The Art of Describing

Svetlana Alpers

The Art of Describing

DutchArt inrheSeventeenth Century

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Th e University of C hicago Press, Chicago 60637
John Murray (Publish ers) Ltd, London WIX 4BD
© 1983 by The Univers ity of C hi cago
All rights reserved. Published 1983
Paperback edition 1984
Printed in the U nited States of America
93 92 91 90 89 88 87 86 85 84 7 6 5 4 3

Library of Congress C ata loging in Publication Data

Alpers, Svetlana.
Th e art of describing.
Includes bibliographical references and in dex.
I. Painting. Dutch. 2. Painting, Modern-17th - 18th
centuri es -Netherlands. 3. Visual perception. r. Title.
ND646 .A72 759.9492 82-6969
ISB 0-226-0 \5\ 2-2 (cloth) AA CR2
ISB 0-226-0 \513 -0 (paper)

SVETLANA ALPERS is professor of art history at

the University of Ca lifornia, Berkel ey. She is an
edito r of Representations and of Th e Raritan
Review and is th e auth o r of The Decoration of
th e Torre de fa Parada and articles o n north ern
painting and on the stud y of art and its hi story.
To Paul
and
Benjamin and Nicholas

\
.'
Contents

List of Illustrations
IX

Preface
xv

Introduction
XVII

1 Constantijn Huygens and The New World

1

2 "Ut pictura, ita visio": Kepler's Model of the Eye and the Nature of
Picturing in the North
26

3 "With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye": The Craft of Representation

72

4 The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art

119

5 Looking at Words: The Representation of Texts in Dutch Art

169

Epilogue: Vermeer and Rembrandt

222

Appendix : On the Emblematic Interpretation of Dutch Art

229

Notes
235

Index
269

VII
Plate 1. DAVID BAILLY , Still Life, 165 1. Stedelijk Museum "de Lakenhal," Leiden.
1
I

i
I

I',

I,

Iiii'l
il'l
II
I I
I'
ill
I'

ii'
i! Plate 2. JAl\i VER.\IEER, The Art of Painting. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
!I;

I,
I
I
I,
..... :e 3 . J AN CHRISTAENSZ . MI CKE R, View of Amsterdam. Collection Amsterdam Hi stO ri cal
\Suseum, Amsterdam.
,\

Plate 4. PIETER SAENREOAM, Profile Views of Leiden and Haarlem and Two Trees (pen, wash,
and watercolor), 1617 and 1625. Kupferstichkabinett, 5taatliche Museen Preussischer Kul-
rurbesitz, Berlin (West).
IIIustrations

Page
1. THOMAS DE KEYSER, Constantijn Huygens and His
Clerk, 1627 3
2. JACQUES DE GHEYN, Hermit Crab and Witchcraft 6
3. JACQUES DE GHEYN, page from a drawing book 7
4. JA N DE BRAY, A Couple Represented as Ulysses and
Penelope, 1668 14
5. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, The Jewish Bride 15
6. R EMBRANDT VAN RIJN, Beggar Seated on a Mound 16
7. R EMBRANDT VAN RIJN, Self-Portrait, 1658 16
8. PAULUS POTTER, The Young Bull, 1647 19
9. ABRAHAM VAN BEYEREN, Still Life with a Silver Wine Jar and
a Reflected Portrait of the Artist 20
10. ABRAHAM VAN BEYEREN, detail of fig. 9 21
11. JAN VAN EYCK, Madonna with the Canon van
der Paele, detail 21
12. GERARD Dou, A Poulterer's Shop 28
13. JAN VERMEER, View of Delft 29
14. JAN VERMEER, Soldier and Laughing Girl 31
- 15. Illustration of the theory of the retinal image in RENe
Kul- DESCARTES, La Dioptrique (Leiden, 1637) 34
16. JA N VERMEER, Th e Art of Painting 37
17. J ACOB MATHAM, The Brewery and the Country H ouse of Jan
Claesz . Loa 39
18 . Illustration of the working of th e eye in J OHAN VAN
BEVERWYCK, Schat der Ongesonth eyt (Amsterdam, 1664) 42
19. ALBRECHT DURER, draftsman drawing a nude,
in Unterweysung der Messung (Nuremberg, 1538) 43
20 . J AN VAN EYCK, Madonna with the Canon van der Paele 44
21. DOMENICO VENEZIANO, Madonna and Child with Saints. 45
22. LEONARDO DA VINCI, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne 47
23. Drawing of an optical device from the papers of
JOHANNES KEPLER 50
24. PIETER SAENREDAM, i nterior of the Buur Church,
Utrecht, 1636 54

IX
x List of Illustrations

25. PIETER SAENREDAM,Interior of the Buur Church,

Utrecht, 1644 54
26. PIETER SAENREDAM, Interior of the Buur Church,
Utrecht, 1644 55
27. The first "regola" or the "costruzione Iegittima,"
in GIACOMO BAROZZI DA VIGNOLA, Le due regale
della prospettiva practica (Rome, 1583) 56
28. The second "regola" o r th e distance-point method,
in GIACOMO BAROZZ I DA VIGNOLA, Le due regale della
prospettiva practica (Rome, 1583) 56
29. JA N VREDEMAN DE VRIES, Perspective (Leiden,
1604- 5), plate 1 57
30. JAN VREDEMAN DE VRIES, Perspective (Leiden,
1604- 5), plate 2 57
31. JA N VREDEMAN DE VRIES, Perspective (Leiden,
1604- 5), plate 28 58
32. Jan Saenredam, after HENDRICK GOLTZIUS, An Artist
and His Model 60
33. Attributed to A NTONIO AND PIERO DEL POLLAIUOLO,
The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian 61
34. AGNOLO BRONZINO, St. John the Baptist 61
35. PABLO PICASSO, Seated Woman, 1927 61
36. SAMUEL VAN H OOGSTRATEN, peep-box, detail 63
37. SAMUEL VAN HOOGSTRATEN, peep-box, detail 63
38. PIETER SAENREDAM, Interior of the St. Laurens
Church at Alkmaar, 166 1 65
39. PIETER SAENREDAM , Interior of the Church of St. Bavo
in Haarlem, 1635 66
40. PIETER SAENREDAM, Interior of the Church of St. Bavo
in Haarlem, 1636 67
41. Jan van de Velde, after PIETER SAENREDAM,
St. Bavo , Haarlem 68
42. DIEGO VELAZQUEZ, Las Meninas 69
43. Miraculou s images found in an apple tree 80
44. Corneli s Korning, after PIETER SAENREDAM , Print to Belie
Rumors about the I mages Found in an Apple Tree, 1628 81
45. Illustration of seeds of thyme in ROBERT H OOKE,
Micrographia (London, 1665), p late 18 86
46. J ACQUES DE GHEYN, Four Mice 86
47. ABRAHAM VAN DER SCHOOR, Vanitas Still Life 87
48. J ACQUES DE GHEYN, Studies of a Head 87
49. JACQUES DE GHEYN, Old Woman and Vine 88
50. JACQU ES DE GHEYN, Caesar Dictating to His Scribes 89
51. WILLEM CLAESZ. HEDA, Still Life, 1634 92
52. F RANCISCO DE ZURBARAN, Still Life with Lemons,
Oranges and a Rose 92
List of Illustrations Xl

53. "A Tree ," in J OHANN AMOS COM ENIUS, Orbis Sensualium
Pictl« (London , 1685) 97
54. J ACQUES DE GHEYN , Woman with Child and Picture-book 97
55. "Cookery," in JOHANN AMOS COMENIUS, Orbis Sensualium
Pictus (Lond o n, 1685) 99
56 . A NONYM OUS , Northern Netherlandish School, Radish, 1626 101
57 . DAVID BAILLY, Still Life, 1651 104
58 . Aegidius Sadeler, after BARTHOLOMAUS SPRANGER, Memorial
to the Wife of Bartholomaus Spranger, 1600 107
59. WILLEM K ALF, Still Life with a Nautilus Goblet 115
60. GERARD Dou , The Quack, 1652 11 7
61. J AN VERMEER, Woman Playing a Gltitar 118
62 . JAN V ERMEER, The Art of Painting, detail 120
63 . JACOB O CHTERVELT, The Musicians 121
64 . JAN VERM EER, The Art of Painting, detail 123
65. JAN V ERMEER, View of Delft 123
66. John Mix Stanley, after RI CHARD H . K ERN, View of Sangre
de Cristo Pass, in Reports of Explorations and Surveys to
Ascertain the . . . Means for a Railroad from the Mississippi
to the Pacific Ocean (1835- 54) 124
67. M ap of the United States 125
68 .ALB ERT BrERSTADT, Yosemite Winter Scene 125
03 69 .J ASPER J OHNS, Map, 1961 125
3 70. Map of the Seventeen Provinces, publi shed by C LAES J ANSZ.
VISSCHER, detail 127
5 71. CONSTANTlj N H UYGENS III, A View of Maastricht across
the Meuse at Smeermaes , 1676 129
66 2. Anonymous, after P IETER SAENREDAM, The Siege of H aarlem 129
3. GASPAR VAN WITTEL, View of the Tib er at Orv ieto 130
67 GASPAR VAN WJTTEL, The Square and the Palace of
M ontecavallo 130
68 -5. PI ETER BRU EGEL, Bay of Naples 131
69 76 . Frontispiece in WrLLEM BARENTSZ. , Caertboek Vande
'0 Midlandtsche Zee (Amsterdam, 1595) 131
7 . J AN VAN GOYEN, Views of Brussels and Haeren 132
" Geographia" and "Chorog raphia" in PETRUS API ANUS,
Cosmographia (Paris, 1551 ) 134
6 - 9. Map of Africa in WrLLEM J ANSZ. BLAEU, World Atlas (1630) 135
6 ' no How to hold a p en , in GERARDUS M ERCATOR, On the
7 Lettering of Maps (1549) 137
7 ' 1. H ENDRICK GOLTZIUS, Du ne Landscape near Haarlem, 1603 140
8 ' 2. HENDRICK GOLTZ IUS, Couple Viewing a Waterfall 140
9 -"3. Map of Den Bri el, in BRAUN AND H OGENBERG , Civitates
92 Orbis Terrarum (Cologne, 1587-1617) 141
Landmarks in WILLEM J ANSZ. BLAEU, Le flambeau
92 de la navigation (Amsterdam, 1625) 143
XII List of Illustrations

