"Rembrandt is revered as one of the greatest and most important figures in the trajectory of art, and for good reason. He was, by design or nature, a revolutionary. As such he is perhaps a uniquely qualified interlocutor with other cultures and civilizations. (...) For the first time in the history of art, the painting speaks for itself. To put it another way, as Malraux phrased it, Rembrandt was the first to touch the soul with his paintings. He went well beyond the subject matter, which is only a pretense of sorts, to reach a more profound truth. As one watches the trajectory of his career arc, he is always stretching further and further in his paintings, to find his own concept of 'beauty'. That is why he was influential for future generations. By throwing off the confines of classicism, he freed others to push their own boundaries in the pursuit of beauty through their own conceptions of truth.. ..André Malraux described Rembrandt as prophet. He drew from the past to unleash the future. It is an exciting thought. Of course, he came to be seen as a metaphor for virtuosity. André Gide made a wonderful compliment to Dostoyevsky by claiming that he was the greatest novelist because he created portraits in his writings like Rembrandt painted."