Alpers - Constantijn Huygens and the New World

Alpers: Chapter One: Cnstantijn Huygens and the New World


This is Chapter One of Sventlana Alpers' "The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century", 1983

Quoted text is in YELLOW. Text quoted from other authors is in Orange

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Thomas De Keyser, portrait of Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk, 1627

 

 

"Rembrandt is superior to Lievens in judgment and in the representation of lively emotional expression, but Lievens has greater grandeur of invention and boldness than Rembrandt."... Constantijn Huygens



Constantijn Huygens is a fascinating fellow - obviously possessing a lively mind that, under the supervision of  his father, was given a broad education in the arts, sciences, and languages  - preparing him for a career as a diplomat and courtly advisor. (eventually, he would tutor William Henry of Orange, who would become King William III of England).

Today, some of his religious poetry -- and his musical compositions - remain in print.

He was in his early thirties when he discovered the studio of two young painters, Rembrandt and Lievens, then both about 20, and he would promote both of their careers.

Jan Lievens, portrait of Constantijn Huygens, 1627-1630

Huygens' memoir has been  a gold mine for art historians - but unfortunately it has not been translated into English.

 

Rembrandt, "Judas Repentant", 1627

 

 

 

Here is Huygens' take on the above painting:



"The singular gesture of the despairing Judas - leaving aside the many fascinating figures in this one painting – that one furious Judas, howling, praying for mercy, but devoid of hope, all traces of hope erased from his countenance, his appearance frightening, his hair torn, his garment rent, his limbs twisted, his hands clenched bloodlessly tight, fallen prostrate on his knees on a blind impulse, his whole body contorted in wretched hideousness. Such I place against all the elegance that has been produced throughout the ages. ... I maintain that it did not occur to Protagenes, Appeles or Parrhasius, nor could it occur to them were they return to earth that (I am amazed simply to report this) a youth, a Dutchman, a beardless miller, could bring together so much in one human figure and express what is universal. All honor to thee, my Rembrandt!"



Alpers does not mention the two  quotes shown above, but they do exemplify Huygens'  interest in dramatic narrative that she calls conventional. (i.e. based on the Italian model)

It's so exciting to read a bright, articulate commentary by a contemporary observer who knew the artists, I badly want to agree with his observations.   But I can't.

I saw a Jan Lievens show in Milwaukee five years ago, and  can agree about the  boldness and  "grandeur of invention" in his early paintings, but I'm not familiar enough with Rembrandt from the 1620's to make any judgment.   His 1631 Man With a Gold Chain ,at the Art Institute, hardly lacks those qualities.

But Huygens' comments about "Judas Repentant" mystify me.  The scene seems to be so much more about the hypocritical clerics than about   furious Judas, howling, praying for mercy . And, of course, Huygens had never seen a painting by   Protagenes, Appeles or Parrhasius , so it's a bit fanciful to mention them.  Enthusiasm for Rembrandt's narrative ability seems to have carried him away.

Jacob Van Campen, portrait of Constantijn Huygens and wife, 1635

Michiel Van Mierevelt, portrait of Constantijn Huygens, 1641

Here's two later portraits of Huygens  -- this man liked artists! (as well as himself) -- making it yet more difficult to pay attention to what Alpers has to say about him -- but she wants to direct our attention to his praise for  Francis Bacon and Cornelius Drebbel


Indeed, material objects that till now were classified among atoms since they far elude all human eyesight, present themselves so clearly to the observer's eye that when even completely inexperienced people look at things which they have never seen, they complain at first that they see nothing, but soon they cry out that they perceive marvelous objects with their eyes. For in fact this concerns a new theater of nature, another world, and if our revered predecessor De Gheyn had been allotted a longer life span, I believe he would have advanced to the point to which I have begun to push people (not against their will): namely, to portray the most minute objects and insects with a finer pencil, and then to compile these drawings into a book to be given the title of the New World, from which examples could be incised in metal.

Above is what Huygens wrote consequent to his experience of looking through Drebbel's microscope.

Jacob De Gheyn, sketch of witches and crab

In calling for a fine artist to record what he sees in a microscopic lens, Huygens assumes that picturing serves a descriptive function. It is not tied to received and hallowed knowledge but to new sights of a very individual kind.



Who else could Huygens have summoned to portray this "New World" if not someone we might call a "fine artist" ?

And I wonder how concerned Huygens would have been about the density and accuracy of details in this book he would like to see.

Was he more concerned with biological identification and analysis -- or with provoking the sense of wonder concerning Nature and praise for the God who made it ? 

Alpers does not tell us how he critiqued such depiction, if he ever did.

BTW , the example that Alpers shared, shown above - joining the naturalistic depiction of a crab with some fanciful witches and demons, is unique.  Elsewhere,   De Gheyn depicted such subjects separately -- and no one is sure why he put them here on the same page.  Was it just to save paper - as one might do in a book of random sketches ?




What is interesting to us as viewers of pictures is the immediate connection that Huygens makes between the new technology and knowledge captured in a picture.   This invocation of De Gheyn's skill is supported by a certain notion of  picturing and of sight: we draw what see and conversely to see  is to draw. There is an assumed identity between seeing and the art of drawing that is realized in the artist's image.