85. PHILIPS KONINCK, Landscape with a Hawking Party

(detail of fi g. 86) 143
86. PHILIPS KONINCK, Landscape with H awking Party 144
87 . ANONYMOUS D UTCH PAINTER, The Polder " Het Grootslag"
near Enkhuizen 145
88. J ACOB VAN RUISDAEL, View of Haarlem 146
89. AELBERT CUYP, View of Amersfoort 146
90. CONSTANTIjN HUYGENS III , View of the Waal from the
Town Gate at Zaltbommel, 1669 149
91. R EMBRANDT VAN RIJ N, The Goldweigher's Field, 1651 150
92 . PETER PAUL RUBENS, Landscape with H et Steen 150
93. AELBERT CUYP, Two Young Shepherds 151
94. JAN VERMEER, View of D elft 153
95. Nijmegen, in BRAUN AND HOGENBERG, Civitates Orbis
Terrarum (Cologne, 1587- 1617) 153
96. ESIAS VAN DE V ELDE, Zierikzee, 1618 154
97. H ENDRIK VROOM, The H aarlem Gate, Amsterdam, 1615 155
98. J A VAN GOYEN, View of the Hague, 1653 155
99. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN , View of Amsterdam 155
100. J AN CHR ISTAENSZ. MI CKER, View of Amsterdam 158
101. CLAES J ANSZ . VISSCHER, The Siege of Breda, 1624 160
102. DIEGO VELAzQUEZ, Th e Sttrrender at Breda 161
103. Map of Brazil by GEORG MARKGRAF, publish ed by
J ohannes Blaeu (1647) 163
104. ALBERT E CKHOUT, Tarairitt Man, 1641 164
105 . J AN VAN KESSEL, America, 1666 165
106 . J AN VERMEER, Th e Art of Painting, detail 166
107. "Geographia" and "Chorographia" in P ETRUS APIANUS,
Cosmographia (Paris, 1551) 167
108. J AN VERMEER, The Art of Painting, detail 168
109 . PIETER DE HOOCH , The Cottrtya rd of a H ouse
in Delft, 1658 170
11 0. PI ETER DE H OOCH, detail of fig. 109 170
111. BARTHOLOMEUS VAN DER HELST, Th e Four Archers of
the St. Sebastian Guards, 1653 171
112 . BARTHOLOMEUS VAN DER HELST, detail of fig. 111 171
113 . PI ETER SAENREDAM,lnterior of the Church of St. Odulphus
in Assendelft, 1649 173
114 . P IETER SAENREDAM, detail of fig. 113 173
115. P ETER P AUL RUBENS, The Miracles of St. Ignatius Loyola 173
116. P IETER STEENWYCK, Allegory on the Death
of Admiral Tromp 174
117. The tomb of Admiral Tromp, Oude Kerk , Delft 174
118. PIETER SAENREDAM, In terior of the Church of St. Bavo in
Haarlem, 1636, detail 175
List of Illustrations XlU

119. PETER PAUL RUBENS, St. Cecilia 175

120. PIETER SAENREDAM, Interior of the Mariakerk in Utrecht,
1641 176
121. PIETER SAENRfDAM , detail of fig. 120 177
122. JA N VAN EYCK, The Arnolfini Wedding, 1434 178
123 . JAN VAN EYCK, detail of fig. 122 179
124. ANTHONY LEEMANS, Still Life, 1655 181
125. PIETER SAENREDAM, Profile Views of Leiden and Haarlem
and Two Trees, 1617 and 1625 181
126. DIRCK VAN RIJSWICK, Tribute to Nicholas Verburch 182
127. JACOB MATHAM , The Brewery and the Country H ouse of
Jan Claesz. Loo, 1627, detail 182
128. ANONYMOUS, Northern Netherlandish School, Radish,
1626, detail 183
129. JERO NIMUS VAN DIEST, The Seizure of the English Flagship
"Royal Charles" 184
130. J ERONIMUS VAN DIEST, detail of fig . 129 184
131. J OSEPH DE BRAY, In Praise of Herring, 1657 185
132. GABRIEL METSU , Woman at the Virginal 186
133. GABRIEL METSU , Duet 187
134. JAN VERMEER, The Music Lesson 189
135. J AN VERMEER , detail of fig. 134 189
136. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, Anslo and His Wife, 1641 190
137. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, detail of fig. 136 190
138. GERARD DOU, R embrandt's Mother 191
139. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, An Old Woman 191
140. DIRCK HALS , Lady Tearing a Letter, 1631 193
141. GERARD TER BORCH, A Lady Writing a Letter 194
142. GERARD TER BORCH, A Lady Reading a Letter 195
143 . GABRIEL M ETSU, Man Writing a Letter 198
144. GABRIEL METSU, Woman R eading a Letter 199
145. GABRIEL METSU, The Letter Writer Surprised 202
146. JAN VERMEER, Woman Reading a Letter 203
147. JAN VERMEER, Woman Reading a Letter 204
148. REMBRANDT VAN R IJ N, Bathsheba, 1654 204
149. JAN STEEN, Bathsheba 205
150. PIETER LASTMAN, David Giving the Letter to Uriah, 1619 208
-' 151. PIETER LASTMAN, The Angel Addressing the Family of
') Tobias in Departure 208
152 . PIETER LASTMA N, Abraham and the Angels, 1616 209
153 . FRAN<;:OIS VENANT, David and Jonathan 209
154. P IETER LASTMAN, Susanna and the Elders, 1614 210
155. PETER PAUL RUBENS, Susanna and the Elders 210
156. Frames from Asterix en de Belgen 211
157. R EMBRANDT VAN RIJ N, Nathan Admonishing David 213
XIV List of Illustrations

213
158. P ETER PAUL R UBENS, Th e Massacre of the Innocents
159. P ETER PAUL R UBENS, Apollo and the Python
160. FERDINAND B OL, Th e Intrepidity of Fabritius in the Camp
of King Pyrrhus 216
2 16
161. FERD INAND BOL, Elisha Refuses Naaman's Gifts, 166 1
162. "Elck spiege lt hem selven ," in J ACOB CATS, Spiegel van den
217
Ouden en Nieuwen Tyt (Th e Hague , 1632)
219
163. J AN STEEN, "Easy Come, Easy Go," 1661
2 19
164. J AN STEEN, detail of fig. 163
221
165. R EMBRANDT VAN RIJ N, Abrah am and Isaac, 1645
221
166. R EMB RANDT VAN RIJ N, Christ Preach ing
226
167. R EMBRANDT VAN RIJN, Th e Oath of Julius Civilis , 1661
226
168. R EMBRANDT VAN RIJ N, detail of fi g. 167
226
169. R EMBRANDT VAN RIJ N, detail of fig. 167
227
170. REMBRANDT VAN RIJ N, Home r Dictating, 1663
171. CAESAR VAN EVERDING EN, Duke Willem II Granting
Privileges to the H igh Office of the Dike-R eeve of Rijnland
228
in 1255, 1655
232
172 . J ACOB CATS, Silenus Alcibiades (Midd elburg , 1618)
232
173. J ACOB CATS, Silenus Alcibiades (Middl eburg, 1618)
232
174. J ACOB CATS, Silenus Alcibiades (Midde lburg, 16 18)
175. ANONYMOUS, North ern Nethe rlandis h School ,
Couple with Child 233
259
176. P IET MONDRIAN, Landscape near Amsterdam
Christ 265
177. REMBRANDT VAN RIJ N, The Adulterous Woman before
Preface

In the several years that this book has been in preparation I have incurred a
number of debts. First, I have benefited from the invitations and hospitality
of three institutions and their staffs . I began work on the book in 1975-76 as
a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in th e Behavioral Sciences at
Stanford. I was able to pursue research on native ground in 1979 during my
six month s as a visiting fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced
Study, in Wassenaar, with the support of the Humanities Research Commit-
tee of the University of California, Berkeley, and a fellowship from the
American Council of Learned Societies. Finally, a major portion of the writ-
ing was done in 1979- 80 when I was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, where Clifford Geertz made art welcome at the School
of Social Science. Each of these institutions offered the challenge of new
colleagues from a variety of disciplines and also the pleasure (not free from a
certain pain) of being able to do one's work uninterrupted day after day .
Finally, and more informally, theWarburg Institute of the University of
London has long provided me with a scholarly home away from home.
As important as these times of retreat has been the time I have spent
teaching at Berkeley. The questions, argum ents, and work done by students
in my seminars push ed me to clarify and develop my own. Their eagerness to
take the study of art and its history seriously helped make the enterprise seem
worthwhile. I shall thank particular people for particular points. Here I
simply want to testify to how essential both the exercise of teaching at
Berkeley and the students I have taught there have been to the writing of this
book.
In the course of writing I have been helped by more individuals than it is
possible to name. I am most grateful to Carol Armstrong, Celeste Brusati,
Bob Haak, Anita Joplin, Susan Donahue Kuretsky, Walter Melion, Michael
Montias, Johan Snapper, Pi eter van Thiel, Eric-Jan Sluijter, Nicolette
Sluijter, James Welu, Arthur Wheelock, Jr., and M. L. Wurfbain for their
help with particular points of information or material. In venturing into fi elds
far from my own, I have been fortunate to find a numb er of scholars willing
to answer questions and offer the corrections necessary to someone new to
and quite untrained in their special fields. I want to thank in parti cular Bruce
Eastwood, Roger Hahn, Gerald Holton, and Helen Wallis. David Wood-
ward's invitation to participate in the series of Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr. Lec-

xv
XVI Preface

th e
tures on art and cartography at the Newbe rry Librar y in 1980 offered
friends
ideal occasion for working out my ideas abou t maps . Amon g those
many occasio ns with their good
and colleagues who have been available on
Paul Alpers , Michae l Bax-
talk and good writing I especially want to thank
l Fried,
andall, James Cahi ll, T. J. Clark, Natalie Zemon Davis, Michae
I was
Stephen Green blatt, Rosalind Krauss, Edward Said, and Edward Snow.
Egbert
fortunate to have begun studyi ng Dutch art under Seymo ur Slive,
. In a broade r sense, I shall
Haver kamp- Begemann , and the late Horst Gerson
studied with him
always remain the studen t of E. H. Gomb rich . Since I first
spur, to
at Harva rd years ago his work has been the examp le, his suppOrt a
my Own.
where
Finally , two remarks are in order about format and usage. Except
have includ ed the origina l,
a standard English translation of a text exists, I
Rober t
almost always preced ed by an English translation. 1. want to thank
Latin
Hurley and Carole Newlands, who worke d with me on the French and
United Provin ces that formed the Dutch
passages respectively. The Seven
as Hol-
Republic are comm only, though inaccurately, referred to in English
of referen ce I have
land, after the richest of them. For the sake of ease
not to the
followed this usage. Unless otherwise noted, Holland, then, refers
province bearing that name but to the entire Dutch Repub li c.
S. A.
Introduction

