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Loading... The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983)by Svetlana Alpers
   None No current Talk conversations about this book. Alpers’ book defines Dutch art by contrast with the Italian ideal. Where Italian art is narrative, Dutch art is descriptive and, she feels, without the concealed iconographic meanings recent criticism has found there. Where Italian art depends on the Alberti model of looking at the world from a particular vantage point and as if through a window, Dutch art does not use the framed image, the clearly located viewer. She ties the idea of picturing in with optics—with seeing itself—and with mapping. If there is deception, she says, it is in the illusion of picture making itself: “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” (xxiv). She has some interesting things to say about multiple views of one figure, not as a way of showing narrative, but as a way of enabling the viewer to see all around a figure at the same time (59). She mentions the figure come fratelli of Pollaiuolo’s Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, the twisted figure or figura serpinata where we see back and front, and Picasso’s multi-faceted figures. (  ) michaelm42071 | Aug 31, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
The art historian after Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich is not only participating in an activity of great intellectual excitement; he is raising and exploring issues which lie very much at the centre of psychology, of the sciences and of history itself. Svetlana Alpers's study of 17th-century Dutch painting is a splendid example of this excitement and of the centrality of art history among current disciples. Professor Alpers puts forward a vividly argued thesis. There is, she says, a truly fundamental dichotomy between the art of the Italian Renaissance and that of the Dutch masters. . . . Italian art is the primary expression of a 'textual culture, ' this is to say of a culture which seeks emblematic, allegorical or philosophical meanings in a serious painting. Alberti, Vasari and the many other theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance teach us to 'read' a painting, and to read it in depth so as to elicit and construe its several levels of signification. The world of Dutch art, by the contrast, arises from and enacts a truly 'visual culture.' It serves and energises a system of values in which meaning is not 'read' but 'seen, ' in which new knowledge is visually recorded.--George Steiner, Sunday Times There is no doubt that thanks to Alpers's highly original book the study of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century will be thoroughly reformed and rejuvenated. . . . She herself has the verve, the knowledge, and the sensitivity to make us see familiar sights in a new light.--E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)759.9492 — The arts Painting History, geographic treatment, biography Other geographic areas Europe Other parts NetherlandsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.34)
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