I t's unlikely that Simon Schama will ever produce a book anyone accuses of being too short. Schama doesn't so much write books as deliver immense objects to his readers. His latest undertaking, an investigation of Rembrandt van Rijn's intricate connection to another 17th century master, Peter Paul Rubens, is close to the heftiest volume I have ever read. This is a 728-page book, sized to fit 359 illustrations. The pages, when not simply walls of print, are walls of print broken only by densely painted Baroque masterpieces, reproduced in full color.
Visual overload is always just a licked fingertip away.
This is the kind of monumental undertaking most historians would gladly trade their rustbucket Volvos for a shot at. Schama, after all, is the jet set, the Mac Daddy of historians. He gets to write gargantuan books because he delivers the goods. We should, argued Schama, because in the burgher republic of the Dutch Golden Age, we can find the seeds of our own current lifestyle, our embrace of plenty and our neurotic misgivings about whether all that plenty is somehow robbing us of our souls. Apparently predestined for greatness, he became, by the end of his life, an anachronism laid low by his foibles.