A Weekend with Rembrandt

I thought that the best thing in this book was a story about an ancient Greek painter named Zeuxis. Back before photography, painters put a lot of effort into trying to capture reality in a picture, which might not sound too hard until you find out that for a guy like Zeuxis, "the situation seemed so ridiculous that he burst into laughter. And he laughed so hard that he died." (p. 8) The amazing thing for me is that anyone who had so much talent could live to be 61, which is the setting that is used for Rembrandt to be the narrator of this book: "Zeuxis ~ he was as old as I am, sixty-one." The dates on pages 55-57 reveal that Rembrandt lived to be 63. Most of the information in this book is about his art.