Rembrandt's Self-Portraits: A Study in Seventeenth Century Identity.

The polemical charge that motivates Rembrandt's Self-Portraits is the desire to recast the terms in which a major debate about Rembrandt had been posed: the controversy between proponents of the Romantic story of the artist as alienated genius and rebel, and the proponents of the (earlier and later) classicist critique of an artist who got what he deserved because he violated the rules of life, art, and patronage. Chapman partly dissents from the Romantic picture of the "two-part Rembrandt" (136) in which the "extroverted" youth represented himself making faces, playing roles, and wearing fancy costumes while the "introverted" old pariah "turned to more spiritual values and a fascination with the emotions and the inner life" (135). But she dissents only to defend the second part of the story from its critics and to show that there was plenty of introversion in the early work. Conceding that one group of early self-portraits is extroverted, she faults scholars for overlooking an even earlier group "distinguished at once by remarkably evocative shading and by a relative lack of outward emotional expression. That these images seem to penetrate the dark recesses of Rembrandt's mind suggests a depth of introspection not usually attributed to him at this early age" (11). She grounds the distinction in intellectual history by accounting for the expressive images in terms of the theory of affetti and for the introspective images in terms of humoral psychology: the former are theatrical experiments (rehearsals for roles in history paintings) in which the artist isn't so much disclosing his soul as using his face to model the emotions; the latter are Rembrandt's attempts to convey "his own artistic temperament," his unique sense of identity" as "a man of melancholic temperament" (30, 8, 25).

Having thus shown that the "inwardness usually associated with Rembrandt's late portraits in fact had surfaced at the very beginning of his career" (31), Chapman goes on to develop her own "greatly modified version of the two-part Rembrandt" in which she tries to demonstrate that "a fundamental change" took place in his "pattern of conceptualizing selfhood," a change "consistent with seventeenth-century thought" (135). She starts by reminding us that in Rembrandt's era melancholy was the poet's and artist's humor, and that he associated his melancholy with his artistic calling. The fancy-dress performances of the early 1630s--the artist-patriot wearing armor and "the virtuoso gentleman artist" (48) complete with elegant beret and gold chain--are experiments in the fashioning and positioning of an artistic identity. Although these fantasies are ostentatious--many of them emulate Rubens and Van Dyck--she argues that they don't "mock the courtly ideal ... of social status and privilege" but displace it to a professional ideal: "a new image of the honored but independent virtuoso artist" (54). But after the 1640 self-portrait in London, with its complex allusions to Titian, Raphael, Ariosto, and Castiglione, the "rather old-fashioned ideal" valorized by "this courtly Renaissance self-portrait type did not sit well with his emerging independence," and Rembrandt therefore set out "to reformulate his self" (81). The later portraits range from more contemporary and down-home if defiant images of the artist at work, through the Titianesque "Prince of Painters" (94) depicted in the monumental 1658 self-portrait in New York, to the cackling old jokester who laughs at the craquelure of his mortality in the "poignant and ironic" canvas in Cologne (101-04).

Rembrandt's Self-Portraits is well-worth perusal for several reasons. The author's approach to the problem of self-representation is more precise, physiognomic, and wissenschaftlich than that of previous commentators. Her carefully researched and scrupulously slow-paced readings interrogate existing interpretations of many portraits; the readings are subtle, critical, but never tendentious. Her attention to the iconographic sources of Rembrandt's status symbols, her distinction between the social and professional ideals they symbolize, her constant focus on the problematic aspects of his emulation of illustrious precursors, and her excellent chapter on his biblical performances, are especially valuable. Also noteworthy is her perceptiveness in dealing with the meaning effects of variations in paint texture.

Most of the weaknesses of the book arise from a methodological inconsistency in Chapman's use of the term "self" and in her attitude toward what it signifies. There is a difference between saying "Rembrandt fashioned himself" and "Rembrandt fashioned his self": the reflexive pronoun in the first predicate has merely deictic force, whereas in the second, the noun clause has referential force and implies commitment to an entity, the self. Chapman's basic thesis is that throughout his career Rembrandt restlessly fashioned and refashioned his self. But when she gets down to the business of interpreting pictures she has little recourse to this reifying language. Though she flips back and forth between deictic and ontological uses of "self," her individual readings focus less on self-fashioning than on self-representation, and less on Rembrandt's creation of his self than on his creation of "his self-image and role as artist" (11). The readings therefore fail to substantiate the larger thesis informed by a persistent effort to translate the data and changes of self-representation into the data and changes of self-fashioning so as to produce the story of Rembrandt's spiritual autobiography in pictures. And in fact this translation project bypasses a hypothesis that Chapman also entertains, one that has more plausibility than the story of self-fashioning but that runs counter to the story and fails to weather the force of the procedure that sustains the story. This is the hypothesis, already stated and demonstrated by Svetlana Alpers in Rembrandt's Enterprise, that from beginning to end the self-portraits are performances in the theatrical sense. They may perform the disclosure of authentic self, pretend to reveal "the deepest recesses of the human psyche" (17), and, as a series, produce the effect of a record that documents a crisis of identity and a conversion, the renunciation of "an earlier self" (135). But to determine whether they actually do such heady things, as opposed to performing them for the benefit of some virtual spectator (the painter/sitter, if no other), exceeds the powers and evidentiary resources of anyone who isn't Rembrandt and who resists the idea that self-representation represents the self or that it transparently conveys self-fashioning.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