Art: Really Rembrandt?

YOU CAN'T OFTEN COMPARE PAINTers with writers, because of the apples-and- oranges problem of imagining links between dissimilar arts. But in the case of Rembrandt van Rijn you can, and the temptation to do it, if not carried too far, can hardly be resisted. He was the Shakespeare of 17th century painting, even more so than Nicolas Poussin was the Milton.

That is the first thing that the exhibition "Rembrandt: The Master & His Workshop: Paintings," now in its closing week at London's National Gallery, makes clear. Rembrandt was not a "literary" painter, as his intense devotion to the muck and glow and substance of paint attests. But he was an incomparably theatrical one. In his work, the idea of a figure painting as tableau is exchanged for that of outright drama: deep, dark backgrounds and narrative light picking out the hierarchy of character; turbulent crowd scenes; an eye for all classes, from cobblers to kings; a vast range of expression in the faces and gestures; moments of shock (the blade grinding into the clumsy giant's eye in The Blinding of Samson ((1636)) has the same appalling impact as the blinding of Lear) alternating with passages of the most lyrical eroticism, reflectiveness, inwardness. Then, too, there are the shifts of language, the rough and the smooth, and the long series of self- portraits, Rembrandt's time-lapse scrutiny of his aging, from smooth-faced boy to old potato-nosed master, which incarnate the very essence of soliloquy.

None of this was completely new in painting -- you have only to think of Titian, Rembrandt's father figure and model, and of Caravaggio, whose dirty- feet realism had such an impact on the Dutch master when young. But Rembrandt put the elements of dramatic narrative, character description and history painting together in a way that had not been attempted before, and has scarcely been rivaled since.

Moreover, his art -- another Shakespearean parallel -- always testifies to the fact that when a great artist breaks the mold, the result still pays homage to the mold itself. There can hardly be a more intensely moving portrait of a woman's naked body than his Bathsheba with King David's Letter (1654). At root it is a Titianesque conception, heir to those sumptuous Venetian nudes; but Rembrandt avoids idealism, suffuses the real imperfect body with thought and a sense of moral reflection, re-creates the structure of flesh in terms of an amazing directness of "rough" brush marks. We think of paintings like this or the later Kenwood Self-Portrait (circa 1665), with its sketchy construction (arcs in the background, a near Cubist flurry of angular brush marks to indicate palette and brushes), as being a long way from the Italian Renaissance, but in fact they are grounded in it and in Titian's late manner.

No Dutch painting is more like a Titian than Rembrandt's Moses Breaking the Tablets (1659), the furious patriarch with a shining face, rearing up from the brown murk to smash the tables of the law. The style of Rembrandt's maturity was so totally his own, even in the way it used the past, that it seems inimitable. But in fact it was widely and constantly imitated, especially by his own assistants, and there begins the problem of attribution with which the Rembrandt Research Project, a team of leading connoisseurs and Rembrandt specialists from Europe and the U.S., has been wrestling for the past decade.