Until recently it was the descriptive aspects of Dutch art that held the atten-
tion of viewers. For better or for worse, it was as a description of Holland and
Dutch life that writers before the twentieth century saw and judged
seventeenth-century Dutch art. Sir Joshua Reynolds, an antagonist, and Eu-
gene Fromentin, an enthusiast, met in their agreement that the Dutch pro-
duced a portrait of themselves and their country-its cows, landscape,
clouds, towns, churches, rich and poor households, its food and drink. The
issue of what one could say, how one could convey the nature of such a
descriptive art was felt to be a pressing one. Reynolds could only come up
with an annotated list of Dutch artists and subjects in hisJaurney to Flanders
and Holland of 1781. He acknowledges that it provides "barren entertain-
ment" in contrast to the lengthy analysis he can give of Flemish art. Here are
some excerpts from the list:
Cattle and a shepherd, by Albert Cuyp, the best I ever saw of him; and
the figure is likewise better than usual: but the employment which he has
given the shepherd in his solitude is not very poetical: it must, however,
be allowed to be truth and nature; he is catching fleas or something worse.

A View of a church by Vander Heyden, his best; two black friars going
up steps. Notwithstanding this picture is finished as usual very minutely,
he has not forgot to preserve, at the same time, a great breadth of light. His
pictures have very much the effect of nature, seen in a camera obscura.

A woman reading a letter; the milk-woman who brought it, is in the

mean time drawing a curtain, a little on one side, in order to see the picture
under it, which appears to be a sea-view.

Two fine pictures of Terburg; the white sattin remarkably well painted.
He seldom omitted to introduce a piece of white sattin in his pictures.

Dead swans by Weeninx, as fine as possible. I suppose we did not see less
than twenty pictures of dead swans by this painter. 1
The vulgar nature of the subject matter disturbs Reynolds, but he still
concentrates his attention on what is to be seen-from white satin to white
swans. The painters' interest in what Reynolds calls the "naturalness of

XVll
xv'" Introduction

representation," combined with their repetitiousness (Ter Borch's inevitable

white satin or Ween ix's countless dead swans), makes for a boring, even
inarticulate verbal account. Or as Reynolds himself explains:
The account which has now been given of the Dutch pictures is, I
confess, more barren of entertainment, than I expected. One would wish
to be able to convey to the reader some idea of that excellence, the sight of
which has afforded so much pleasure: but as their merit often consists in
the truth of representation alone, whatever praise they deserve, whatever
pleasure they give when under the eye, they make but a poor figure in
description. It is to the eye only that the works of this school are addressed;
it is not therefore to be wondered at, that what was intended solely for the
gratification of one sense, succeeds but ill, when applied to another. 2
It is hard for us, as heirs to the art of the nineteenth century, to get back
to the frame of mind that made Reynolds disparage this descriptive art. We
are after all convinced, as he was not, that a great painting can be made as
Cezanne made it, for example, of two men playing cards, or a bowl of fruit
and a bottle, or as Monet did of a patch of water lilies in a pond. But it is
equally hard for us today to value Dutch art for the reasons given by a
nineteenth-century enthusiast like Fromentin. In an often-quoted passage,
Fromentin in 1876 argues, with reference to the 1609 truce with Spain and the
founding of the new state, that "Dutch painting was not and could not be·
anything but the portrait of Holland, its external image, faithful, exact,
complete, life-like, without any adornment.'" He put the central issue suc-
cinctly at one point: "What motive had a Dutch painter in painting a picture?
None. ,,4 The thrust of the professional study of Dutch art in our time has
been to dig deeper than the naive museum goer who exclaims at the sheen of
Ter Borch's satins, or at the clear, calm air of a Saenredam church interior,
who is perhaps amused at the sunlit cow by Cuyp that rivals a distant church
tower in size, or finally pauses in awe before the beauty and composure of a
Vermeer lady in the corner of her room, her face echoed in the reflecting glass
offered by the window.
Fromentin struggled to deal with how to separate the art as such from the
world of which it was an imitation.
We feel a loftiness and a goodness of heart, an affection for the true, a
love for the real, that give their works a value the things do not seem to
possess. 5 •

But he was always on the verge of denying that which makes the art separate
from, different from the life.
We live in the picture, we walk about in it, we look into its depths, we
are tempted to raise our heads to look at its sky.6
And Fromentin specifically contrasts Dutch painting in this regard with the
art of the "present (French) school," the academic heir to the Italians.
Here, you will perceive formulae, a science that can be possessed, an
acquired knowledge that helps examination, sustains it at need, takes its
Introduction XIX

place, and, so to speak, tells the eye what it should see; the mind what it
should feel. There, nothing of the kind: an art which adapts itself to the
nature of things, a knowledge that is forgotten in presence of special
circumstances in life, nothing preconceived, nothing which precedes the
simple, strong and sensitive observation of what is. 7
Significantly, and most appropriately as we shall see, Fromentin returns to a
theme also enunciated by Reynolds, namely, that the relationship of this art
to the world is like that of the eye itself.
In our time art historians have developed the terminology and trained their
eyes and sensibilities to react rather to those stylistic features that compose the
art- the height of the horizon on the panel, the placing of tree or cow, the
light. All of these are spoken of as aspects of art as much if not more than they
are as observations of the world seen. Each artist has his own relatively clear
stylistic development and we can detail the influence of the artists on each
other. Here, as in the interpretation of the subject matter, the study of Dutch
art has taken on analytic tools first developed to deal with Italian art. The
viewer who admires the sheen on a Ter Barch gown is now told that the
woman in the shining gown is a whore being sought or bought before our
eyes; the young sorrowing women who so frequently perch on the edge of a
bed or chair attended to by a doctor are pregnant out of wedlock, and those
looking at mirrors are sinfully vain. Vermeer's woman by the window reading
a letter is engaged in extra- or premarital sex. Merry drinkers are gluttons,
sluggards, or more likely the victims of the pleasures of the sense of taste, as
music-makers are victims of the pleasures of the sense of hearing. The display
of watch works or of exotic flowers that fade is an exercise in human vanity.
Iconographers have made it a principle of Dutch seventeenth-century picture-
making that the realism hides meanings beneath its descriptive surface.
But there has been too great a price paid in visual experience in this current
appeal to understanding verbal depths. Dutch art itself challenges such a view.
The issue here is far from new. It has its source deep in the tradition of
Western art.
To a remarkable extent the study of art and its history has been determined
by the art of Italy and its study. This is a truth that art historians are in danger
of ignoring in the present rush to diversify the objects and the nature of their
studies. Itali an art and the rhetorical evocation of it has not only defined the
practice of the central tradition of Western artists, it has also determined the
study of their works. In referring to the notion of art in the Italian Renais-
sance, I have in mind the Albertian definition of the picture: a framed surface
or pane situated at a certain distance from a viewer who looks through it at
a second or substitute world. In the Renaissance this world was a stage on
which human figures performed significant actions based on the texts of the
poets. It is a narrative art. And the ubiquitous doctrine ut pictura poesis was
invoked in order to explain and legitimize images through their relationship
to prior and hallowed texts. Despite the well-known fact that few Italian
pictures were executed precisely according to Alberti's perspective specifica-
xx Introduction

tions, I think it just to say that this general definition of the picture that I have
summarily presented was that internalized by artists and finally installed in
the program of the Academy. By Albertian, then, I do not mean to invoke
a particular fifteenth-century type of picture, but rather to designate a general
and lasting model. It was the basis of that tradition that painters felt they had
to equal (or to dispute) well into the nineteenth century. It was the tradition,
furthermore, that produced Vasari, the first art historian and the first writer
to formulate an autonomous history for art. A notable sequence of artists in
the West and a central body of writing on art can be understood in these
Italian terms. Since the institutionalization of art history as an academic
discipline, the major analytic strategies by which we have been taught to look

I
at and to interpret images-style as proposed by Wolfflin and iconography
by Panofsky-were developed in reference to the Italian tradition. '
The definitive place of Italian art in both our tradition of art and our
tradition of writing about it means that it has proved difficult to find appro-
priate language to deal with images that do not fit this model. Indeed, some
innovative work and writing on images has come out of a recognition of this
difficulty. It has been done on what might be called nonclassical, non-
Renaissance images that would otherwise have been seen from the perspective
of the Italian accomplishment. I have in mind writings such as Alois Riegl's
accounts of ancient textiles, the art of late antiquity, post-Renaissance Italian
art, or Dutch group portraits; Otto Pacht on northern art in general; Law-.
rence Gowing on Vermeer; or more recently Michael Baxandall on German
limewood sculpture and Michael Fried on absorptive or anti theatrical (for
which we may read anti-Albertian) French painting. 9 Though they differ in
many respects, each of these writers felt the need to find a new way to look
at a group of images, at least partly in acknowledgment of their difference
from the norms provided by Italian art. It is in this tradition, if I can call it
that, that I would like to place my own work on Dutch art. And if in the pages
that follow I chart this art partly through its difference from the art of Italy,
it is not to argue an unique polarity between north and south, between
Holland and Italy, but to stress what I believe to be the condition of our study
of all non-Albertian images. .
There is, however, one pictorial distinction and a historical situation to
which I will pay particular attention. A major theme of this book is that
central aspects of seventeenth-century Dutch art-and indeed of the northern
tradition of which it is part-can best be understood as being an art of
describing as distinguished from the narrative art of Italy. This distinction is
not an absolute one. Numerous variations and even exceptions can doubtless
be found. And one must leave the geographic boundaries of the distinction
flexible: some French or Spanish works, even some Italian ones can fruitfully
be seen as partaking of the descriptive mode, while the works of Rubens, a
northerner steeped in the art of Italy, can be seen in terms of the ways in
which on various occasions he variously engages both these modes. The value
of the distinction lies in what it can help us to see. The relationship between
[ntroduction XXI

these two modes within European art itself has a history. In the seventeenth
century and again in the nineteenth some of the most innovative and accom-
plished artists in Europe-Caravaggio and Velazquez and Vermeer, later
Courbet and Manet- embrace an essentially descriptive pictorial mode. "De-
scriptive" is indeed one way of characterizing many of those works that we
are accustomed to refer to casually as realistic - among which is included, as
I suggest at various points in my text, the pictorial mode of photographs. In
Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter, Velazquez's Water-seller, Vermeer's
Woman with Scales, and Manet's Dejeuner sur I'Herbe figures are suspended
in action to be portrayed. The stilled or arrested quality of these works is a
symptom of a certain tension between the narrative assumptions of the art and
an attentiveness to descriptive presence. There seems to be an inverse propor-
tion between attentive description and action: attention to the surface of the
world described is achieved at the expense of the representation of narrative
action. Panofsky put this particularly well about Jan van Eyck, another artist
who worked in the descriptive mode:
Jan van Eyck's eye operates as a microscope and as a telescope at the same
time ... so that the beholder is compelled to oscillate between a position
reasonably far from the picture and many positions very close to it ....
However, such perfection had to be bought at a price. Neither a micro-
scope nor a telescope is a good instrument with which to observe human
emotion .... The emphasis is on quiet existence rather than action ....
Measured by ordinary standards the world of the mature Jan van Eyck is
static. 10