The Huygens quote does  not support any of  these assertions.  Huygens has not yet told us about whatever knowledge he might wish to gain from the images.  Perhaps he was only interested in the strangeness of the beauty -- as I have been when looking at magnified images of tiny creatures. (I'm certainly glad that professional biologists can use them -- but I just want to stare in wonder)

But even if Huygens had told us what kind of  knowledge he wanted captured - that would imply a notion of recognition rather than sight:   "we draw what we can recognize" --- rather than "we draw what we see"




Art, as Clifford Geertz has shown us, is part and parcel of a cultural system. Geertz argues that the kind of presence art has is not an absolute fact, vocable in some universally valid aesthetic terms, but is locally specific.


The definition of art in any society is never wholly intra-aesthetic, and indeed but rarely more than marginally so. The chief problem is presented by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force, in whatever form and in result of whatever skill it may come, is how to place it within the other modes of social activity, how to incorporate it into the texture of a particular pattern of life. And such placing, the giving to art objects a cultural significance, is always a local matter; what art is in classical China or classical Islam, what it is in the Pueblo southwest or highland New Guinea, is just not the same thing, no matter how universal the intrinsic qualities that actualize its emotional power (and I have no desire to deny them) may be. The variety that anthropologists have come to expect in the spirit beliefs, the classification systems, or the kinship structures of different people, and not just in their immediate shapes but in the way of being-in-the-world they both promote and exemplify, extends as well to their drummings, carvings, chants, and dances. .....(Clifford Geertz - as quoted by Alpers)




The full text of Geertz's 1976 essay, "Art as a Cultural System" (found online here ), argues on behalf of this definition, calling for an interpretative semiology of each period of art, and offering Michael Baxandall's "Painting and Experience in 15th C. Italy" as one example. Obviously, this book is Alpers' attempt to do the same thing for 17th C. Holland.



"If we observe that Piero della Francesca tends to a gauged sort of painting, Fra Angelico to a preached sort of painting, and Botticelli to a danced sort of painting, we are observing something not only about them but about their society".... Baxandall


OK -- but   we  have only some vague ideas about how 15th C. Florentines  preached and danced, while mercantile gauging would have been a worldwide phenomenon until the last century or so. Meanwhile, except for the deterioration of some pigments, we can see the unique qualities of Florentine paintings exactly as they left them.

And even if we could step into a time machine to carefully study preaching, dancing, and everything else in that period, aren't systems  of meaning unstable, and aren't artists notorious for being  incomprehensible to conventional minds ?


...exposing the structure of a work of art and accounting for its impact are not the same thing. What Nelson Goodman has called "the absurd and awkward myth of the insularity of aesthetic experience," the notion that the mechanics of art generate its meaning, cannot produce a science of signs or of anything else; only an empty virtuosity of verbal analysis. --- Geertz


Formal analysis is too reductive to account for the impact of a work of art.  But what is the importance of  conventional impact?    The "Harry Potter" series were among the best selling books (450 million copies)  in history.  But I still don't want to read them  and I don't care why they're so popular, unless someone can write about that in an articulate,  perceptive,  and learned way.


Geertz  proclaims that The chief problem is presented by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force, in whatever form and in result of whatever skill it may come, is how to place it within the other modes of social activity.

..... but aesthetic force seems to have had a haphazard connection to social activity.  Sometimes (Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel) it's been at the very center of institutional life -- but other times (Van Gogh) it's been created at the margins of society.

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Getting back to Huygens, Alpers offers another quote to exemplify his interest in new natural knowledge, and the authority of the visual (of new things seen) over the textual (of old ideas written):

Nothing can compel us to honor more fully the infinite wisdom and power of God the Creator unless, satiated with the wonders of nature that up till now have been obvious to everyone-for usually our astonishment cools as we grow familiar with nature through frequent contact-we are led into this second treasure-house of nature, and in the most minute and disdained of creatures meet with the same careful labor of the Great Architect, everywhere an equally indescribable majesty.


But doesn't this show an interest in worship  more than science?

Jan De Bray, Self portrait with wife as Ulysses and Penelope, 1668

Huygens was also fascinated by the camera obscura, and Drebbel wrote about using it to project the images of various costumes onto people.   Alpers then asserts that "By contrast, Dutch pictures avoid such a theatrical presentation in the interest of embracing the world described."
To make this argument, she refers to some contemporary Dutch portrait painting, like the above, where the subjects are shown in historic costume.


But this looks rather theatrical to me - even if it's not convincing as a scene from Homer.

Jan De Bray, self portrait with family as Anthony and Cleopatra, 1669

This is a curious - and rather awkward painting --  depicting the artist's deceased wife and children.  But does it really reflect an interest in the camera obscura or "embracing the world described" ?

Again, the characters seem to be play acting a famous scene rather than seriously performing it.

Rembrandt,"The Jewish Bride", 1667

It is Rembrandt, unique in this way as in so many others, whose mysterious and probing portraits redeem the genre. A Rembrandt work of this type often poses the unanswerable question as to whether we have a portrait or a historical work before our eyes.


Rembrandt certainly feels profound next to De Bray -- but we're digressing even further, aren't we ?

 

Rembrandt,"Saskia as Flora", 1634

Rembrandt, Flora, 1650's

A comparison of his awkward [early] Saskia as Flora with the splendid [late] Hendrijcke as Flora suggests that even Rembrandt is not always successful in this.


Alpers continues to digress  -- but who can blame her for showing and mentioning these paintings ?   The Met's "Flora" is one of my favorite paintings of all time.  I stared enraptured by it when I was 15 -- and still do so today.


