The more one studies Rembrandt, the less one manages to connect the incomplete and contradictory impressions formed about his life and work. The departure of our century from the idealism of Romanticism, which overcame many interpretive problems based on the idea of the ex nihilo birth of the genius creator, has not effectively helped to elucidate the "mystery" of Rembrandt's unparalleled technique. The efforts to "reconstruct" the artist's personality, undertaken by modern science, also seem like illusions, no less futile than those created by past centuries.
Of course, thanks to the multifaceted research of the scientists of the Rembrandt Research Project, we know much more today about the workshops and artistic conventions of the time, about Rembrandt's role as a teacher, about his choices as a collector, about his commercial transactions, about his relationship with the city of Amsterdam, which, as Descartes wrote, "was the place where one could buy everything, while feeling free and safe". [...]
(from the book's preface)