What Panofsky says of Van Eyck is quite true. But the "ordinary standards"
that he calls on are none other than the expectations of narrative action created
by Italian art. Although it might appear that painting by its very nature is
descriptive- an art of space, not of time, with still life as its basic theme-it
was essential to the Renaissance aesthetic that imitative skills were bound to
narrative ends. The istoria, as Alberti wrote, will move the soul of the be-
holder when each man painted there clearly shows the movement of his soul.
The biblical story of the massacre of the innocents, with its hordes of angry
soldiers, dying children, and mourning mothers, was the epitome of what, in
this view, pictorial narration and hence painting should be. Because of this
point of view there is a long tradition of disparaging descriptive works. They
have been considered either meaningless (since no text is narrated) or inferior
by nature. This aesthetic view has a social and cultural basis. Time and again
the hierarchy of mind over sense and of educated viewers over ignorant ones
has been summoned to round out the argument for narration with a blast at
an art that delights the eyes. Narration has had its defenders and its expli-
cators but the problem remains how to defend and define description."
Dutch pictures are rich and various in their observation of the world,
dazzling in their display of craft, domestic and domesticating in their con-
cerns. The portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and the presentation of daily life
XXII Introduction

represent pleasures taken in a world full of pleasures: the pleasures of familial

bonds, pleasures in possessions, pleasure in the towns, the churches, the land.
In these images the seventeenth century appears to be one long Sunday, as a
recent Dutch writer has put it, after the troubled times of the previous
century." Dutch art offers a delight to the eyes and as such seems perhaps to
place fewer demands on us than does the art of Italy.
From the point of view of its consumption, art as we think of it in our time
in many respects began with Dutch art. Its societal role was not far from that
of art today: a liquid investment like silver, tapestries, or other valuables,
pictures were bought from artists' shops or on the open market as possessions
and hung, one presumes, to fill space and to decorate domestic walls. We have
few records of commissions and little evidence of buyers' demands. The
problem faced by a modern viewer is how to make this art strange, how to
see what is special about an art with which we feel so at home, whose
pleasures seem so obvious.
The problem is compounded by the fact that, unlike Italian art, northern
art does not offer us an easy verbal access. It did not occasion its own mode
of critical discourse. It differs both from the art of the Italian Renaissance
with its handbooks and treatises and from nineteenth-century realisms, which
were the subject of both extensive journalism and frequent manifestoes. It is
true that by the seventeenth century Italian words and texts had permeated
northern Europe and had even been taken up by a few artists and writers. But
this produced a split between the nature of the art being produced in the north
(largely by craftsmen who still belonged to craft guilds) and the verbal pro-
fessions of treatises as to what was art and how it ought to be made. It was
a split, in short, between northern practice and Italian ideals.
There are few significant signs among Dutch artists of the strain of living
in a native pictorial tradition while admiring, or being told that they should
admire, foreign ideals. There are those Dutch artists who began their careers
by producing history paintings (the architectural painter De Witte, Rem-
brandt's pupils, even Vermeer) but who then turned (commonly with more
positive results) to what are loosely classed as genre scenes. We read of the
figure cut by the group of Dutch artists in Rome. 13 They called themselves the
Bentvueghels (birds of a flock), took on comic names, and engaged in bac-
chanalian initiation ceremonies that simultaneously mocked antiquity and the
Church. They refused to abide by the regulations of the Italian painters and
they left their mark in the form of witty graffiti on convenient walls. In
providing entertainment of this sort for themselves and amusement for the
society around them they were reflecting, one might suppose, on the fact of
their difference. It was in the spirit of briefly triumphing over a sense of
inferiority that they played out their carnival capers. In a quite different sense
we can locate the strain in the very nature of Rembrandt's art. Though it is
arguable that he was out of sympathy with the pictorial aims of his coun-
trymen, he could not embrace the Italian mode as such. Rembrandt produced
his marvelous yet strange images partly out of this conflict. This fruitful
Introduction xxtu

interplay between foreign ideals and the native tradition was rare . Utrecht
artists such as Honthorst and Ter Brugghen are often classified as followers
of Caravaggio. But they responded to an Italian artist who was himself deeply
attracted to the northern European tradition: Caravaggio, it might be argued,
led them back to their own northern roots .
Part and parcel of the difference felt between the art of Italy and that of the
north was a ' sense of Italian superiority and Netherlandish inferiority. The
Italian assumption about the rational authority and power of their art is made
clear in the famous critique of the art of the Netherlanders attributed by
Francisco de Hollanda to none other than Michelangelo himself:
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 also 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 stuffs and masonry, the
green grass of the fields, the 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 pleases some persons, is done without reason
or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skilful choice or boldness
and, finally, without substance or vigour. 14
The passage immediately following this one (one that has understandably not
been quoted in studies devoted to northern art) seals and further grounds
Michelangelo's severe judgment: "It is practically only the work done in Italy
we can call true painting, and that is why we call good painting Italian." We
shall want to return to Michelangelo's rich testimony again. For the moment
I want to note that while reaSOn and art and the difficulty involved with
copying the perfections of God are on the side of Italy, only landscape,
external exactness, and the attempt to do too many things well belong to the
north. The contrast is between the central and definitive Italian concern with
the representation of the human body (what Michelangelo engages when he
speaks of the difficulta of art) and the northern concern with representing
everything else in nature exactly and unselectively . The Netherlanders for
their part did not really disagree. On those rare occasions when northerners
attempt to state the special nature of their native art, they characteristically
concur with the Italian distinction by laying claim to nature, rather than art,
as the source of their artistic accomplishment. 15
The Italian bias is still evident today in the writings of those art historians
who are anxious to demonstrate that Dutch art is like Italian, that it too had
its classical moment, produced its significant history paintings, that it too
signified. Art history has witnessed powerful attempts to rework northern art
in the image of the south. I think this can fairly be said to be part of the thrust
of Panofsky's studies. He ranked the southern aspirations of Durer over his
northern heritage: in Panofsky's account the Durer who depicted the nude
and was intrigued with perspective is favored over the descriptive artist of the
XXIV Introduction

Great Piece of Turf. But even Diirer's exercises in the nude and his architec-
tural settings, which are often devious in their complexity, hardly reveal a
southern sense of picture making. And his prints-including the meditative
Melencolia in which Panofsky read the mood of the Renaissance genius-
display the detailed observation and the descriptive surfaces characteristic of
the north. Basing himself on an iconographical model of meaning first used
to deal with Italian art, Panofsky in his Early Netherlandish Painting saw
Netherlandish images as displaying disguised symbolism, by which he meant
that they hid their meanings beneath realistic surfaces. Despite his Italian bias,
Panofsky's analyses often achieve a balance between the claims for surface
representation and for meaningful depth. This delicate balance has been dis-
rupted by the recent rash of emblematic interpretations of Dutch art.
Many students of Dutch art today view the notion of Dutch realism itself
as the invention of the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the rediscovery
of the relationship of a number of motifs in Dutch paintings to prints affixed
with mottoes and texts in the popular emblem books of the time, iconogra-
phers have concluded that Dutch realism is only an apparent or schijn realism.
Far from depicting the "real" world, so this argument goes, such pictures are
realized abstractions that teach moral lessons by hiding them beneath de-
lightful surfaces. 16 Don't believe what you see is said to be the message of the
Dutch works . But perhaps nowhere is this "transparent view of art," in
Richard Wollheim's words, less appropriate. For, as I shall argue, 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. 17
-." How then are we to look at Dutch art? My answer has been to view it
circumstantially. This has become a familiar strategy in the study of art and
literature. By appealing to circumstances, I mean not only to see art as a social
manifestation but also to gain access to images through a consideration of
their place, role, and presence in the broader culture. I begin with the example
of the life and sOme of the works of Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the
stadholder, a voluminous writer and correspondent and a leading cultural
figure in the Netherlands. His early discovery of Rembrandt and his engage-
ment with the arts have long been of interest to historians of art and of
literature. In his autObiographical fragment about his youth, art appears as
part of a traditional humanistic education retooled for him by his father. But
in recounting his scientific, technological, or Cas Huygens might say) philo-
sophical education done in digression from his father's set program, Huygens
binds images to sight and to seeing, specifically to new knowledge made
visible by the newly trusted technology of the lens. Huygens testifies, and the
society around him confirms, that images were part of a specifically visual, as
contrasted with a textual, culture. The distinction between this seventeenth-
century emphasis on seeing and representation and the Renaissance emphasis
on reading <lnd interpretation has been illuminated recently for us in the
writings of Michel Foucault. 18 It was a general European phenomenon. But
Introduction xxv