And though I've never seen the earlier version in person -- yes, it does seem that in 1634 he was playing around with fabrics and costumes -- while in the 1650's he was being profoundly dramatic.

Rembrandt - self portrait as beggar,1630

 

Rembrandt, Self Portrait, 1658 (Frick)

If we follow Rembrandt from his early, etched self-portrait as the beggar seated on a mound, in which he dresses himself in rags, to the royal demeanor that he takes on in the Frick Self-Portrait, we are surely witnessing Drebbel's magic lantern rather than Huygens's world described"


It's delightful to contemplate and compare these two images -- but Rembrandt was as much a beggar in 1630 as he was a king in 1658, so I don't see how one is any more play-acting than the other.

 Paulus Potter, The Young Bull, 1647

More on topic is Alpers' discussion of the above painting.

The tiny steeple in the distance, and the tiny flies in the foreground,  are examples of the relative sizes of great and small, a topic which Huygens raised in his discussion of microscopes and telescopes.   When using these instruments to examine the universe, man is no longer the measure (as Alberti asserts in a quote provided), and apparently Huygens was excited by the open-ended world to be discovered.

There seems no better reason for that steeple in the background - but then, I don't sense a good reason for this painting as a whole - though I can see how a farmer might appreciate it.   It might well win a ribbon at a state fair.

I had a friend in college who grew up on a dairy farm near Washington Court House,  Ohio.  He loved his cows, and I'm sure he would have liked this painting.

The painting seems to say "this is how my world looks" -- with no further discussion inspired or required.  Now I understand Reynolds' complaint about Dutch painting - though I might apply it more selectively.

 

Mark Tansey, "Innocent Eye Test",  1981

BTW - Potter's  painting reappeared 3 centuries later in this monumental monochrome canvas now hanging in the Met, where  I saw it last June.  Apparently it's reference to art theory and history has qualified it as important conceptual art.  But visually, it feels just as aesthetically dead as the original - even if it's been painted for art critics instead of farmers.

Paul Potter, 1647

As it turns out, Potter painted another, much smaller depiction of a barnyard in the same year - and this one is in Chicago, so I got to see it.

I wouldn't call it a great painting... but it does have its charms.

 

Philips Koninck, Landscape with Hawking Party, date unknown

Alpers offers several other examples of this "characteristic feature" of Dutch painting.

Abraham Van Beyeren, Still Life with Silver Wine Jug, 1660-1666

 

The curious image of the artist is often reflected in miniature on the surface of a wine jug

 

Jan Van Eyck, Virgin and Child with Canon Van Der Paele (detail), 1436

Equating through juxtaposition of near and far, or small and large, had occupied northern painters since at least Jan Van Eyck.  He had depicted himself in miniature reflected in his works

.. and had juxtaposed the hands of Chancellor Rolin against the towers of a distant town



Did artists in the north ever, one wonders,  posit any fixed measure or proportion?

It is this question that forms the basis of the famous complaint against northern art attributed to Michelangelo. It is the final sentence of this passage that concerns us:



In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness or such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skillful choice or boldness, and, finally, without substance or vigor.


One more thing to note about the above paintings:  everything, both near and far, great and small, is in sharp focus.  And nothing is washed out by brightness in the areas of light --- or by darkness in the areas of shadow.

 These paintings are about what's there -- rather than about how the eye sees them or light reveals them.

 

Michiel Van Mierevelt

Alpers tells us that Huygens singled out Van Mierevelt as his favorite portrait painter.

As you may recall, Huygens hired him to paint his portrait in 1641.

Apparently, he considered his work to be the most "lifelike".   But was he more interested in personality or details of features and textures ?

Similarly, he advocated the practice of drawing.  But was he more interested in an accurate record of details or in whatever lyrical or expressive qualities may compose them?



But perhaps because of the theoretical weight given internationally to disegno (the conceptual role of drawing in the invention of images), the craft and social utility of tekening (the Dutch word for drawing)has not been defined. There is much evidence from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that art served as a pictorial record or description.


Does this evidence include any critiques of drawing ?  Were they held accountable for factual details, or qualities of composition or expression -- or all of the above ?

Without such evidence, the following conclusion seems problematic:



The pursuit of natural knowledge in the seventeenth century provides a model for the consideration of both craft and high art. Here the relationship between craft and theory is a recognized problem. Let us propose that the empirically based pursuit of natural knowledge, for which Huygens opts, contrasts with the classical, mathematically based studies, even as the craft concerns of Dutch artists do with the aims and ideals of high art.


Huygens seems to have a  tangential relationship to both science and art - based more on curiosity than commitment.  It has not yet been shown to me that Huygens opted for "the empirically based pursuit of natural knowledge". It was just something he admired - as he did the paintings of Rembrandt, Lievens, Mierevelt etc.

And remember-- diplomacy was his vocation -- not avocation (as with Rubens). It was his job to impress important people with up-to-date learning and taste.



The social history of the Dutch artist has yet to be written. But to the extent that we acknowledge art as a practical craft, we must reconsider our notion of the occupation of the artist as well as of his product. The advantage of drawing an analogy between the artist and the experimenter in natural knowledge is that it encourages us to focus anew on what went into the making of Dutch images: absence of any learned discourse and no connection to any institution engaged in it. The use of traditional skills; a renewed sense of purpose and delight in discovery.

