The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century

"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.