The Art of Describing (Paper): Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century - Softcover

Alpers, Svetlana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226015130 ISBN 13: 9780226015132

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1984

Synopsis

"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

About this title

About the Author:

Svetlana Alpers is professor emerita of the history of art, University of California, Berkeley, and visiting scholar in the department of fine arts, New York University. She is the author of "The Making of Rubens" and, with Michael Baxandall, "Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence," published by Yale University Press.

Synopsis:

Examines the influence of culture, science, and technology on the art of Dutch painters, including Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Rubens.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0226015130
• ISBN 13: 9780226015132
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 302