This is the Epilogue and Appendix 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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EPILOGUE : REMBRANDT AND VERMEER
My account of Dutch art in the seventeenth century has concentrated on defining the distinctive system of conventions, governing metaphors, intellectual assumptions, and cultural practices in which that art was grounded. Though I have not attempted to deal with all the artists considered to be major, nor with all the genres considered essential, the success of my effort must lie in what it can help us to see throughout the range of the art. Any interpretation of Dutch art that makes such claims should, I think, be able to offer a persuasive account of the works of the two greatest Dutch artists of the time, Rembrandt and Vermeer. That the issues raised here should have made a difference to their art is in turn some confirmation of the interpretation. Rembrandt and Vermeer are polar opposites in this respect: Rembrandt rejects the notion of knowledge and of human experience that dominates Dutch images, while Vermeer makes a meditation on its nature the center of his work. Thus if Rembrandt's art provides a critique of the art of describing from without, the art of Vermeer takes its measure from within.
This passage echoes what Alpers wrote at the end of her introduction:
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.
To which I then replied:
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"
Does Alpers' interpretation of Dutch art offer a persuasive account of the works of Rembrandt and Vermeer? And why is that an important question?
Regarding the first question:
Christianity is the glaring omission in this survey of cultural practices. Please note that I am only a Christian when looking at a painting that convincingly reflects one or another variants. I believe in paintings - not churches, ministers, or creeds. Alpers was writing from and for the modern, secular, academic establishment - yet still she might have made some effort to recognize that the Christian preaching of that era was at least as important to Dutch artists and their viewership as Kepler, Huygens, or Comenius.
In the introduction, Alpers proposed that this period of Dutch history was something like a holiday after a century of religious wars. Artists and viewers just wanted look around and enjoy the world -- smell the roses as it were. But as Sarnredum shows us, they did not abandon their churches - and as Rembrandt shows us, they did not abandon their faith. What one believes about human destiny cannot be separated from how one describes the world - even if it's only a bird, a tree, or a peeled lemon. It appears to me that they looked for the quiet, meditative beauty of the divine in whatever was created - but in a more domestic, sensual way than the Spanish painters of that time.
Ralph Goings, River Valley Suite, 1976
Here is a painting from a different era.
It is also highly descriptive of the world as seen
It is well organized but not especially delightful, profound, or sensual.
Alpers does not account for how
17th C. Dutch description was any different.
Juan Sanchez Cotan, c. 1600
Here is a highly descriptive painting,
that also came from a world that cultivated Christian piety -
but of a very different variety.
(eventually, the artist would take religious vows
and only paint religious themes)
Regarding the second question:
Why must we consider Rembrandt and Vermeer to be the most important Dutch artists of their time?
Both died broke: Rembrandt because he went out of fashion; Vermeer, who never had been fashionable, could not survive an economic downturn. Most of Vermeer's paintings were not attributed to him for another two hundred years.
How can an account of the works of Rembrandt or Vermeer be persuasive without a persuasive explanation of why they are important ? (excluding, of course, the monetary value or conventional reputation of their work). It's not surprising that Alpers did not attempt that - art historians are no longer expected to make judgments. But it remains a gaping hole in the argument of this book - and it becomes especially noticeable now, as the epilogue focuses on just two artists. If some annoying teenage iconoclast were to assert that they are only "great" because the European upper classes needed - and still need - to elevate some/any white male to validate their own authority and privilege --- what counter argument could Alpers make?
I shall do no more here by way of an epilogue than outline some of those elements in the works of Rembrandt and Vermeer that are illuminated by this way of understanding them. The place that Vermeer's works have had in this book leaves no doubt about what I take to be their exemplary role in the definition of the art of describing. What might not be clear, and what I want to conclude with, is the manner in which Vermeer refined and defined this sense of image-making and of knowledge. Let me introduce this point by offering a correction to the viewing of his Art of Painting I presented in chapter 4. It is undeniable that the great map of the Netherlands, which is claimed by Vermeer to be of his own making, presents and makes central a mapping mode of picturing. And Vermeer further confirms the relationship between picture-maker and maker of maps in his two paintings of professional men, the Astronomer and the Geographer. However, while it is like a map, it would be wrong to conclude that Vermeer shows that a picture is a map and hence that he is really a cartographer. An obvious resistance to this conclusion is provided by the fact that the theme of the great majority of his paintings is far from a mapmaker's concerns.
