Rock-Star Rembrandt.

Rembrandt's Eyes, by Simon Schama (Knopf, 750 pp., $50)

FOR two centuries now we have been conjuring almost compulsively with the name of Rembrandt van Rijn. Even people who know nothing about art know something about him. He is the great painter par excellence, the man who distilled humanity into pigment, the scourge of prigs, the champion of underdogs, the complete mensch. His rebellion is one in which even conformists can take comfort and have a share. Like Shakespeare, Leonardo, and Beethoven, he appears to stand at the very summit of human culture, to embody all that is best in our natures. And then, of course, there is the sheer monetary value of his works. More than diamonds, Porsches, or weapons-grade plutonium, the very fabric of his canvas is the incarnation of money, of portable capital pure and simple.

That it was not always so makes it only more so now. In Leiden and Amsterdam, where he spent most of his life, Rembrandt (1606-1669) was often, though not always, reviled and misunderstood. In the latter part of his life he was constantly in debt. He seems to be the first and greatest of those Bohemians who hold such an odd and irresistible charm for the bourgeois in his armchair. Though men like Rubens and Raphael rose above their respective ages, they also moved comfortably within them. But Rembrandt was too introspective to serve his age as his age wished to be served. The Night Watch, for example, is great art, but it is a little too complex, a little too nuanced to have propitiated the vanity of public men who had paid their five guilders simply to be flattered and have done.

Several years back, in an article in the New York Times, Simon Schama wrote that "every generation gets the Rembrandt it deserves." I am not sure that I know what this means. What cannot be denied is that his new biography is conscientiously contemporary in spirit and tone. Describing one of Rembrandt's early self-portraits, Schama writes, "He is Hamlet in Holland, an inward-outward person, a poet in heavy-metal " Regarding another portrait, he refers to Rembrandt's "rock-star stubble."

Schama himself, before shaving off his own stubble, looked peculiarly like this younger Rembrandt. And though he is not a rock star, the term "academic superstar" is so consistently affixed to his name that it sounds almost like a title. Now, being an academic superstar comes with certain rewards, foremost of which is the willingness of publishers to accommodate your merest whim. I mention this because, in reading Rembrandt's Eyes, I found it difficult to escape the impression that the author, in his love of his subject, had decided to write a big book on him and only then, after the fact, went looking for a suitable thesis- since, as everyone knows, a book needs to have a thesis.

In pursuit of this thesis, however, he appears to have spun out of whole cloth a purely fictitious conflict. "There was a time," he writes, "not so very long ago, before the anachronism police had been sent out on monograph patrol, when 'genius' and 'Rembrandt' seemed to belong in the same sentence." He goes on to say that "the post-war aversion to any kind of cultural heroism, which at its most extreme ended up in the endeavor to get rid of the idea of authorial originality altogether, was bound to discount the originality of his innovation." And yet, the only instance Schama cites of this view is the doctoral dissertation of a single, obscure Dutch scholar named Jan Emmens.

Schama's pretexts, for such they are, seem confused to say the least. Surely the notion that Rembrandt was a genius is as current in common parlance as it ever was. Furthermore, in discussing Rembrandt, postwar Modernists-especially Andre Malraux-played up the tormented-genius bit to an almost comical degree. Another of Schama's culprits is the Rembrandt Research Project, a consortium of Dutch scholars to whom Schama attributes the belief that the artist's manner "could be imitated by others to a degree of plausibility that has made any serious differentiation between the real and the unreal item all but impossible." This too is an almost reckless paraphrasis: If anything, the RRP is redoubted and loathed precisely because of its dogmatical rulings on what is real and what is not real in the Rembrandt corpus.

"Insofar as Rembandt's painting is still thought distinctive," Schama continues, "it is now fashionably reckoned to be the product of his society, his culture, his teachers, his patron." What is weird about this is that, even to the extent that it is true, Schama proceeds to do the very same thing, although in his own acrobatically eccentric way. His idee maitresse is that Rembrandt, especially early on, was almost neurotically fixated on Rubens. "Rembrandt was haunted by [Rubens]. He had become Rubens's doppelganger. When, for the first time, he etched himself half-length, enveloped in a grandiose cape, it was as if he had superimposed his face on the body and deportment of his paragon. The face declared itself, unmistakably, to be Rembrandt. But everything else whispered 'Rubens.'" At the risk of indelicacy, this is nonsense. Though it is true enough, for what it is worth, that the etching in question recalls Rubens's self-portrait, all of the younger artist's other self- portraits, before and after, look entirely different, entirely Rembrandtian. Second, if it is true that he learned some tricks from Rubens, he learned far more from Pieter Lastman, Hercules Seghers, and a dozen other more proximate painters than from a foreigner he had never even met. What he got from Rubens, in other words, was not a thousandth part of what Van Dyck took away from the older master, yet one would seriously propose that Van Dyck was Rubens's doppelganger.

Fortunately, these theses, as window-dressing, have little organic relation to the rest of the text. The general public will not care about them either way and will read the biography for all the best and most old-fashioned reasons, namely to deepen their acquaintance with this eminent artist. Silliness aside, Schama tells his tale with a certain gusto, not to say razzle-dazzle. And if he does not allow his readers to feel as if they really know the artist, in the way that Ellmann enables us to know Oscar Wilde, or Edel enables us to know Henry James, still Schama vividly conjures up the age in which Rembrandt lived and the environment in which he moved.

It does not help, however, that Schama has a tin ear. Describing one tumultuous period in Rembrandt's life, he writes that "euphoria and sorrow were advancing toward each other like two dancers from opposite sides of a room." Then there is the padding. The most disconcerting example of all is surely the 150-page digression on Rubens. At one point, he mentions that Rembrandt's first wife was from a family of Mennonites. This induces him to link that sect to the earlier Anabaptists, which leads to a digression on a radical subsect of the Anabaptists that ruled briefly in Munster over a hundred years before. If my math is correct, we are now at five removes from Rembrandt van Rijn.

Evident throughout his book is Schama's love, above all, of Holland in its golden age. In this regard he reveals himself to be more a historian than a biographer, and more a biographer than an art historian. That is to say that he is more interested in attendant circumstances than in individual human beings, and more interested in personality than in art. Often, in reading Rembrandt's Eyes, one wonders whether Schama's own eyes are sensitive enough to write about Rembrandt's art. Though Schama devotes a great deal of space to discussing painting, it is here most of all that he reveals his limitations. Regarding Balaam and the Ass, for example, Schama claims that "by making visual connections among pulled bridle, raised stick, and upright sword, the artist has set in motion a rhythm of dynamic, violent action." The problem is that the rhythm to which he refers is simply not to be found in this rather weak piece of apprentice work. Then, as a model for the famous Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, Schama cites Rubens's Tribute Money, which has nothing to do with it visually or otherwise, yet he overlooks the far more likely connection to Rubens's Four Philosophers, of which a full-page, full-color reproduction appears a little earlier in his own book. And though the 1654 image of Jan Six is very fine, it is hard to imagine what was going through Schama's mind or his eyes when he pronounced it "the greatest portrait of the seventeenth century."

Behind such fustian, one suspects, is a confidence in the apparent subjectivity of art writing, a confidence that, in the end, there is no disputing taste. Schama likes this maxim so much that he refers to it more than once. For his sake, it had better be true.

Mr. Gardner is a frequent contributor to National Review.