The Late Rembrandt show that closed this past weekend at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is the first exhibition ever to focus on the adventurous and experimental painting of the last 18 years of Rembrandt's life.
You don't need to be an art expert, let alone an expert on the works of Rembrandt, to find yourself drawn in, and puzzled by, some of these paintings (and drawings and prints). Or to find yourself looking at them with the same quizzical and interested eye with which we sometimes see Rembrandt look out at us in his self-portraits.
I was struck, walking through the galleries at the Rijksmuseum, at just how many of the figures portrayed by Rembrandt seem to have lifeless and unseeing eyes; you cannot see into their oily depths. What's puzzling is that, despite this fact, his figures appear lifelike and vivid — as if the viewer has an intimate awareness of the subjects' thoughts and feelings.
How to make sense of this? Why don't we experience the figures themselves as lifeless and zombielike, if, as I suggest, we experience their eyes as unseeing and dead?
If the "eyes are windows to the soul," then it as if these windows are shuttered closed. But these Rembrandt paintings give the lie to this very image.
As Rembrandt's near contemporary Réné Descartes argued, the soul is not present in the body the way a pilot is present in his 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.
As I see it, there is no contradiction between lively spirit and lifeless eyes. Take the case of our knowledge of our own selves in the mirror. You can see yourself in the mirror, and you can see your eyes. But what you can't see, or rather, what you can't really experience, is the fact that it is these very eyes that you see that are doing the seeing. Instead, what you encounter when you try to look into your own eyes in a mirror are mere objects, sightless, foreign, blank.
Maybe this is the key to what goes on in Rembrandt's portraits? He presents his personalities to us as we would see ourselves in the mirror: intimately, immediately and with understanding.
Now there are a group of portraits by Rembrandt that are entirely different — his self-portraits. In these paintings, there is no question of lifeless or unseeing eyes. The thing about these self-portraits is that the subject is not presented to us as we see ourselves in the mirror (even though these pictures, self-portraits, are actually made using mirrors!). We don't so much look at Rembrandt, in observing these paintings, as we encounter him looking back at us. He is active and inquiring. And, so, he is alive in a way that the other portrayed figures are not. At the same time, or so I find, the subject of the self-portraits is less open to us, less transparent; the encounter is less intimate.
The differences I have described between the dead-eyes we see 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 — that is, it's not a literal difference in what is visible — but a difference in the acts these paintings perform.
These works show different kinds of things and invite us to take up different kinds of relations to that which they show.
Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe
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