 

Pieter Withoos (1654-1693)

Typically, there is also a sense of delight -- a sense of beauty - in Dutch drawings of flora and fauna from that period.  It took me about 4 seconds to Google  the above example.


Biological illustration does not have to look this good -- and, by the way, it won't look this good unless the artist has intended it -- and probably been guided by a teacher.

Utamaro, 1788

Here is another natural and  beautiful insect - from a culture that then had little enthusiasm for empirical science.




Didn't northern viewers find it easier to trust to what was presented to their eyes in the lens, because they were accustomed to pictures being a detailed record of the world seen? Given the extraordinary articulateness and persistence of the pictorial tradition in the north-a tradition that neither the cultural movement of the Renaissance nor the crisis over religious confession managed to undo-one is hard put to assign precedence in these matters. The cultural space that images can be said to occupy in Huygens's world and writing raises but does not answer such questions.




Some of Huygens' commentary about art was quoted at the beginning of this post -- but not by Alpers.     And there's  more that could have been studied -  Huygens liked to write about art.  But Alpers has limited her discussion to his interest in what can be seen through a microscope or camera obscura.   Alpers has barely begun to examine  the "cultural space that images occupy in Huygens' world"

Her comment about the persistence of the Dutch pictorial tradition from the 15th to the 17th centuries is an interesting one. When and why did it end ? But not much has been said, yet, about what characterizes  that tradition.

But like Huygens, and myself, Alpers likes to look at and discuss specific paintings.  So this book is fascinating, despite the inadequacy of its arguments.  The digressions are the best part.

Alpers - Introduction

Aelbert Cuyp, "Herdsman with Cows", 1645

Until recently it was the descriptive aspects of Dutch art that held the attention of viewers. For better or for worse, it was as a description of Holland and Dutch life that writers before the twentieth century saw and judged seventeenth—century Dutch art. Sir Joshua Reynolds, an antagonist, and Eugene Fromentin, an enthusiast, met in their agreement that the Dutch produced a portrait of themselves and their country—its cows, landscape, clouds, towns, churches, rich and poor households, its food and drink. The issue of what one could say, how one could convey the nature of such a descriptive art was felt to be a pressing one. Reynolds could only come up with an annotated list of Dutch artists and subjects in his journey to Flanders and Holland of 1781. He acknowledges that it provides “barren entertainment” in contrast to the lengthy analysis he can give of Flemish art. Here are some excerpts from the list:

Cattle and a shepherd, by Albert Cuyp, the best I ever saw of him; and the figure is likewise better than usual: but the employment which he has given the shepherd in his solitude is not very poetical: it must, however, be allowed to be truth and nature; he is catching fleas or something worse.


I couldn't find any Cuyp images with a solitary shepherd scratching himself, but I'm guessing that Reynolds would not have found this one any more "poetical" -- though it feels quite dream-like to me.

Jan van der Heyden and Adriaen van de Velde.

View of Düsseldorf with the church of St. Andrew, 1667

A View of a church by Vander Heyden, his best; two black friars going up steps. Notwithstanding this picture is finished as usual very minutely, he has not forgot to preserve, at the same time, a great breadth of light. His pictures have very much the effect of nature, seen in a camera obscura.


The above image is as close as I could come to  two black friars going up steps.

I've never looked at outdoor scenes projected upon a camera obscura, but if it resembles the view finder of a camera, it seems that the above painting is different, in that it manages to show details in  areas of bright sky as well as  shadow, while still producing that  kind of  luminous glow specific to Dutch painting of that era.

 Gerard Ter Bosch,  "Suitor's Visit", 1658

Two fine pictures by Terburg, the white satin remarkably well painted. He seldom failed to introduce a piece of white satin in his pictures.


Terburg is now called Gerard Ter Borch the Younger (1617-1681). Above is an example of a picture that includes a piece of white satin.

Was Reynolds looking at a figurative scene similar to above ?  There is plenty of narrative content to the above visit to a brothel - but as a painter, perhaps Reynolds would only have  been fascinated by the sheen of the satin.

 JanWeenix, Still Life with Swan and Game, 1685

Dead swans by Weenix, as fine as possible.  I suppose we did not see less than 20 pictures of dead swans by this painter.

This area of detail seems to far surpass the painting as a whole.




These quotes are now found in "The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds", which may be downloaded here

Where we may also find his report concerning the leading Flemish painter, Rubens:

Rubens, Great Last Judgment

There is nothing very interesting in this picture, perhaps there is a too great quantity of flesh. Three naked women and a naked man join together to make the great mass of light in the picture. One of the women who is looking out of the picture, has for that reason the appearance of a portrait, and is said to be one of Rubens' wives; and a figure rising out of the grave in the foreground is said to be his own portrait, but certainly neither of these suppositions is well founded.

Nor might  those suppositions be included in a serious discussion of the narrative or formal aspects of this painting.  Reynolds is chatting away like a tour guide.

The next large picture is Michel combating the fallen angels - Michel is but an ungraceful figure. His red mantle has but a heavy appearance.  It seems as if it were only laid in flat to be afterwords finished.  The picture has certainly suffered by cleaning.  There wants upon the whole a solidity of effect.





All of these Rubens paintings are now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum which must be rather restrictive about the proliferation of images since no good big ones are yet to be found on the internet -- and their website does not mention this painting at all.  Yet here it is -- in a snapshot of the gallery shown below:

Rubens, Small Last Judgment

The next is called the small Last Judgment.  As in the large picture the blessed are the the most conspicuous. Here the damned make in a manner the subject of the composition; the blessed are faintly represented at a distance in the upper part of the picture, near Christ and the Virgin Mary. This picture is far superior to the large one on the same subject in every respect.