It IS In Holland that this mode of understanding the world is fully and

creatively realized in the making of images.
The Dutch present their pictures as describing the world seen rather than (
as imitations of significant human actions . Already established pictorial and
craft traditions, broadly reinforced by the new experimental science and
technology, confirmed pictures as the way to new and certain knowledge of
the world. A number of characteristics of the images seem to depend on this:
the frequent absence of a positioned viewer, as if the world came first (where
we are situated as viewers is a question that one is hard put to answer in
looking at a panoramic landscape by Ruisdael); a play with great contrasts in
scale (when man is not providing the measure a huge bull or cow can be
amusingly played off against a tiny distant church tower); the absence of a
prior frame (the world depicted in Dutch pictures often seems cut off by the
edges of the work or, conversely, seems to extend beyond its bounds as if the
frame were an afterthought and not a prior defining device); a formidable
sense of the picture as a surface (like a mirror or a map, but not a window)
on which words along with objects can be replicated or inscribed; an insis-
tence on the craft of representation (extravagantly displayed by a Kalf who
repeatedly recrafts in paint the porcelain, silver, or glass of the craftsman
along side the lemons of Nature herself). It is, finally, hard to trace stylistic
development, as we are trained to call it, in the work of Dutch artists. Even
the most naive viewer can see much continuity in northern art from Van Eyck
to Vermeer, and I shall often look back from the seventeenth century to
similar phenomena in earlier northern works . But no history on the devel-
opmental model of Vasari has ever been written, nor do I think it could be.
This is because the art did not constitute itself as a progressive tradition . It did
not make a history in the sense that art did in Italy. For art to have a history
in this Italian sense is the exception, not the rule. Most artistic traditions mark
what persists and is sustaining, not what is changing, in culture. What I
propose to study then is not the history of Dutch art, but the Dutch visual
culture -to use a term that lowe to Michael Baxandall.
In Holland the visual culture was central to the life of the society. One
might say that the eye was a central means of self-representation and visual
experience a central mode of self-consciousness. If the theater was the arena
in which the England of Elizabeth most fully represented itself to itself,
images played that role for the Dutch. The difference between the forms this
took reveals much about the difference between these two societies. In Hol-
land, if we look beyond what is normally considered to be art, we find -that
images proliferate everywhere. They are printed in books, woven into the
cloth of tapestries or table linens, painted onto tiles, and of course framed on
walls. And everything is pictured-from insects and flowers to Brazilian
natives in full life-size to the domestic arrangements of the Amsterdammers.
The maps printed in Holland describe the world and Europe to itself. The
atlas is a definitive form of historical knowledge through images whose wide
dissemination at the time we owe to the Dutch. The format of the Dutch atlas
XXVI Introduction

is expanded by Blaeu in the seventeenth century to twelve printed folio

volumes and then in the nineteenth it lends its name to entire collections of
printed images . This involves questions of pictorial mode as well as questions
of social function. While in another country a battle would be accounted for
in a large history painting prepared for court and king, the Dutch issue a
popular news map. Such different modes of representation also involve differ-
ing notions of history. One is bound to the heroic human actions of Italian
painting and privileges unique events , while the other does not.
Having said so much about what the book will include, I should perhaps
mention what it will not. On the subject of religion this book does not,
directly, have much to say. Yet nothing I say about Dutch visual culture is
inconsistent with Dutch religious views and, indeed, I think it can be used to
help turn the current attention awa y from dogma to social practice. So far the
art has been related to dogma or to rules governing behavior. On the other
hand , I relate it to views of knowledge and the world, which are implicitly
imbedded in a religious sense of order.
Although they flourished in a Protestant state, the pictorial phenomena I
am concerned with in Holland in many respects predate the Reformation.
Neither the confessional change, nor the confessional differences that existed
between people in Holland in the seventeenth century seem to help us much
in understanding the nature of the art. To the argument that secular subject
matter and moral emblematic meanings speak to Calvinist influence, one must
counter that the very centrality of and trust to images seems to go against the
most basic Calvinist tenet- trust in the Word. Such a view is surely sup-
ported by the contrasting absence of images in Presbyterian Scotland or
Calvinist New England. An appeal to religion as a pervasive moral influence
in the sociery's view of itself and the larger world of Nature seems a more
fruitful direction to take than to continue to check the art out against the
tenets of the faith . We sorely need a social history of Dutch religion (and
Dutch sociery). There one would have to consider such things as the extraor-
dinary lack of religious prejudice or aggression in Holland (after the one
outburst of the 1618 Synod at Dordrecht) compared to the rest of Europe.
Issues of behavior and belief that produced strife, accusations, even exe-
cutions in England are notable by their rariry in Holland . And when they
occur they do not reverberate in powerful responses on the part of artists or
writers. Dutchmen seem to have suffered much less than other Europeans
from a sense of the threat posed by conflicting views of sociery or of God. A
recent study locates this right in the art by pointing to the ecumenical nature
of Saenredam's church portraits: he adjusts arches so as to blend different
architectural styles and thus efface historical and confessional differences. "
Toleration has its practical side. Like the merchants' insistence on trading
with the enemy during the continuing conflict with Spain, it insures that
business will continue as usual. Father Cats's immensely popular illustrated
books of manners, which have attracted the attention of art historians and
others as evidence of the Dutch absorption in moral questions of behavior,
Introduction XXVlZ

can be understood better in this light. Cats is more distinctive as a taxonomist

of social behavior than as the dogmatic moralist he is often taken to be. Dutch
art is involved with this view. Pictures document or represent behavior. They
are descriptive rather than prescriptive: A constant pressure is felt to make
distinctions, to portray each thing-be it a person, a flower, or a type of
behavior-so as to make it known. But along with this anxiety to define there
is an ease with boundaries . Dutch art is notoriously subject to confusion with
life. And those cultural and societal boundaries so basic to the definition of
the urban West that mark off the city from the country, or the whore from
the wife, can be curiously blurred .
After the first chapter on Constantijn Huygens, the book proceeds as
follows: chapter 2 deals with the problem of what a picture is in Holland by
turning to contemporary notions of sight and seeing, specifically to the model
of the picture offered by Kepler's analysis of the eye; chapter 3 deals with the
cultural role of images, in particular with the kind of authority that was
attributed to their making and viewing. Here I turn to notions of education,
knowledge, and craft found in the writings of Comenius and Bacon and in the
programs of the English Royal Society. Often in these texts we find what the
Dutch painted put into words. The mapping impulse, the subject of chapter
4, brings these results to bear on specific types of Dutch landscape views; and,
turning the tables a bit on the visual culture so defined, chapter 5 considers
the role of words in Dutch images.
Two final remarks which I hope will minimize any misunderstandings . To
those who will protest that Italian art is not fully represented, or that I
exaggerate differences within European art by slighting the continuous inter-
play between the art of different countries, I would reply that they are
mistaking my purpose . I do not want either to multiply chauvinisms or to
erect and maintain new boundaries, but rather to bring into focus the hetero-
geneous nature of art. Attending to the northern descriptive mode challenges
the deeply imbedded tendency of our discipline to collapse all art-making
under a general rubric provided by the viewing of Italian Renaissance art.
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.
And I think that any future study of, say, Jan Steen or the group portrait, to
instance a major artist and a major genre with which I do not deal here, would
benefit from taking it into account. To further locate and secure this way of
seeing Dutch art, I turn briefly, in conclusion, to the two greatest artists of
the time: to Vermeer, who reflected so deeply on, and to Rembrandt, who
was in conflict with, the Dutch art of describing.
1
Constantijn Huygens and
The New World

It is a commonplace that few words

were wasted on art in seventeenth-century Holland. If one wants to find out
how the Dutch thought of the images they made, bought, and looked at one
grabs at straws: Rembrandt's seven preserved letters compared to Rubens's
hundreds; Vermeer glimpsed only indirectly through the legal documents
involving his family; lists of home-town artists, sometimes amplified with a
few extra remarks, that are part of the commemorative publications devoted
to individual towns . Dutch theoretical treatises at least nominally subscribe to
notions of art developed and practiced outside of the Netherlands in France
and Italy. We have little information from the commissioning of works since
the great majority were made for the market or, better, the markets. They
were sold either out of the painter'S shop, from kermis stalls, or, if they took
the form of prints, at a bookseller dealing in maps, books, and prints . Works
of art are recorded in inventories according to categories of subject matter
(such as landscape, kitchen, banquet, or company) that give little sense of the
way the art was perceived, used, or understood. The fact that Dutch art was
so often independent of the texts that were the basis of history paintings made
them also independent of commentary. Reynolds was right when he com-
plained in effect that you cannot tell the story of a Du tch painting, you can
only look at it. One reason the inscriptions in emblem books have appealed
to modern interpreters is that, though at one remove, they give us some verbal
access to otherwise silent works . !
One finds surprisingly rich testimony as to how the Dutch conceived of
images in the writings of Constantijn Huygens. Art historians have long cited
Huygens's Autobiography because of its early championing of Rembrandt
and its taste for the Dutch artists of the day. But they have ignored a quite
different kind of concern with images that is to be found elsewhere in the same
text and in Huygens's other writings as well. Constantijn Huygens (1596-
1687) was the son of the secretary to the first stadholder of the new Dutch
Republic and succeeded his father in that position. 2 He combined service to

