The Eyes of Rembrandt

The unmatched master of popular historical narrative Simon Schama, with the brilliance of a professional novelist and the meticulousness of a professional historian, creates a dynamic and comprehensive image of the Netherlands in the 17th century – the time when the Leiden native Rembrandt van Rijn triumphantly demonstrated the heights that Dutch painting could achieve, earning the title of the greatest painter for many centuries. The few documented facts about the life and professional activities of the artist that have survived to our days are virtuously woven into the colorful fabric of a vast and diverse historical context. Commercial hustle and political intrigues, the confrontation of the Spanish Habsburgs and the Dutch Republic, Catholics and Protestants, the flourishing of democratic art in the Netherlands, and the sparkling paintings of the "artist of kings" Rubens – a turbulent, whimsical world where the art of the Modern era was born. A world that became the stage for the life and work of the Dutch Rembrandt van Rijn – an artist whose paintings seem to triumph over reality.