There is no less "quantity of naked flesh" in this version than in the "Great Last Judgment" -- but the twisting of the entire design is far more energetic.

Rubens,  Fall of the Damned

 But there is another picture of the Fallen Angels, of the same size as this, which even exceeds it. It is impossible to form an adequate idea of the powers of Rubens without having seen this picture: he seems here to have given a loose to the most capricious imagination in the attitudes and invention of his fallen angels. who arc tumbling one over the other, with "hideous ruin and combustion, down to the bottomless perdition"

If we consider the fruitfulness of invention which is discovered in this work, or the skill which is shown in composing such an infinite number of figures. or the art of the distribution of the light and shadow, the freedom of hand, the facility with which it seems to be performed. and what is still more extraordinary, the correctness and admirable taste of drawing of figures fore·shortened, in attitudes the most difficult
to execute, we must pronounce this picture to be one of the greatest efforts of genius that ever the art has produced.

Spoken as the president of the Royal Academy, Reynolds' first priority seems to be technical accomplishment.  (Though I far prefer Rubens'  drawings, since they come from his own hand.  The drawing in these paintings appears quite uneven.)

Alpers must have been referring to some other Reynolds' commentary about Flemish aritsts -- because these comments about Rubens hardly qualify as "lengthy analysis"

The account which has now been given of the Dutch pictures is, I confess, more barren of entertainment, than I expected. One would wish to be able to convey to the reader some idea of that excellence, the sight of which has afforded so much pleasure: but as their merit often consists in the truth of representation alone, whatever praise they deserve, whatever pleasure they give when under the eye, they make but a poor figure in description. It is to the eye only that the works of this school are addressed; it is not therefore to be wondered at, that what was intended solely for the gratification of one sense, succeeds but ill, when applied to another.



 It is hard for us, as heirs to the art of the nineteenth century, to get back to the frame of mind that made Reynolds disparage this descriptive art. We are after all convinced, as he was not, that a great painting can be made as Cezanne made it, for example, of two men playing cards, or a bowl of fruit and a bottle, or as Monet did of a patch of water lilies in a pond.


Yes - and it's the interior contradiction of Reynold's statement that is even harder for me to accept. One the one hand Reynolds tells us that these Dutch paintings "afforded so much pleasure" -- but on the other "their merit often consists in the truth of representation alone".  Surely he would have allowed that some representations (street maps, medical illustrations) may be judged true but still give no pleasure to the eye.

And I'm wondering what  "other sense" Reynolds had in mind.  It must be something to do with the viewer's ability to talk about the painting.  Verbal descriptions of Dutch painting could  be nothing more than "barren entertainment"  for him- and apparently Reynolds cultivated clever and  intellectual conversation in his circle of friends.

Three Ladies Adorning a Temple of Hymen, 1773

It might also be noted that Reynolds was the son of an Anglican clergyman and might not have had much  sympathy for the more Protestant world of the Dutch.  His practice, as a painter, was to portray the elegance of the English aristocracy - which was also  foreign to the world of Dutch painting.

Eugene Fromentin, 1847

But it is equally hard for us today to value Dutch art for the reasons given by a nineteenth-century enthusiast like Fromentin. In an often-quoted passage, Fromentin in 1876 argues, with reference to the 1609 truce with Spain and the founding of the new state, that ''Dutch painting was not and could not be anything but the portrait of Holland, its external image, faithful, exact, complete, life-like, without any adornment." He put the central issue succinctly at one point: "What motive had a Dutch painter in painting a picture? None.,


Alpers then introduces us to Eugene Fromentin, a French painter born about a hundred years later, who also considers 17th C. Dutch painting to be all about description.  But as you can see above, Fromentin may well have thought that he was doing the same thing.


We feel a loftiness and a goodness of heart, an affection for the true, a love for the real, that give their works a value the things do not seem to possess.

Above, Fromentin  begins to speculate on what the painting is offering besides "truth in representation"


We live in the picture, we walk about in it, we look into its depths, we are tempted to raise our heads to look at its sky.

Alpers asserts that the above quote suggest that "he was always on the verge of denying that which makes the art separate from, different from the life."

That is not a conclusion that I would draw - but Fromentin also wrote that Dutch painting is:


"an art which adapts itself to the nature of things, a knowledge that is forgotten in presence of special circumstances in life, nothing preconceived, nothing which precedes the simple, strong and sensitive observation of what is."


As Alpers reminds us, the art historians of our time are concerned with the elements of pictorial and narrative style that precede the "observation of what is"....and suggests that "there has been too great a price paid in visual experience in this current appeal to understanding verbal depths. Dutch art itself challenges such a view"
.... though it appears to me that all art challenges that view - as indeed, actual works of art challenge whatever can be said about them..   Which is why I would suggest that art talk is better the closer it holds to the specific rather than the general.  Unfortunately Fromentin's art commentary has not been translated into English, so I cannot find the original context for the above excerpts.

