By Michael Taylor
D.A.P., $27.50

This is an incredibly compact book, not only because of its small size but because it manages to squeeze in so much aesthetic analysis, biographical detail and historical context (a 16-page “chronology” at the end amounts to a complete, annotated life of Rembrandt). Emblematic of Taylor’s approach to Rembrandt’s portraits is the fact that he chooses to concentrate on one small part of the human body and use it as a gateway into the master’s whole approach to “flesh and spirit.”

Taylor is a translator from the French, not an art historian, but his unconventional essay shows a truly visual mind at work. He notes perceptively that the nose is the only facial feature that cannot be fully seen from the front; in fact, it tends to vanish when viewed head-on, which Rembrandt sometimes acknowledged in his drawings by rendering it as little more than two dots. In his paintings, though, the artist lavished major effort on this humble, often homely appendage. As Taylor observes, the nose is often the dividing line between areas of light and dark in Rembrandt’s portraits, casting the shadow that hides one eye and envelops a face in mystery. He devotes a whole chapter to “the highlight on the tip of the nose,” that little dot of white that gives three-dimensionality to the picture—“hence the joke about being able to pick up a Rembrandt portrait by the nose.”

Rembrandt himself, as his myriad self-portraits show, had a particularly lumpish proboscis, a trait which he never attempted to downplay. Taylor connects this with the artist’s general interest in ugliness, age and fleshly decay. The light on the nose is spirit asserting itself in the face of mortality. (The only unfortunate aspect about this book is that the illustrations are all in monochrome.)