Peering into Rembrandt’s Eyes

This chapter reflects on the exhibition “Late Rembrandt” that ran in 2015 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which was the first exhibition ever to focus on the adventurous and experimental painting of the last eighteen years of Rembrandt's life. Many of the figures portrayed by Rembrandt seem to have opaque and unseeing eyes. As Rembrandt's near contemporary René Descartes argued, the soul is not present in the body the way a pilot is present in a vessel. The connection is tighter than that. And Rembrandt's pictures offer a kind of exhibition of this idea—one can encounter the manifest spirit of a living person in a picture even when there is no seeing “into” them, even when we are confined, as we are, to seeing them from the “outside.” Meanwhile, there are a group of portraits by Rembrandt that are in an entirely different key—his self-portraits. In these paintings, almost miraculously, there is no question of lifeless or unseeing eyes. The differences between the blank eyes one sees in almost every figure painting of Rembrandt in this exhibition and the animate gaze of the self-portraits is not so much a difference in what the viewer actually sees but a difference in the acts these paintings perform.