I wrote pretty much the same thing back when Chapter Four was under discussion:
the map only serves a decorative function. It might just as well be a carpet, like the one in the foreground, for all it can tell us about the Netherlands. The creases and shadows are more important than any reference to geography. It's far less about the world, than about how the artist enjoys re-creating it
Such resistance being obvious, as she now admits,
why didn't she go back and rewrite Chapter 4?
Vermeer effectively determines the woman observed, woman as the object of male attention, to be the painter's subject. In a sense there is nothing so astonishing about this. What was true in Italy is given a different life in the domestic context of Dutch art. But the rigor with which Vermeer defines the theme is singular. The total absence of children in his works, for example, is astonishing when his fellow painters presumed children to be an essential part of a woman's domestic sphere-an essential sign of her virtue one might say. In isolating woman observed as his subject, Vermeer thematizes something essential about the nature of such a descriptive art.
No other examples of the rigorous description of a woman observed
other than the absence of children?
And Vermeer doesn't always isolate his feminine subject:
"Art of Painting", "The Music Lesson", "Girl Interrupted", "The Wine Glass, "The Procuress". "The Little Street"
To show what I mean, let us look once more at the passage attributed by Francisco de Holanda to Michelangelo and give special attention to its reference to women:
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 aiso 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 scuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, and 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 please some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skilful choice or boldness and, finally, without substance or vigour. '
Northern art, it is argued here, is an art for women because it is concerned to represent everything in nature exactly and unselectively. It thus lacks all reason and proportion. The assumption, clearly, is that this contrasts with Italian art, which is for men because it is reasoned and proportioned. But why cite women? As a gloss we can tum to a fifteenth-century Italian handbook on painting written by Cennino Cennini:
Before going any farther I will give you the exact proportion of a man. Those of a woman I will disregard for she does not have any set proportion.. I will not tell you about irrational animals because you will never discover any system of proportion in them. Copy them and draw as much as you can from nature.
To say an art is for women is to reiterate that it displays not measure or order, but rather a flood of observed, unmediated details drawn from nature. The lack of female order or proportion in a moral sense .is a familiar sentiment from this time. What is suggested by de Holanda is its analogue in a particular mode of art - an art that is not like ideal, beautiful women, but like ordinary immeasurable ones.
It is fitting, given such a view, that Vermeer presents the ungraspable nature of the world seen and poses the basic problem of a descriptive art in the form of repeated images of women. How do we relate to the presence of the prior world seen? In his depiction of women, Vermeer thematizes this problem and turns it to extraordinary psychological account. For all their presence, Vermeer's women are a world apart, inviolate, self-contained, but, more significantly, self-possessed. This is why they are freed even of children.
The camera may be accused of presenting "a flood of observed, unmediated details drawn from nature" -- but not Vermeer. At least, not if the viewer can sense that unique, Vermeer-like order
that makes paintings get attributed to him.
In a mature work such as the Amsterdam Woman Reading a Letter, the quality of the paint and the quality of the rendering engage human implications that are rare in Dutch art. Vermeer recognizes the world present in these women as something that is other than himself and with a kind of passionate detachment he lets it, through them, be.
"Passionate detachment" seems like a good way to characterize many of Vermeer's paintings. I wish Alpers had written a chapter about it - while searching for where it appeared - or was absent - from the work of other Dutch paintings of that time. I also wish she could notice qualities other than "quality of the paint and the quality of the rendering". So much more is involved in creating a compelling pictorial space.
Lawrence Gowing in his fine study of Vermeer has put the central quality of his art in the following way : Vermeer stands outside our convention [of art, he means, for which we can read of Italian art] because he cannot share its great sustaining fantasy, the illusion that the power of style over life is real. However an artist love the world, however seize on it, in truth he can never make it his own. Whatever bold show his eye may make of subduing and devouring, the real forms of life remain untouched.,
Vermeer, writes Gowing - voicing what has been a major theme of this book - rejects the claims on which the dominant mode of Western art is based. Durer's representation of the draftsman at work can serve to remind us of those claims. And in the end Vermeer's art did give way to the world: the lozenge-like brushstrokes that patch together his last works signal the rift between the image and the world it describes that Dutch art had almost managed to hide.
