(FORTUNE Magazine) – Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama Knopf, 702 pages, illus.

A severed cow's head in the Brooklyn Museum has caused a contemporary sensation, but the gory motif is an old one. In 1655 Rembrandt painted The Slaughtered Ox, depicting a disemboweled carcass strung up from the ceiling like a crucified Christ. Blood and guts were hardly novel subjects for 17th-century artists: Tortured saints, autopsies, game animals being readied for the stew pot--all were common. But Rembrandt, according to Simon Schama's stunning new biography, Rembrandt's Eyes, brought an especially disquieting vividness to such scenes. In creating Slaughtered Ox, Schama observes, the Dutch master used his "brush as if it were a butcher knife.... The eerie result of all this furiously energetic brushwork is both to bring the creature to life and to display its death, like a flayed and mutilated martyr captured in the throes of his agony." By spiking an everyday image with violence, Rembrandt anticipated the modern artist's preoccupation with shock even as he responded to the culture of post-Reformation Amsterdam.

Schama portrays this culture with rich sensory acuity. He's an inventive storyteller with a keen eye for historical detail--skills he's used in his other books, which include Citizens, about the French Revolution, and The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. In the new book, Schama explains the religious and political squabbles of 17th-century Holland and shows how they crop up in Rembrandt's painting. The gnarled hands and wrinkled brow of Saint Peter suggest a "formidable load of Calvinist guilt," thus the painter's subtle Protestantization of the first Pope. That may sound like a stretch, but Schama's historical authority makes it believable. He delivers us directly to the streets Rembrandt walked, where we smell the vinegar in which the corpses of plague victims were soaked, as well as the Turkish rosewater that scented the gloves of wealthy men. Schama burrows so successfully into the painter's world that even his discussions of the paintings themselves remain free of scholarly dust.

So does his description of Rembrandt van Rijn. Born in 1606 to a Leiden malt miller and his wife--and orphaned early--the young painter came to the attention of the Dutch statesman and poet Constantijn Huygens. Huygens was impressed by the realism and "liveliness of emotion" of Rembrandt's figures, and Schama lets us see why, comparing Rembrandt's paintings with those of his chief rival, Jan Lievens. Lievens' version of the Samson and Delilah story, with a scissors-wielding soldier approaching Samson, looks like "silent-movie melodrama" with a "pop-eyed, creaky booted soldier." Rembrandt's version captures the officer's trepidation with details like "the tiny catchlight in his right eye that reveals his mixture of vigilance and fear." The broad pantomime Lievens and other painters of the day employed was giving way to Rembrandt's subtler theatrics, a kind of method acting on canvas. This put Rembrandt in demand as a portraitist--sought out for his ability to capture a subject's inner life, to suggest a world of thought beneath an otherwise placid face.

In a self-portrait done at age 23, The Artist in His Studio, Rembrandt paints his eyes lying "flat against the face, glitterless." The effect is disturbing, as if, instead of eyes, his face is pocked by two wounds. "Behind the drill holes," writes Schama, "in the deep interior of the imagination, the real action is going on, wheels within wheels; the machinery of cogitation whirring and flying."

Equal parts aesthetic meditation, biography, and art criticism, Rembrandt's Eyes is cultural history at its best. Schama peers into those black pockets and discovers the incremental process whereby Rembrandt came to see the world differently, and how we came to see the world his way.

--Albert Mobilio

ALBERT MOBILIO is a freelance writer living in New York City