Veronese,"Wedding at Cana", 1562

The Italian attends only to the invariable, the great and general ideas which are fixed and inherent in universal Nature; the Dutch, on the contrary, to literal truth and a minute exactness in the detail, as I may say, of Nature, modified by accident. The attention to these petty peculiarities is the very cause of this naturalness so much admired in the Dutch picture, which , if we suppose it to be a beauty, is certainly of a lower order that ought to give place to a beauty of a superior kind, since one cannot be obtained but by departing from the other.... Reynolds



Curiuosly, Alpers does not share the above quote, which comes from the same book that she quoted earlier.

It leads right into her main theme:


 Since the institutionalization of art history as an academic discipline, the major analytic strategies by which we have been taught to look at and to interpret images-style as proposed by Wolfflin and iconography by Panofsky, were developed in reference to the Italian tradition.



 Following the lead of other dissenters that she lists (Alois Riegl, Otto Pacht, Lawrence Gowing, Michael Baxandall, and Michael Fried), she will abandon that doctrine and propose a different way to discuss a group of images:


 A major theme of this book is that central aspects of seventeenth-century Dutch art-and indeed of the northern tradition of which it is part-can best be understood as being an art of describing as distinguished from the narrative art of Italy

This distinction of narrative/descriptive is identical to Reynolds', but presumably she will not join him in judging the descriptive art to be of a "lower order"  (but since she is a professional art historian rather than the director of an art school, she is probably reticent to rate any art tradition above another)



In the seventeenth Century and again in the nineteenth some of the most innovative and accomplished artists in Europe - Caravaggio and Velasquez and Vermeer, and later Courbet and Manet - embrace an essentially descriptive pictorial mode.

 Caravaggio, "Crucifixion of St. Peter", 1600

Velasquez, 'Water Seller", 1618-1622

 Vermeer,"Woman with Scales", 1662

Manet, "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe", 1862

Caravaggio's "Crucifixion of St. Peter", and Velasquez "Water Seller" ,Vermeer's Woman with Scales, and Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe figures are suspended in action to be portrayed. The stilled or arrested quality of these works is a symptom of a certain tension between the narrative assumptions of the art and an attentiveness to descriptive presence. There seems to be an inverse proportion between attentive description and action: attention to the surface of the world described is achieved at the expense of the representation of narrative


It is not apparent to me that  all four of these paintings are examples of "an essentially descriptive pictorial mode"

But Zola did make a good argument about "The Luncheon on the Grass":

.... of the Painters, especially Édouard Manet, who is an analytic painter, do not have this preoccupation with the subject which torments the crowd above all; the subject, for them, is merely a pretext to paint, while for the crowd, the subject alone exists. Thus, assuredly, the nude woman of The Luncheon on the Grass is only there to furnish the artist the occasion to paint a bit of flesh."

Jan Van Eyck, "Annunciation" , 1434-1436

Jan van Eyck's eye operates as a microscope and as a telescope at the same time ... so that the beholder is compelled to oscillate between a position reasonably far from the picture and many positions very close to it .... However, such perfection had to be bought at a price. Neither a microscope nor a telescope is a good instrument with which to observe human emotion .... The emphasis is on quiet existence rather than action .. .. Measured by ordinary standards the world of the mature Jan van Eyck is static.

What Panofsky says of Van Eyck is quite true. But the "ordinary standards" that he calls on are none other than the expectations of narrative action created by Italian art.


As a final example, Alpers offers up Pankofsky's discussion of Van Eyck. (I don't know if he had any specific piece in mind .... I picked the Annunciation from the National Gallery because I'll be seeing it this Sunday)

Simone Martini, 'Annunciation', 1333

Is this Annunciation less static ?  The answer does not seem obvious.

It does seem that both paintings portray events in a world - a spiritual world - whose actions are far removed from flesh-and-blood existence.

But that is not the issue that Panofsky and Alpers were raising.



Although it might appear that painting by its very nature is descriptive-an art of space, not of time, with still life as its basic theme-it was essential to the Renaissance aesthetic that imitative skills were bound to narrative ends. The istoria, as Alberti wrote, will move the soul of the beholder when each man painted there clearly shows the movement of his soul. ..... Because of this point of view there is a long tradition of disparaging descriptive works. They have been considered either meaningless (since no text is narrated) or inferior by nature ..

Would not the same disparagement have been directed toward works which had a narrative - but that narrative was considered wrong or less important. ?



Time and again the hierarchy of mind over sense and of educated viewers over ignorant ones has been summoned to round out the argument for narration with a blast at an art that delights the eyes .


Isn't "art that delights the eye" a category that only sometimes overlaps with  an art of " literal truth and a minute exactness in the detail,"?

"Eye candy" is the current pejorative for that which seems untethered to an important idea.


Dutch pictures are rich and various in their observation of the world, dazzling in their display of craft, domestic and domesticating in their concerns. The portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and the presentation of daily life represent pleasures taken in a world full of pleasures: the pleasures of familial bonds, pleasures in possessions, pleasure in the towns, the churches, the land. In these images the seventeenth century appears to be one long Sunday, as one recent Dutch writer has put it, after the troubled times of the previous century. Dutch art offers a delight to the eyes and as such seems perhaps to place fewer demands on us than does the art of Italy.


The above qualities may also be found in contemporary photography.

But a painting can offer all that -- plus something else --- can't it ?

Vermeer, "Little Street", 1657

Presumably, the three women shown above were not intended to be characters in a story told elsewhere, so we are not required to know that story, analyze this interpretation, and compare it with others.

Alpers might then assert that  this painting is placing fewer demands on us than if there had been such a story.

