SOURCE: “The Bosom of History,” in New Republic, December 6, 1999, pp. 44–46, 48–51.

In the following negative review, Freedberg finds serious factual errors and interpretative distortions in Rembrandt's Eyes.

I.

Page after page in this large and sumptuous book, Simon Schama offers some of the finest and most vivid prose by any history writer of our time. Schama's study of Rembrandt is crowded with notions that are smart, witty, and moving. Might the excesses of his writing have been restrained? Perhaps not. Much of the achievement of Schama's book is owed to its excess, its abundance, its learned luxuriousness. Rembrandt's Eyes has something in it of the voluptuousness and the humanity not so much of Rembrandt as of Rubens, the other hero of this vast canvas—particularly the domestic Rubens, the lover of children and of the comforts of home, the painter of sumptuous altarpieces and abundant female flesh. The largeness...