1
2 Chapter One

the state and religious orthodoxy with a variety of intellecrual and artistic
skills. The lute, globes, compass, and architecrural plan on the table beside
him in the portrait by Thomas de Keyser (fig. 1) refer to only a few of
Huygens's interests and accomplishments. He was trained in the classics, was
a writer, a poet, a translator of Donne, and had a library almost half the size
of that of the Icing of France. He was well traveled and when still young was
invited to perform on the lute before the English Icing. He was vitally inter-
ested in both art and contemporary science, and he directly encouraged the
career of his famous son, Christian Huygens. Huygens was no ordinary
Dutchman. But there is truth to Huizinga's claim that to understand Holland
one must read Huygens. When one does, it is less the loftiness than the
amplirude of the man that strikes one. It is an amplitude that enables Huygens
to contain and reveal in his writing much of what was of the moment in his
world.
In 1629, at the age of thirty-three, and but a third of the way through his
long life, Huygens put himself to the task of setting down the course of his
life to that time. This fragment of an autobiography is written in Latin and
lay unpublished among his papers until its discovery at the end of the nine-
teenth century. J Huygens's family and his education, which his father cast in
the international, aristocratic mold of the day, give shape to his account. Thus
training in drawing takes its place beside languages, literature, mathematics,
riding, and even dance. Huygens's text reads in some respects like an edu-
cational handbook. It differs from those contemporary autobiographies in
which aristocratic authors like Sir KenelmDigby give short shrift to education
and devote themselves instead to the romance of life. But Huygens takes the
opporrunity afforded him by the educational theme for various personal
asides and digressions that are among the most interesting parts of the frag-
4
ment.
Knowledge and love of art are mixed with chauvinism in the often-cited
passage in which Huygens tells of his own artistic education and goes on to
give an account of art and artists in the Netherlands of his time.' In writing
of his own training, Huygens specifically complains that the artist of his
choice, the old family friend and neighbor Jacques de Gheyn II, was unwill-
ing to serve as his teacher. He was, therefore, not given the opporrunity to
learn the art of rapidly rendering the forms and other aspects of trees, rivers,
hills, and the like, which northerners (as Huygens justly claims) do even
better than the ancients. Huygens instead srudied with Hondius, a print-
maker whose hard and rigid lines were better suited to representing columns ,
marble, and immobile strucrures than moving things like grass and foliage, or
the charm of ruins. In his assessment of Dutch artists, he acknowledges and
praises in particular the slcills of northern portraitists and landscape painters.
He acutely says that they can even represent the warmth of the sun and the
movement of breezes. But while praising the unique accomplishment of such
lifelike representations, Huygens never calls into question the older, estab-
lished tradition of art. And despite his fine "feel" for Dutch painters, he
Constantijn Huyg ens and "The New World" 3

l. THOMAS DE KEYSER , Constantijn Huygens and His Clerk, 162 7. By permission of the
Tr"ustees of the National Gallery, London.
4 Chapter One

awards the palm to Rubens as the greatest artist of the time.

It tells us something of the political outlook of the northern Netherlands
that Rubens, who lived in Flanders, is claimed by a Dutchman as a native
artist. Aside from revealing his taste for Rubens, it reveals Huygens's artistic
outlook. He obviously rates what was known as history painting as the
highest form of artistic achievement. It also is remarkable that Huygens
singles Rembrandt out as a future great- remarkable both in view of the
idiosyncratic nature of Rembrandt's talents and in view of his slow start:
Rembrandt's earliest works hardly held forth such great promise. But this
judgment is still consistent with a bias for history painting. Huygens's hyper-
bolic claim that ancient Greece and Italy would be outdone by a beardless son
of a Dutch miller is made not to dispute but to accept the claims and achieve-
ments of the great tradition of art as it was viewed at the time. In keeping with
this he recommended, though in vain, that Rembrandt go to Italy to see the
likes of Raphael and Michelangelo. The trenchant distinction that Huygens
makes between Rembrandt's expressiveness and the power of the figures as
rendered by his studio-mate Lievens is couched in the very terms in which the
great tradition was conventionally discussed. Huygens often acted on these
beliefs. In the 1630s and 1640s he negotiated for the stadholder with Rem-
brandt for a series representing the Passion of Christ, and at mid-century he
joined forces with the architect Jacob van Campen, a founding father of
Dutch classicism, to work on the allegorical program of the decorations
celebrating the House of Orange in the Huis ten Bosch.
This traditional view of art is maintained only in the passages that Huygens
devoted to his art education and to contemporary artists. Art historians have
not paid attention to the rest of the Autobiography. The long section on art
was excerpted from the rest of the newly discovered manuscript and, accom-
panied by a Dutch translation, was the first part to be published. It was
specially prepared for the benefit of art historians preceding the publication
of the entire Latin text. The more recently published Dutch translation of the
entire text included a special appendix on Huygens as a critic of art based once
again on this particular section of the whole. 6 However, if we look at how
images and their makers are invoked in other parts of the Autobiography we
find surprising things. Huygens takes a quite different stance toward tradition
in general and offers us a different understanding of the nature of Dutch
pictures. It is just because Huygens is so well known as a classically oriented,
humanistically engaged cultural figure that his other side is so striking. And
if pictures are what interest us, it seems to me that the Dutch were preeminent
in that aspect of picture-making that corresponded, broadly speaking, to
Huygens's nonhumanistic, scientific concerns.
The Autobiography builds up to a passage of extravagant praise for the
works of the two men whom Huygens salutes as the leading thinkers of his
i day, Francis Bacon and Cornelis Drebbel:

I have looked up in awe at these two men who have offered in my time the
Constantijn Huygens and "The New World" 5

most excellent criticism of the useless ideas, theorems, and axioms which,
as I have said, the ancients possessed.

[Veterum, quae dixi, inanium notionum, theorernatum, axiomatum cen-

sores praestantissimos duos aetate mea suspexi.]'
Huygens had met the English philosopher-whom he goes so far as to call a
sort of saint- and the Dutch experimenter on one of his first three trips to
England . Both were situated well outside the educational program planned
for him by his father. At one point Huygens even had to defend Drebbel
against his father's charge that he was a sorcerer. Drebbel, an inventor as well
as a sometime entertainer to the English court, was indeed a curious figure. 8
He made microscopes, devised a machine with claims to perpetual motion,
invented a self-playing clavichord, and constructed a submarine in which he
re the submerged under the Thames to the delight and wonder of the court, but
gens which proved useless when tried as a weapon against the French at the seige
..es as of La Rochelle. Part necromancer, part experimentalist of a type frequent at
the the time, he struck contemporaries as either devious and untrustworthy or as
th ese wondrous and inventive, in short, as either a deceiver or a discoverer. It is not
Rem- irrelevant to our discussion of Dutch art that while Huygens found Drebbel
try he admirable and his discoveries fascinating, Rubens was suspicious and dis-
er of missive. In a letter of 1629 to the celebrated scholar Peiresc, a friend with
ao ons whom he shared interests in antiquity and science, the Flemish painter tells
of having seen Drebbel on a London street. On the basis of his appearance and
the nature of his work, Rubens smartly suggests that he might appear greater
5 have at a distance than at close range. Unlike Huygens, Rubens calls the perpetual
on art motion apparatus nonsense and is totally uninterested in his microscope. But,
ccaffi- always the gentleman, he stops short and says that one must be careful not to
It was rely on public gossip to criticize someone one does not know. In a deep sense
cation neither the type of man nor his experiments had any attraction for Rubens.
of the Drebbel's technical and manipulative view of the world is in sharp contrast to
i once the textual and historical concerns of Rubens . 9
t haw Drebbel's connection to the world of Dutch art was of long standing. In his
by we youth he had studied in Haarlem with Goltzius, a leading artist of the pre-
dition vious generation, and he married his younger daughter. He made a map of his
Dutch hometown, Alkmaar, in 1597, at the same time that he was turning to the
ented, design of clocks, water supply systems, and chimneys with improved drafts .
;. And Links between art and the attempts of the new experimental technology to
ninent control nature were well established in the Netherlands. The status of the
ng, to efforts, however, was sometimes suspect. While praising Drebbel's experi-
ments, Huygens was deeply critical of Goltzius's flirtation with what he
Dr the called the "madness" of alchemy. Curiously, though, Huygens makes no
of his mention of De Gheyn's interest in similarly questionable researches . Dis-
tinctions between truth and folly are not always easily made. In the works of
De Gheyn we find juxtapositions of images that seem to expose this issue . A
n e the hermit crab, for example, drawn in all of its spiky detail beside a kind of
6 Chapter One

2. JACQU ES DE GHEYN, Hermit Crab and Witch craft (pen, ink , and watercolor) .
Stadclsches Kunstinst itut, Frankfurt am Main.

witches' sabbath puts the complex relationship between curiosity and imag-
ination in pictorial terms (fig. 2).
Huygens's promotion of Drebbel reaches its climax in his account of
looking through Drebbel's microscope. He reports that people peering
through the lens at first see nothing. (This is, in fact, a just account of what
it is to look through the minute and imperfect lens of.a seventeenth-century
hand-held microscope.) They then cry out that they can see unbelievable
things. It is a new theater of nature, indeed, another world. If only De Gheyn
had lived longer, writes Huygens, he could have used his fine brush to depict
the little things or insects seen in the lens. These drawings would then be
engraved and the engravings collected into a book he would entitle The New
World.
Indeed, material objects that till now were classified among atoms, since
they far elude all human eyesight, presented themselves so clearly to the
observer's eye that when even completely inexperienced p eople look at
things which they have never seen, th ey complain at first that they see
nothing, but sOOn they cry out that they perceive marvelous objects with
their eyes. For in fact this concerns a new theater of narure, another world ,
Constantijn Huygens and "The New World" 7

and if our revered predecessor De Gheyn had been allotted a longer life-
span, I believe he would have advanced to the point to which I have begun
to push people (not against their will) : namely, to portray the most minute
objects and insects with a finer pencil, and then to compile these drawings
into a book to be given the title of the New World, from which examples
could be incised in metal.
[Corpora nempe, quorum inter atom os hactenus aestimatio fuit, omnem
humanam aciem lange fugientia, inspectanti oculo tam distincte obiecit, ut,
cum maxime vident imperiti, quae nunquam videre, nihil se videre questi
primo, mox, incredibilia oculis usurpare clamitent. Revera enim istud novo
in theatro naturae, alia in terrarum orbe versari est et, si Geinio patri
diuturnior vitae usus obtigisset, aggressurum fuisse credo, quo impellere
hominem non invitum coeperam, minutissima quaeque rerum et in-
sectomm delicatiore penicillo exprimere compilatisque in libellum, enius
aeri exemplaria incidi potuissent, Novi Orbis vocabulum imponere.J IO
Huygens looks into a lens and calls for a picture. In calling for a fine artist
to record what he sees in a microscopic lens, Huygens assumes that picturing
serves a descriptive function. It is not tied to received and hallowed knowl-
edge but to new sights of a very individual kind . De Gheyn was an artist who
had drawn both flora and fauna in minute detail (fig. 3), and Huygens seeks

:nag- !