But can't this, and any,  depiction of multiple human figures, demand some kind of explanation?  Who are these people ? What's going on here ? What kind of world are they living in ? Why is it important for us to see them ? Why is this scene so attractive? How does the artist feel about them ?  Does the absence of a known narrative make those questions any easier?

Perhaps this painting would not have provoked such questions from Alpers.   Indeed, most paintings with  multiple human figures do  not interest me enough to provoke any questions at all  from me.   The entire oeuvre of Thomas Kinkaide for example.  Curiosity is proportional to attraction -- at least for me -- and the same might be said about everyone except scientists - or art historians who think of themselves as cultural anthropologists.

From the point of view of its consumption, art as we think of it in our time in many respects began with Dutch art. Its societal role was not far from that of art today: a liquid investment like silver, tapestries, or other valuables, pictures were bought from artists' shops or on the open market as possessions and hung, one presumes, to fill space and to decorate domestic walls. We have few records of commissions and little evidence of buyers' demands. The problem faced by a modern viewer is how to make this art strange, how to see what is special about an art with which we feel so at home, whose pleasures seem so obvious. 


Why should we try to make something "strange" ? To what extent is that possible ?  And how important are financial and decorative considerations ?

17th C. Dutch Art-- indeed all historical art -- already appears quite strange to me --i.e. the art of each period  is identifiable as such -- and feels quite distant from 21st Century America.




Flemish painting ... will ... please the devout better than any painting of Italy. It will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense of true harmony. In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness or such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skillful choice or boldness and, finally, without substance or vigour.......It is practically only the work done in Italy we can call true painting, and that is why we call good painting Italian.



To further establish the distance between northern European and Italian art, we're given this quote from Francisco de Holanda, a Portuguese artist and writer who met Michelangelo and attributed the above judgment to him.


Francisco/Michelangelo  may have faulted the northerners for "external exactness", but no direct reference is made to narrative.   It's mostly about formal qualities like symmetry, proportion, vigour, substance, harmony, and boldness.

Hugo Van Der Goes, Portinari altarpiece, 1475

Surely Francisco and Michelangelo were familiar with the Portinari altarpiece which then hung in a chapel in Florence.  Did they really think that it would only appeal to very young and very old women ?  Yikes!

Durer, "Great Piece of Turf" (detail), 1503

The Italian bias is still evident today in the writings of those art historians who are anxious to demonstrate that-Dutch art is like Italian, that it too had its classical moment, produced its significant history paintings, that it too signified. Art history has witnessed powerful attempts to rework northern art in the image of the south. I think this can fairly be said to be part of the thrust of Panofsky's studies. He ranked the southern aspirations of Durer over his northern heritage: in Panofsky's account the Durer who depicted the nude and was in intrigued with perspective is favored over the descriptive artist of the Great Piece of Turf. But even Durer's exercises in the nude and his architectural settings which are often devious in their complexity, hardly reveal a southern sense of picture making.

Giovanni Bellini, "Ecstasy of St. Francis", 1480 (detail)

Would  Panofsky  have considered the botanical details in the above somehow less descriptive than the plants in "The Great Piece of Turf" ?

Durer, "Fall of Man", 1504 (detail)

Titian, 'Fall of Man", 1550

Titian also seems no less interested in botanical detail - and, curiously enough, his human figures seem more natural, and less artificially constructed than the "Adam" in Durer's version.

Chen Wu, Orchid (detail), 1832 

 The botanical concerns of Chinese artists might also be considered.  The notion of "description" is rather tangential to their Taoist philosophy of natural forces, internal and external, but the resulting images seem quite similar.




Many students of Dutch art today view the notion of Dutch realism itself as the invention of the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the rediscovery of the relationship of a number of motifs in Dutch paintings to prints affixed with mottoes and texts in the popular emblem books of the time, iconographers have concluded that Dutch realism is only an apparent or schijn realism. ................... as I shall argue, northern images do not disguise meaning or hide it beneath the surface but rather show that meaning by its very nature is lodged in what the eye can take in however deceptive that might be.


What are the benefits  of speculation concerning the un-articulated thoughts of an  artworld ?  Especially one that vanished over 300 years ago.

It's so difficult  to keep historic notions distinct from one's own.  In  the above quote, Alpers moves seamlessly from historic to contemporary.

In the following paragraph, she moves in the opposite direction - from contemporary to historic:


How then are we to look at Dutch art? My answer has been to view it circumstantially. This has become a familiar strategy in the study of art and literature. By appealing to circumstances, I mean not only to see art as a social manifestation but also to gain access to images through a consideration of their place, role, and presence in the broader culture. I begin with the example of the life and some of the works of Constantine Huygens, secretary to the stadholder, a voluminous writer and correspondent and a leading cultural fi gure in the Netherlands. His early discovery of Rembrandt and his engagement with the arts have long been of interest to historians of art and of literature.


It  would be more direct to access an historic culture through its images, rather than the other way around - but that would be outside the interpretive function of academic art history.


The distinction between this seventeenth Century emphasis on seeing and representation and the Renaissance emphasis on reading and interpretation has been illuminated recently for us in the writing of Michel Foucault.


It's helpful for this introduction to identify the author's allegiance to postmodern theory -- but since I don't share it, the above distinction remains highly speculative to me - except regarding the world of contemporary art which does privilege reading and interpretation above  visual qualities.