If I understand what Gowing/Alpers are saying: the Italian artists adapted what they observed to the demands and intentions of a style -- while Vermeer adapted his style to what he had objectively observed and was trying to describe. For example: the woman as she is to herself, rather than as she appears to some male viewer. (the artist in the Durer image is positioned to leap over table and between the knees of the woman he is drawing) Then, Alpers says that the late works of Vermeer "signal the rift between the image and the world"
Perhaps if Alpers had offered some examples of "lozenge like brushstrokes" this passage would make more sense. As written, however, it does seem that Alpers is unaware of the demands that a certain style has made on all of Vermeer's work, early to late. Perhaps she really cannot see how different his paintings are from photographs.
A reader might well ask, what then do you do with Rembrandt? Surely his art, which deserts the surface of things in this world to plumb human depths, cannot be accounted for as an art of describing? Certainly not. As I suggested in the first chapter while discussing the camera obscura and the portrait histoire, Rembrandt's art does not fit this model. As we have seen in the juxtaposition of his Bathsheba with the letter paintings of the other Dutch, or in his representation of conversation, our attention to this dominant pictorial mode can help us to see Rembrandt's works precisely by suggesting the depth of his estrangement from it. The idiosyncratic appearance and curious power of his images are, I think, bound up with his profound reaction to the native tradition. The question is not, as it used to be put, was Rembrandt or was he not a representative Dutch artist, but rather how or in what respects was he such? With the rise in interest in Dutch history painting, the current fashion is to see Rembrandt as fitting comfortably into the native scene. In many ways I, on the contrary, tend to agree with Kenneth Clark's remark about the surprising nature of Rembrandt's power given the artistic world into which he was born. But I think that Lord Clark's Italian solution to the problem - his suggestion that it was the deep affection for Italian art that proved the making of Rembrandt- is at best a partial truth. Fully as important as his attraction for Italy was his engagement with, and to my mind his deep ambivalence toward, his own tradition. Rembrandt's idiosyncrasy is that he not only turned away from the Dutch art of describing, but also from the Italian notion of narrative painting.
Rembrandt is such a puzzle - not only because he differs from his predecessors - but also because he stands so far apart from the artists who came after him. Lord Clark wrote an entire book that connects him to the Italians - and perhaps, for example, Titian's Flora, then in Amsterdam, inspired Rembrandt to paint his wife holding flowers.
Titian, Flora, 1515
Rembrandt, Flora, 1634
Yet so much is different - despite the similar theme. Titian's figure floats - Rembrandt's sinks. Titian's woman is a timeless, classic ideal - Rembrandt's woman feels like a real woman, here and now.
It seems a bit absurd to suggest that an artist would "plumb human depths" - and do so quite effectively - just in order to defy current trends. To account for Rembrandt, we might better study each painting in chronological order to see how he developed. He was an exceptional painter by 1631 -- but he was far beyond that twenty years later. Is it possible that his own imagination, work ethic, intelligence, and character were primarily responsible for his distinctive style of painting?
Saul and David, 1631
Saul and David, 1651
We might start with the characteristic technique, the handling of paint in Rembrandt's mature works. Rembrandt resolutely refuses to produce the transparent mirror of the world of the Dutch fijnschilderkunst. The thick surfaces of paint that we find in mature works such as the Jewish Bride , the Prodigal Son, or the Oath of Julius Civilis obfuscate the world seen while offering a rare entry into invisible human depths. At one level what concerns Rembrandt is a matter of craft. In his later drawings and etchings, as in his paintings, Rembrandt rejects the established practice of good craftmanship appropriate to each medium: in his paintings, figure and ground are bound together and thus elided through the medium of paint; in the graphic works the broad strokes of the reed pen, and the burr he leaves on the plate co soak up the ink, obscure linear definition in a striving for tonal effect.
What an amazing - even magical - conflation of formal power and narrative impact
Oath of Civilis, 1661-62
This piece, however, is kind of a mess.