",neyn
.:ep lct
be

3. JACQUES DE G H EY N ,
page from a drawing
book (watercolor on
vellum). Fondation
Custodia (colI. Frits
Lugt), Institur
Neerlandais, Paris.
8 Chapter One

to bind his skills to the new optical technology and the knowledge gained
from it. What is interesting for us as viewers of pictures is the immediate
connection that Huygens makes between the new technology and knowledge
captured in a picture. This invocation of De Gheyn's skills is supported by a
certain notion of picturing and of sight: we draw what we see and conversely
to see is to draw. There is an assumed identity between seeing and the artifice
of drawing that is realized in the artist's image.
In considering the kind of images that Huygens expects, we are calling
attention to things about Dutch art that seem so obvious that we take them
for granted. Art as the record of the image in the lens touches qualities that
led commentators to consider Dutch art to be an extraordinarily and patiently
crafted description of the world. The single instance of summoning De Gheyn
to draw what is in the lens is not a sufficient basis for a general account of
Dutch art. But this and other related passages in Huygens's writing suggest
a certain cultural space that was occupied by Dutch images at the time.
Art, as Clifford Geertz has shown us, is part and parcel of a cultural
system. Geertz argues that the kind of presence art has is not an absolute fact,
evocable in some universally valid aesthetic terms, but is locally specific.
The definition of art in any society is never wholly intra-aesthetic, and
indeed but rarely more than marginally so. The chief problem is presented
by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force, in whatever form and in result
of whatever skill it may come, is how to place it within the other modes
of social activity, how to incorporate it into the texture of a particular
pattern of life. And such placing, the giving to art objects a cultural signifi-
cance, is always a local matter; what art is in classical China or classical
Islam, what it is in the Pueblo southwest or highland New Guinea, is just
not the same thing, no matter how universal the intrinsic qualities that
actualize its emotional power (and I have no desire to deny them) may be.
The variety that anthropologists have come to expect in the spirit beliefs,
the classification systems, or the kinship structures of different people, and
not just in their immediate shapes but in the way of being-in-the-world
they both promote and exemflify, extends as well to their drummings,
carvings, chants, and dances. I .

The absence of a special discourse about Dutch art may be a blessing in

disguise, for it encourages us to look outside the art itself for clues as to its
status, role, and meaning in the society. This is just where Huygens's Auto-
biography and his other writing can help us. They open up the possibility of
defining the particular nature of a culture in which images play such a prom-
inent role. In suggesting the new authority given to a visual as against a
textual form of knowledge, Huygens suggests one reason for the peculiar
primacy that images had at the time. But the variety of ways that images filled
this role and the characteristics they exhibit in the process remain to be
considered.
Huygens concludes his autobiographical fragment by looking into Dreb-
bel's microscope and proclaiming the discovery of a new world. In his final
Constantijn Huygens and "The New World" 9

sentence he expresses the wish to profit from their conversation, the most
interesting that he had ever had. Huygens was still young when he wrote this
and had a rich and various life ahead . But the interests revealed here are a far
cry from those we expect of the educated humanist, commited to ancient
languages, quoting established wisdom, and celebrating Rubens. The artist
and his art are linked in this conclusion not to the noble tales, the beautiful
bodies, and the expressive gestures of history painting, but quite simply to the
world seen, the world known through seeing rather than through reading.
Neither here nor anywhere else in his writings does Huygens reveal that he
feels any conflict between the aims of humanistic learning and the new natural
knowledge, just as he sets up no conflict between history painting and what
I call the art of describing . Immediately following his proclamation of the new
world seen in Drebbel's lens he writes:
Nothing can compel us to honor more fully the infinite wisdom and power
of God the Creator unless, satiated with the wonders of nature that up till
now have been obvious to everyone-for usually our astonishment cools
as we grow familiar with nature through frequent contact-we are led into
this second treasure-house of nature, and in the most minute and disdained
of creatures meet with the same careful labor of the Great Architect,
everywhere an equally indescribable majesty .

[Infinitam Creatoris Dei sapientiam ac potentiam venerari nulla re magis

adigamur, quam si, satiati obviis cuique hactenus naturae miraculis, quo-
rum, ut fit, frequenti llSli ac familiaritate stupor intepuit, in alterum hune
naturae thesaurum imrnissi, in minimis quibusque ac despectissimis
eandem opificis industriam, parem ubique et ineffabilem maiestatem
offendamusT '

Huygens displays an extraordinary optimism about the entire enterprise of

the new science for traditional theological reasons. He was certain that God's
great plan was being more fully discovered in the lessons of the microscope
and the telescope.
This confirming sentiment puts us in mind of Bacon, the thinker whom,
next to Drebbel, Huygens admired most. Huygens is also a Baconian in the
sense that he thinks of modern times as different from the past by virtue of
knowledge and achievements unknown to the ancients. This theme is repeat-
edly touched on by Huygens in the Autobiography, whether with the exam-
ple of the superiority of John Donne's preaching or the new technology of the
lens. In spite of his classical education and his love for ancient authors,
Huygens warns of the hold that the ancients have on men's minds. Hc quotes
at some length from Bacon's Great Instauration on just this point:
Except that under the influence of a unanimity that is firmly rooted in, so
to speak, the judgment of time, we depend upon a system of thought
largely deceptive and unsound, so that for the most part we do not know
what has been noted in the sciences and arts at different periods and places
10 Chapter One

and what has been brought out into the open, much less what has been
undertaken by individuals and studies in silence.

[praeterquam quod consensu .. . iam inveterato tanquam temporis iudicio

moti, ratione admodum fallaci et infirma nitimur, cum magna ex parte
notum nobis non sit, quid in scientiis et artibu s, variis saeculis et locis,
innotuerit et in publicum emanarit, multo minus, quid a singulis tentatum
sit et secreto agitatum.r
Huygens introduces the topic of the ancients versus the moderns in a
surprisingly anecdotal way. He says that from the age of sixteen he has had
to use eyeglasses in order to see clearly. Those wide-set, bulging eyes, so
familiar to us from his portraits, were weak. To his delight, Huygens reports
his discovery (which has since been confirm ed) that the use of lenses is a
strictly modern invention. We can praise antiquity, but this is something they
did not know about. In a lengthy "digression on eyeglasses" in the humanist
manner, Huygens recounts th e history and use of lenses. Many other cus-
toms, arts, and sciences that were unknown to the ancients are JU St now , he
p oints out , being discovered . On this note Huygens proceeds from his eye-
glasses to a brief (though misleading) assessment of modern optics and geog-
raphy. The contrast between the teachings of antiquity and the discoveries of
modern technology and science is the same leitmotiv that sounds loud and
clear in Huygens's praise of Bacon and Drebbel. "
Huygens, of course, was hardly alone at the time in arguing this way about
th e ancients and the moderns, but there is a further distinction to be made.
In the complex turmoil of old and new, of craft and theory that make up what
used to be called the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, two
strands are normally distinguished: the observational and experimental (in the
ori ginal sens e of experiential) practice promoted by Bacon, on the one hand,
and the new mathematics on the other. However one judges the innovation
or contributi on of these two, it is clearly the former that Huygens invokes
and with which h e feels comfortable. In this he is in concert with his COun-
trymen . His son Christiaan, who parted company with this tradition, did so
abroad, in France. IS This issue is not only intellectual but also social. It
involves the kind of people you know and the world in whi ch you live.
Huygens's interest in art is commonly related to his general cultivation. A
leading study has argued that it is this that bound him most closely to England
and things English. A. G. H. Bachrach says, "Sir Constantine [he was
knighted already in 1622] ... was one of the few equally at home in the two
worlds in which England and Holland respectively excelled - the world of
music and poetry and the world of painting." 16 While this Dutch scholar
emphasizes the lofty , aristocratic, and traditional side of Huygens's culture,
it was (appropriately) an American , the late Rosalie Colie, who exposed the
oth er side, the Huygens who supp orted modern thinkers and the new tech-
nology against traditional learning and art, the Huygens whose world in-
cluded Bacon but alsoDrebbel, "lower in rank but not in intell ect," as he put
it. Huygens had one of the great libraries of the time, but he also collected
Constantijn Huygens and " Th e New World" 11

lenses, brought a camera obscura back from England, and sponsored Leeu -
wenhoek with the Royal Society. These interests also bound Huygens to
England and things English . Both countries excell ed in a visually and tech-
nologically oriented cultu re, thou gh the Engli sh contributed to it more
through their texts and the D utch throu gh th eir images, as we shall see.
Huygens has no quarrel with art as a conveyor of traditional values. The
long section of th e Autobiography devoted to his own artistic edu cation and
to the inventory of Netherlandish artists testifies to this. However, he also
thinks of images as bound in a most concrete way to the recording of new
knowledge of th e world seen. Images are thus tied to an advancement of
learning, in Bacon's phrase, which Huygens specifically sets off against the
inherited wisdom of th e past.
The most extended statement of this is his great and moving Daghwerck,
or The Day's Work. 17 It is a long and complex p oem of over two thousand
lines with a prose commentary. Hu ygens started it in 1630 in praise of, and
dedicated to, his wife Susanna, as a record of his daily life wi th her. The
Daghwerck offers an updated version of th e education set forth in the Auto-
biography. This time, however, the education is of his own making, devi sed
by Huygens for his wife. In it he brings the discoveries of the new science into
his household for th eir commOn delight, education, and wonder. If Susanna
had not died tragically following the birth of a child in 1637, Huygens
intended to go on to set forth a poetic inventory of the day's occupations and
pleasures, the sports, gardening, music, painting, and so forth of their life.
The conversation Huygens finished with Drebbel at the end of the Auto-
biography is taken up instead with his wife . As it is we are led through the
world by microscope and telescope and through a survey of man's body and its
medicines and then the poem abruptly ends in despair.
There is something very Dutch about a poet using the intimacy of his own
house and his marriage as a central image of life, even as there is somethin g
Dutch about Hu ygens's equanimity toward the implications of th e new sci-
ence. The setting of Huygens's poem reminds us of th e images of hou se,
household, and family so frequent in northern art, from the homey dwelling
of a Virgin of Van Eyck or Camp in to th e interiors of the seventeenth century.
It is here in the comfortable, enclosed, private setting of one's own home that
experience is received and literally taken in . This setting surely determines the
definition and perception of what the nature of human experience is. While
the Autobiography takes Huygens across the chan nel to England, tracing hi s
experience of books and ideas, of men and events in the great world, the
Daghwerck instead brings the world into his home. It domesticates
cosmography-akin to the Dutch custom of decorating the walls of thei r
rooms with maps of the worl d, as we shall see later.
A figure that Huygens employs to make an account of this to his wife says
this and implies more:
I have agreeable tidings which I shall bring you inside the house. Just as in
a darkened room one can see by the action of the sun through a glass
everything (though inverted) which goes on outside.
12 Chapter One