Aligning herself with the notion of "visual culture" and "period eye", Alpers then offers several characteristics of that culture in 17th C. Netherlands:

*The Dutch present their pictures as describing the world seen rather than a imitations of significant human actions.

*Already established pictorial and craft traditions, broadly reinforced by the new experimental science and technology, confirmed pictures as the way to new and certain knowledge of the world.

*A number of characteristics of the images seem to depend on the frequent absence of a positioned viewer, as if the world came first

* a formidable sense of the picture as a surface (like a mirror or a map, but not a window) on which words along with objects can be replicated or inscribed

*an insistence on the craft of representation (extravagantly displayed by a Kalf who repeatedly recrafts in paint the porcelain, silver, or glass· of the craftsman along side the lemons of Nature herself).

All of which might apply to many Dutch painters, especially to the landscapists -- but none of which applies to Rembrandt. Was he such a total anomaly ? Didn't any other Dutch painters portray religious dramas ?

Jan Steen,

"Amnon and Tamar", 1661-1670.

And though a concept of "visual culture" seems relevant to our commercial advertising  driven contemporary world, doesn't any analysis of the intellectual life of 17th C. Holland need to address its Christian faith ?



It is, finally, hard to trace stylistic development, as we are trained to call it, in the work of Dutch artists. Even the most naive viewer can see much continuity in Northern art from Van Eyck to Vermeer, and I shall often look-back from the seventeenth century to similar phenomena in earlier northern works. But no history on the developmental model of Vasari has ever been written, nor do I think it could be. This is because the art did not constitute itself as a progressive tradition. It did not make a history in the sense that art did in Italy. For art to have a history in this Italian sense is the exception, not the rule. Most artistic traditions mark what persists and is sustaining, not what is changing, in culture.

There seems, at least to me, a similar development towards naturalism in both the Van Eyck-Vermeer and Giotto-Titian comparisons shown above.

In the  beginning, it seemed as if Vasari measured progress by  truth to nature: "That very obligation  which the craftsmen of painting owe to nature ... should be owed, in my belief, to Giotto"

But when he got to  Titian, it wasn't very clear just what that artist was supposedly doing so  well.  He seems less like an historian of the development of ideas -- and more like a chronicler of famous people.




In Holland the visual culture was central to the life of the society. One might say that the eye was a central means of self-representation and visual experience a central mode of self-consciousness.....Having said so much about what the book will include, I should perhaps mention what it will not. On the subject of religion this book does not,directly, have much to say. 




 Alpers then suggests that Dutch visual culture, from Van Eyck to Vermeer, did not reflect the change in religious conviction of the Protestant Reformation -- and "To the argument that secular subject matter and moral emblematic meanings speak to Calvinist influence, one must counter that the very centrality of and trust to images seems to go against the most basic Calvinist tenet-trust in the Word. Such a view is surely supported by the contrasting absence of images in Presbyterian Scotland or Calvinist New England."   "


Which is a point well taken.

Were the Dutch more interested in what artists were showing than in what preachers were preaching?

God bless them!

But their story should not omit the previous hundred years of political/religious conflict with the Hapsburgs.

Pieter Saenredum, 1660

We sorely need a social history of Dutch religion (and Dutch society). There one would have to consider such things as the extraordinary lack of religious prejudice or aggression in Holland ... Dutchmen seem to have suffered much less than other Europeans from a sense of the threat posed by conflicting views of society or of God. A recent study locates this right in the art by pointing to the ecumenical.nature of Saenredam's church portraits: he adjusts arches so as to blend different architectural styles and thus efface historical and confessional differences.


Saenredum has been mentioned several times in previous  books that I've read, and this is the first  I've heard about the 'blending'  That's fascinating.


Toleration has its practical side. Like the merchants' insistence on trading with the enemy during the continuing conflict with Spain, it insures that business will continue as usual


Toleration is  one thing that can be said for a social order that places commerce over everything else.  That's been the U.S.A. as well.  The downside is that war, slavery, prostitution, drugs, and toxic food can  be good for somebody's business.






Father Cats is more distinctive as a taxonomist of social behavior than as the dogmatic moralist he is often taken to be. Dutch art is involved with this view. Pictures document or represent behavior. They are descriptive rather than prescriptive. A constant pressure is felt to make distinctions, to portray each thing-be it a person, a flower, or a type of behavior-so as to make it known. But along with this anxiety to define there is an ease with boundaries. Dutch art is notoriously subject to confusion with life. And those cultural and societal boundaries so basic to the definition of the urban West that mark off the city from the country, or the whore from the wife, can be curiously blurred.


Notions of  'descriptive' cannot be value free -- because a description advocates that some particular kind of thing is important enough to notice -- and in the case of many Dutch paintings, make exceptionally beautiful.   Accompanying prescriptions can be tighter or looser, but descriptions still apply pressure on what to seek or avoid.




This book is not intended as a survey of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Certain artists and certain types of images will get more attention than others, some will receive little or no comment at all. I have concentrated on those artists and works that seem to me to show most clearly certain things that are basic to Dutch art. While I think that the emphasis on the art of describing is not of exclusive importance, it is essential to an understanding of Dutch art.


 I'd prefer to say that 17th C. Dutch painting is one among many  (including Italian) painterly arts of describing.   But we'll see how she elaborates "the art of describing" -- and I'm especially looking forward to how she will show that how Vermeer "reflected deeply on it" while Rembrandt was "in conflict with it"