Originally it was 15' high
and it was commissioned to go above a doorway in the palatial Amsterdam town hall. It hung there briefly, but was soon returned for reasons that seem obvious to me. Rembrandt couldn't really relate to the folkloric, nationalistic theme and his expressive effects would disappear that high above the viewer.
Jan Lievens
His former studio mate, Jan Lievens, was much better suited for this kind of work
The Jewish Bride, 1665-1669
Rembrandt paints the relationship and the individual emotions as if those people actually lived in the painted canvas.
This drawing is working with tones, but linear definition has not been obscured - indeed the contours have been quite delicately defined as the shape turns.
In turning away from the craft of representation, Rembrandt also turns away from the certainty and knowledge attributed by Dutch culture and its art to the world seen and to sight itself. The surfaces of Rembrandt's late works, as we have just noted, do not enable one to see better on the model of sight embraced by the culture. They are the surfaces of a maker of pictures who profoundly mistrusted the evidence of sight. This point becomes the very subject of Rembrandt's art in his fascination with blindness. Loss of sight was by no means an uncommon topic in Dutch an of the time. We find innumerable renderings of the apocryphal story of Tobit and some even of the blinding of Argus. But Rembrandt's images are memorable in the authority they attribute to those who lack sight.
Perhaps blindness fascinated the Dutch of that time. But with its angelic intervention against sex-crazed demonic forces - the Book of Tobit seems well suited to a Calvinist society. I wonder why it was never so popular in America.
One thinks in particular of his attention to the blind Homer in the fragment that remains of one of his late paintings. The aged Homer is represented dictating to a young scribe: an unseeing speaker speaking words that remain unseen. Paradoxical though it may seem, Rembrandt makes images that show us that it is the word (or the Word) rather than the world seen that conveys truth.
Then why would Rembrandt bother to paint Homer
when his words are already available to be read?
Homer Dictating, 1663 (fragment)
Drastically cropped fragment that it is , this is one amazing painting.
Wow! This eye socket could contain a cathedral,
with plenty of space left over.
Rembrandt, finally, turned from the art of describing in order to evoke time past. Some kind of historical interest must have been part of the appeal for him for the stories illustrated by the Amsterdam history painters. Placed beside the instantaneous nature of making suggested by Hals's brushwork, and the effacement of time suggested in the imprinted effect of Vermeer's View of Delft, the working and reworking recorded in the layers of paint of Rembrandt's late works is an admission of work done through and thus even against time. But the depth of Rembrandt's historical commitment, and what is more, the sense he had of challenging the authority of his fellow artists and their culture, is most clearly revealed in his rejected painting for the new Amsterdam Town Hall. Rembrandt's Oath of Julius Civilis depicts the early Batavians' commitment to revolt against their Roman rulers. The event was commonly seen at the time as a parallel to the modern revolt of the Netherlands against Spain. Rembrandt represented the ancestors of the Dutch engaged in a tribal blood oath: swearing on a sword held by a leader, Civilis, whose hideously blinded eye reveals that he himself had lived by the sword. It is true that Tacitus in his account of the incident refers to these as barbarous rites. But Rembrandt was moved by more than a desire to be faithful to the text.
If the text of Tacitus refers to barbarous rites -- how would this painting suggest that Rembrandt was more interested in "challenging the authority of his fellow artists and their culture" than by "a desire to be faithful to the text" ? If this is the best example of Rembrandt as contrarian - he would appear not to be one.
Caesar van Everdingen, Duke Willem II Granting Privileges, 1655
For a leading contemporary painter Like Caesar van Everdingen, the historical is that which the artist can put illusionistically before our eyes . (Note the work's extraordinary clarity, and the foreground fringe on the rug.) The Civilis shows how far Rembrandt felt he had to go-back even before civilized times- to counter the Dutch insistence on accommodating the past to what is present to the eyes.
The above was commissioned by the corporation whose charter was being bestowed by Duke Willem - so the piece served almost like a legal document. Precision and clarity, not mythopoetry, was required.
