New Releases by Simon Schama

For Rembrandt as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance; the strutting and mincing; the wardrobe and the face paint; the full repertoire of gesture and grimace; the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes; the belly laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle, and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon; to shake a fist or uncover a breast; how to sin and how to atone; how to commit murder and how to commit suicide. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between. More than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt remains the most deeply loved of all the great masters of painting, his face so familiar to us from the self-portraits painted at every stage in his life, yet still so mysterious. As with Shakespeare, the facts of his life are hard to come by; the Leiden miller''s son who briefly found fame in Amsterdam, whose genius was fitfully recognized by his contemporaries, who fell into bankruptcy and died in poverty. So there is probably no other painter whose life has engendered more legends, nor to whom more unlikely pictures have been attributed (a process now undergoing rigorous reversal). Rembrandt''s Eyes, about which Simon Schama has been thinking for more than twenty years, shows that the true biography of Rembrandt is to be discovered in his pictures. Though a succession of superbly incisive descriptions and interpretations of Rembrandt''s paintings threaded into his narrative, he allows us to see Rembrandt''s life clearly and to think about it afresh. But this book moves far beyond the bounds of conventional biography or art history. With extraordinary imaginative sympathy, Schama conjures up the world in which Rembrandt moved -- its sounds, smells and tastes as well as its politics; the influences on him of the wars of the Protestant United Provinces against Spain, of the extreme Calvinism of his native Leiden, of the demands of patrons and the ambitions of contemporaries; the importance of his beloved Saskia and, after her death (Rembrandt was later forced to sell her grave, so complete was his ruin), of his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels; and, above all, the profound effect on him of the great master of the immediately preceding generation, the Catholic painter from Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens: "the prince of painters and the painter of princes" with whom Rembrandt was obsessed for the first part of his life, and whose career was the shaping force that drove Rembrandt to test the farthest reaches of his own originality. Rembrandt''s Eyes shows us why Rembrandt is such a thrilling painter, so revolutionary in his art, so penetrating of the hearts of those who have looked for three hundred years at his pictures. Above all, Schama''s understanding of Rembrandt''s mind and the dynamic of his life allows him to re-create Rembrandt''s life on the page. Through a combination of scholarship and literary skill, Schama allows us to actually see that life through Rembrandt''s own eyes. In overcoming the paucity of conventional historical evidence, it is the most intelligently true biography of Rembrandt that has ever been written, and the most dazzling achievement to date of the art historian whose work has been hailed as "marvelously rich and eloquent" ... "rare, imaginative" ... "provocative" ... "astoundingly learned with verve, humor, and an unflagging sense of delight" ... that of "a master storyteller ... and a master of history."* Quotes from the New York Times Book Review, Time, the New York Times, The Independent on Sunday, and Nature, respecti

Rembrandt (1606-1669), zijn schilderkunst en ambitie Rubens te evenaren, geplaatst tegen de achtergrond van het politieke en culturele klimaat van de zeventiende eeuw.

"On ne voit jamais un paysage, on le revoit: il est là, gravé en nous par les récits, les mythes collectifs, les images les plus diverses, des gravures aux tableaux, des cartes postales aux films. Et c''est ce travail collectif de la mémoire, la constitution de paysages idéaux par accumulation de récits, de descriptions, de journaux de voyages, d''images, que Schama élucide. Ces visites des hauts lieux naturels, où " soi-même se révèle à soi-même ", sont à chaque fois l''occasion d''une démonstration érudite (Schama fait un très bel usage des citations) et d''une écriture très maîtrisée. Etudiant le travail quasi poétique opéré par la mémoire collective sur bon nombre de paysages, Simon Schama se fait lui-même écrivain. Sans doute est-ce là que son appel provocateur en faveur d''une autre histoire est le plus convaincant : le récit, dans ce livre, brasse les métaphores, les citations et l''analyse selon un fil narratif dont le pouvoir de suggestion gagne, à lui seul, le statut d''un paysage. Enserrant et répondant à ce paysage de mots, il convient de mentionner enfin le très beau travail d''illustration proposé ici, les images s''ajustant à l''écriture tout au long d''un ouvrage qui fait date. " Antoine de Baecque, Le Monde, 27 octobre 1995.

A Time Magazine Best Books of the Year. In Landscape and Memory, award-winning author Simon Schama ranges over continents and centuries to reveal the psychic claims that human beings have made on nature. He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini''s Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art, as encyclopedic as The Golden Bough and as irresistibly readable as Schama''s own Citizens. "A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times "Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books

Geschiedenis van de invloed van het landschap op de cultuur en verbeelding van de mens en van de mens op het landschap.

Like his The Embarrassment of Riches and the bestselling Citizens, Simon Schama''s latest book is both history and literature of immense stylishness and ambition. But Dead Certainties goes beyond these more conventional histories to address the deeper enigmas that confront a student of the past. In order to do so, Schama reconstructs -- and at times reinvents -- two ambiguous deaths: the first, that of General James Wolfe at the battle of Quebec in 1759; the second, in 1849, that of George Parkman, an eccentric Boston brahmin whose murder by an impecunious Harvard professor in 1849 was a grisly reproach to the moral sanctity of his society. Out of these stories -- with all of their bizarre coincidences and contradictions -- Schama creates a dazzling and supremely vital work of historical imagination. "From the Trade Paperback edition.

In this New York Times bestseller, award-winning author Simon Schama presents an ebullient country, vital and inventive, infatuated with novelty and technology--a strikingly fresh view of Louis XVI''s France. One of the great landmarks of modern history publishing, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution is the most authoritative social, cultural, and narrative history of the French Revolution ever produced.

De voorgeschiedenis van de Franse Revolutie, het revolutiejaar 1789 en het verdere verloop tot het einde van de Terreur in 1794.

In a brilliantly inventive work, bestselling author Simon Schama explores the enigma of 17th-century Holland, a nation that attained an unprecedented level of affluence, yet lived in constant dread of being corrupted by prosperity. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, THE EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES throbs with life on every page. 314 photos & illustrations. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.