesis by asserting that Rembrandt far preferred art to books. She even remarks in passing that his secular works challenge poetic authority and create their own narrative (114). But she also stoutly backs the argument for the other side, citing theoretical treatises of the time which address the question of what purpose reading served for artists; Philips Angel said it was to avoid error and illustrate historical texts accurately. Angel also maintained, however, that Rembrandt exemplified the admirable artist who, through his own deep reflection, added to knowledge found in texts (220). Evidently, texts for Angel were tools for something deeper. But by asserting that Rembrandt's brief was "how to communicate a written narrative in a unique visual...