Choice 评论

Visually and iconographically, difficult to decipher, Rembrandt's painted landscapes elicit intense interest from viewers. These paintings blend the exotic and the ordinary to evoke a mysterious world, often meterologically dramatic, studded with odd monuments, and peopled with occasional peasants and travelers. In the five essays and catalog of 8 authentic and 11 rejected paintings that constitute this revision of her dissertation (Harvard), Schneider analyzes how these landscapes are intrinsic to much of Rembrandt's oeuvre. Her methodology combines technical examination, connoisseurship, and iconography in order to interpret Rembrandt's landscapes as animated settings for biblical and mythological narratives and as natural arenas with scriptural and moralistic meanings. Her discussion of Rembrandt and his native landscape is extended in her exhibition catalog, Rembrandt's Landscapes: Drawings and Prints (1990). Generous sharing of research (in prepublication stages) between Schneider and the Rembrandt Research project team, based in Amsterdam, has happily resulted in references in Schneider's book to Volume 3 of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings (1989) and in references in that tome to Schneider's book. Although Schneider and the project team usually agree on the authenticity of Rembrandt's landscapes, they sometimes diverge. This is a discriminating study whose interpretive readings, based on 17th-century Dutch art and culture, bring into welcome prominence pictures that have often been relegated to the background of Rembrandt studies. For advanced undergraduates and above. -A. Golahny, Lycoming College