Caesar van Everdingen, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1660
Here's another piece by Van Everdingen, and it might be compared to the versions by Titian and Rubens that Alpers discussed in chapter 5. As Alpers might have put it - it's figurative gestures are in the Italian mode - while its depiction of a conversation is in the northern mode.
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APPENDIX
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Isaac Elias, Merry Company, 1629
In proposing to view Dutch art as descriptive, I have implicitly chosen not to follow the lead currently offered by the emblematic interpretation of Dutch art. I want briefly to explain why. The discovery of the similarity between the illustrations printed in emblem books and Dutch paintings is an important one: objects, figural actions, and the domestic settings of Dutch paintings had their counterparts on the pages of the popular emblem books. The question is not whether there is a connection, but what that connection tells us about the art; how we see and interpret the art in the light of it. The argument of the emblematic interpretation has been put forth repeatedly and most powerfully in the work of the pioneer in this field in Holland, E. de Jongh. Referring to an established explanation for the pleasure and power of emblems, De Jongh argues that the objects and realistic scenes placed before our eyes in Dutch paintings serve as veils that conceal meaning. What appears as one thing yields to unexpected hidden meanings. DeJongh offers the emblematic connection as a challenge to what he takes to be the nineteenth-century view of Dutch art as a realistic mirroring of the world. Dutch art, he claims, is only apparently realistic, and he offers us instead the formula (surprising in view of the look of the art) that Dutch art is a realized abstraction.
De Jongh, born five years before Alpers, was the preeminent authority in Dutch Golden Age painting when Alpers wrote this book. An example of his emblematic approach is his interpretation of "Merry Company" shown above.
These two ominous paintings hang on the wall behind the revelers. One depicts the Deluge that God had sent to punish mankind - the other depicts a battle scene of men trying to punish each other. So the attentive viewer might expect a cautionary tale to unfold in the foreground. De Jongh identifies the two figures at the right as a newly wedded couple setting out on their new life - while the other figures exemplify the various sins of sensual enjoyment.
That sounds reasonable to me - especially in a Calvinist society. It's not too difficult to find other Dutch paintings from that era, however, that are less open to this kind of interpretation, What might be the meanings hidden in Vermeer's "Woman Reading a Letter"? Anyone can make something up about it -- but will it be any more convincing than the alternatives?
Rejecting the radically reductive view that Dutch art is a mirror of reality, DeJongh moves to embrace a polar opposite, which is to my mind equally reductive. This view is that meaning is paramount and that the pictures are the means by which it is made visible. Neither net, it seems to me, is suitable to catch Dutch art, which slips through because time and time again it suggests that meaning resides in the careful representation of the world. As a basic rule of thumb DeJongh's emblematic view seems to me to be misleading both about Dutch pictures and about the emblems to which they
are often related. Let me take the emblems first. The notion of a veiled verbal meaning that is to be sought out by the viewer of the image with the help of the caption or motto (usually above) and the epigram or commentary (below) on the printed page is central to the tradition of emblem-making in Europe. The emblem, it has been shown, started as a verbal description or epigram to which publishers began to add illustrations and captions. In its developed form it offered a way to make the visible intelligible and the intelligible visible through a complex and richly organized conceit. It encouraged a play of mind and a delight in indirectness, and appealed to the viewer's wits, reaching its most arcane achievement in the subcategory of imprese or devices.
I'm not going to continue with Alpers' discussion of emblems because I am interested in discussions of what is claimed to be "great art" rather than the rather large category of material culture.
Pieter Breughel the Elder, "The Blind Leading the Blind". 1568
As exemplified by the above, an allegorical illustration may also be a great painting. But if it's not, I don't care to see it unless it’s been embedded in a compelling historical narrative. Jacob Cats, the popular Dutch emblem maker discussed by Alpers, was no Pieter Breughel - and the discussion of emblems in this Appendix does not rise to the level of a compelling historical commentary.
Here’s an illustration of another allegory about blind men. Though not great art - it does seem appropriate to the historiography of 17th century Dutch painting. Alpers and DeJongh may accurately characterize certain paintings that interest them - but they fail to identify the beast as a whole.
And the same might be said for the discipline of art history as it has been practiced for the last hundred years. As it avoids both overall views of history and aesthetic judgments of specific paintings, it has very little of interest to say - at least to me.
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