STORY LINE.(Rembrandt paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts)

"Rembrandt's Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher," at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is a large exhibition of mostly tiny pictures--about a hundred and fifty prints interspersed with thirty-five drawings and twenty-three paintings, only one of which warrants being called a masterpiece: a 1659 self-portrait, from the National Gallery in Washington, in which the fifty-three-year-old painter appears both careworn and radiantly alive. But a Rembrandt show is a Rembrandt show: a chance to revel anew in the genius of perhaps the most interesting or, to be exact, the most interestingly interested visual artist who ever lived. His talent and skill seem limitless, but we are never solicited and are rarely even permitted to stand back and admire them. They are always busily employed in getting to the bottom of something. It might be the quirk of a portrait sitter, the comic or tragic irony in a drama, or the depth charge of a religious subject. Rembrandt is a detective. When I look at his pictures, I feel like Dr. Watson bumbling along behind Holmes. Once exposed by the master, mysteries become as plain as day, but I know that, on my own, I would have missed the clues ten times out of ten.

A mystery for Rembrandt may take the simple form of what something that he has not experienced is like. What is it like to commit murder? In a swift sketch with brown ink, Cain kneels on his supine, terrified brother, whose barely indicated face is eerily specific, like that of someone you dimly remember. The athletic killer parts Abel's defending hands with one arm and raises a jawbone with the other. Rembrandt has thickened the contour of the weapon, giving it the right weight to crush a skull at one blow. The drawing establishes that murder requires concentration, a sure method, and sudden energy, and that it hurts. Of course, this isn't just any homicide. It's the first--a cosmic disaster. Faintly limned in the sky, God rests his chin on one hand and observes the event with sombre detachment. Did this image strike Rembrandt as a bit fey? He added a balancing note of horror: a dog eats the remains of an animal that Abel has sacrificed on an altar. Looking at the drawing, you reconstruct the artist's thought and share his satisfaction. If you're like me, you also tremble a little. Rembrandt's courage daunts.

"In selecting the works there has been a special emphasis on Rembrandt the storyteller," the show's head curator, Clifford S. Ackley, writes in the catalogue. It is a welcome stress, aimed at a lingering blind spot in modern taste. Pejorative senses of "illustration" (the qualifier "mere" goes without saying) and the "literary" have embarrassed overeducated viewers of Rembrandt for a century. Like low-down realism--the other pole of the Dutchman's magnet--poetic narrative is close to anathema in most modern theories of art. Great artists who have embraced it--Edvard Munch, Edward Hopper, Picasso in his distinctly Rembrandt-influenced etchings--suffer the peculiar fate of being well loved and poorly explicated. Modern art criticism long ago discarded the tools of participatory imagination that, today, belong chiefly to movie critics. Was Rembrandt's art the movies of its day? You may say so if you're careful to add that it also performed functions of photography, fiction, theatre, theology, and social anthropology--all with an individualism that engendered continual audacities of technique and style. (Often, you know that a Rembrandt is finished only because, at a certain unruly-looking stage, he signed it.) His was a sensibility new in history, born of the freedoms and appetites of a triumphant bourgeoisie. Twentieth-century types for whom "bourgeois" was a curse had a problem with that.

In a real and delightful way, this most famous of artists remains to be discovered in the manner that he palpably anticipated--picture by picture, one viewer at a time. Rembrandt is in the details. The quality for which he is inevitably praised, "humanity," is too nebulous. "Personality" is more like it. Intimate with both subject and viewer, he dissolves emotional distances. The only halfway ...