The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten's Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age)

Weststeijn applies the rhetorical arts to the practice of the visual arts. He demonstrates how rhetorical concepts, practices, and terms appear in Van Hoogstraten's own discourse, and may be used to interpret the works of Rembrandt and other Dutch artists. Van Hoogstraten probably attended the Dordrecht Latin School, where he would have studied Cicero, Quintilian, and Scaliger; yet his most show more immediate model for the rhetorical approach to art was Junius' The Painting of the Ancients (English, 1638, and Dutch, 1641). Establishing that the art of painting lies within the authority of literary tradition, Weststeijn restores a verbal language to a visual one, and reconstructs the vocabulary to discuss Dutch art. This is an especially useful structure for analysis with respect to representing human expressiveness. In the fourth chapter, "The Depiction of the Passions", Weststeijn demonstrates how Van Hoogstraten's ideas are rooted in or have resonance with philosophers, including Justus Lipsius and René Descartes; rhetoricians, including Cicero, Quintilian, and Isaac Vossius; and artists' writings, notably those by Federico Zuccaro and Willem Goeree. This situates Van Hoogstraten in the broad intellectual arena of western thought. show less