[Hebb ick aengename ni ewe tijdingen, ick salse u binnens huijs voor-
brenghen, gelijckmen in een duijstere Carner door een geslepen G las bij
sonneschijn verthoont 'tghene buijtens huijs a m gaet, maer aeverechts .J"
This is Huygens's p rose annotation to a passage of his poem in which h e refers
to bringing news to his wife in the house even as a glass conveys th e world
outside to those within. The an notation makes it clear th at the glass referr ed
to is a camera obscura-literally a " dark room." This was the common name
given to a device th at allows light to pass through a ho le (often fitted with a
glass lens) into a box or darkened room to cas t an image on a surface of the
world beyond (figs. 18,23). Th e principle is the same as that of a camera, but
the image cannot be preserved. It is quite in keeping with what we kn ow of
Hu ygens that he would call on the camera obscura to bring knowledge of the
world to his wife. I t is "the new tru th, new born into th e clarity of midday's
light" ("de nieu w-geboren Waerheit / Niewgeboren inde klaerheit I Van des
middaghs hooghen dagh") . " It is knowled ge that takes the form of a pi ctu re.
Hu ygens's fascination with the camera obscura can be dated to his visit to
Drebbel during hi s London stay in 1622. Th e instrument, whi ch had been
known in other fo rms for centuries, became a curiosity all over Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Wh ile others had interests in it that were
as tronomical and theatrical, Huygens's interests was purely pictorial - an
interest shared by his countrymen. Its picture-making capacity fascinated him
as it did the D e G heyns. The letter he wrote home to his parents exclaiming
on the beauty of the amazing image cas t by Drebbel's devi ce is an established
part of modern studies on th e Dutch use of th e camera obscura.
I have in my home Drebbel 's other instrument, which certainly produces
admirable effects in reflection painting in a dark room. It is not possibl e to
describe for you the beauty of it in words : all painting is dead in com-
parison, for here is life itself, o r something more noble, if only it did nOt lack
words . Figure, contour, and movement come together naturally therein , in
a way that is altogether pleasing.

U'ay chez may I'autre instrument de Dreb bel, qui certes fait des effets
admirables en peinture de refl exion dans une ehambre obscu re: il ne m'est
possible de vous en declarer la beaute en paroles: toute peinture est morte
au prix, car c'est icy la vie mesme, au quelque chose de plus releve, si la
parole n'y man quoit. Car et la figure et Ie contour et les movements s'y
recontrent naturell ement et d'une grandement plaisante.Y'
The image is a direct chall enge to the painter , but it also serves as a model for
his art. Althou gh elsewhere Hu ygens suggests its utility as a valu able shortcut
to image-making, here it is its picturelike nature that fascin ates him . Words
cannot do justice, he explains, to an image that is life itself or something in
even greater reli ef than life. This is the same point that Reynolds makes about
Dutch art when he despairs of writing an entertaining account of it. The
movement that Hu ygens praises recalls his prai se for th e Dutch skill in repre-
senting natural things. It is not human events or narrations, but the represent-
Constantijn Huygens and "The New World" 13

ation of the movement of nature herself that delights . It is not order, but the
momentary, unfixed aspect of nature's passing show. Huygens's reception of
the natural rendering of the world in the camera obscura can be persuasively
related to his praise of the lifelikeness of contemporary Dutch landscape
paintings. A circle is closed with this device, which offers technological
confirmation of a taste we know he had.
We can learn much from the widespread Dutch fascination with the camera
obscura as a maker of pictures like their own, and we shall return to this at
greater length in the chapter that follows . Here, since it concerns Drebbel, I
want to note a curious absence or exclusion: what the Dutch did not have in
mind in their fascination with it. We are so accustomed by now to associating
the image cast by the camera obscura with the real look of Dutch painting (and
after that with photography) that we tend to forget that this was only one face
of the device. It could be put to quite different uses. These uses significantly
had no echo in Dutch pictures and we should consider why. One of the other
wondrous devices that Drebbel produced was a magic lantern show, similar
in construction to the camera obscura but with a human performance in view.
Among Huygens's papers, in fact, is a letter of Drebbel's describing the
transformation made possible by projecting himself in different ways:

I take my stand in a room and obviously no one is with me. First I change
the appearance of my clothing in the eyes of all who see me. I am clad at
first in black velvet, and in a second, as fast as a man can think, I am clad
in green velvet, in red velvet, changing myself into all the colors of the
world. And this is not all, for I can change my clothing so that I appear to
be clad in satin of all colors, then in cloths of all colors, now cloth of gold
and now cloth of silver, and I present myself as a king, adorned in dia-
monds and all sorts of precious stones, and then in a moment become a
beggar, all my clothing in rags. 21
.''''Cll1. m
Drebbel changes from king to beggar and then, in a lighter vein, he pro-
ceeds to turn himself into a tree and then into a veritable menagerie of animals:
a lion, a bear, a horse, a cow, a sheep, a calf, and a pig . These transformations
also approximate art. But here Drebbel is closer to the masquing entertain-
ments that delighted the English court than to the paintings of the Dutch. The
camera obscura principle is employed to contrive a theatrical presentation,
which is made up of Drebbel's transformations or narrations of himself. It
differs from the presentation of recorded nature that is praised by Huygens
for in two respects : first, because it is performative or theatrical in character, and
second, because the maker of the image, rather than standing by as a viewer,
injects himself into its midst. By contrast, Dutch pictures avoid such a the-
atrical presentation in the interest of embracing the world described. Hence
it is not surprising that Huygens and his countrymen were fascinated by the
descriptive aspect of the camera obscura. A brief excursus on a related picto-
- repre- rial example can help us to clarify this point further in its relationship to
Dutch art.
14 Chapter One

4. JAN DE BRAY, A Couple Represented as Ulysses and Penelope, 1668. Coll ection of the
J. B. Speed An Museu m, Louisvi ll e, Kentucky. Ph oto : Prudence Cum ing Associates
Ltd., London.

A favored genre of portraiture in Holland was the so-called historiating

portrait. 22 One might assume from the name that the Dutch, like Drebbel in
England, played at transform ation. It is often surprising today to see what
historical identities the Dutch sitters wished to take on: a merchant and his
wife as Ulysses and Penelop e (fig. 4), Jan de Bray depicted a man and his wife
as Antony and Cleopatra. But even more surprising than the choice of per-
sona is the manner of presentation . And it is here that th e contrast to Dreb-
bel's use of the camera obscura will become clear. All such sitters for histor-
ical portraits, almost wi th out exception, are distinguished by looking
dressed-up rath er than transformed. Unlike Drebbel, they could claim to foo l
no one. It is a collusion between portrayed and portrayer. It is as if the
insistent identity of the Dutch si tters, present in the look of their faces and
their telling domesti c bearing, combines with the insistently descriptive mode
of the artist representing them to make them unable to appear other than
themselves. It is Rembrandt, unique in this way as in so many oth ers, whose
mysterious and probing portraits redeem the genre. A Rembrandt work of
this type often poses ti, e unanswerable question as to wheth er we have a
portrait or a hi storical work before our eyes. The unresolved case of the
so-called Jewish Bride (fig. 5) reveals the degree to which he can engage
Constantijn Huygens and "The New World" 15

5. R EMBRANDT VAN RIJ N, The Jewish Bride. By courtesy of the Ri jksmuseum-Srichting,

Am sterdam.

contemporary individuals in the imagined life of other times and conversely

grant presence and individuality to the imagined figures of history. 2J (A
comparison of his awkward [ early] Saskia as Flora with the splendid [late]
H endrijcke as Flora suggests that even Rembrandt is not always successful in
this.) Such a sense of Rembrandt's dramatic (though notably nongestural)
proclivities also gives us a way in which to understand the extraordinary
variety of portrayals of self that he made in his lifetime. And this brings us
back to Drebbel's letter and to hi s magic lantern . If we follow Rembrandt
from his early, etched self-portrait as the beggar seated on a mound (fi g. 6),
in wh ich he dresses himself in rags, to th e royal demeanor that he takes on in
the Frick Self-Portrait (fig. 7), we are surely witnessing Drebbel's magic
lantern rather than Huygens'S world described.
Let us return to where we left Huygens beside th e camera obscura in his
Daghwerck. A primary means to knowledge in the poem is the eye. It is
praised as among the hi ghest of God's gift to man .
o you who give th e eyes and th e power,
., have a Give eyes throu gh this power:
;e of th e Eyes once mad e watchful,
} engage Which see th e totali ty of all there is to see.
16 Chapter One

6. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, 7. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, Self-Portrait, 1658. Copyright the
Beggar Seated on a Mound. Frick Collection, New York.
(etching). Teylers Museum,
Haarlcm.

[0, die d'oogen en ' tgeweld geeft,

Oogen geeft bij dit geweld :
Oogen eens ter wacht gestelt,
En die all' sien soo der vee!' sien :J"

The eye is the means by which Huygens reports new knowledge of the world.
He travels up to the heavens, then down into the earth where he looks at
flowers, gnats, and ants. The smallest things that were previously invisible
can now be seen with the help of the magnifying glasses:
From little Flowers, Midges, Ants, and Mites shall I draw my lessons.
With the aid of the microscope, parts of these the smallest of Creatures till
now invisible have at this time become known.

[Oyt Bloemkens, Muggen, Mieren ende Sieren sal ick mij lessen trecken.
Constantijn Huygens and "The New World" 17

Want der kleinste schepselen tot noch toe ongesiene deelen zijn nu bekent
geworden, door hulp van onse korte vergroot-Brillen.]25
Although people said you could not see them with your eyes, you now
can- from the stars in heaven to the individual grains of sand on the shore.
Huygens enthusiastically repeats the voyage with his eyes:
And discerning everything with our eyes as if we were touching it with our
hands; we wander through a world of tiny creatures till now unknown, as
if it were a newly discovered continent of our globe.

[Ende onderscheidende alles by onse ooghen, als oft wij 't met handen
tasten, wandelen door eene tot noch toe onbekende wereld van kleine
schepselen oft het een niew ontdeckt gedeelte van den Aerdbodem
waere.J 6
We are truly as gods, concludes another poem, if we can see everything from
this high est point of the heavens to the tiniest creatures on earth.
On the Telescope
At last mortals may, so to speak, be like gods,
If they can see far and near, here and everywhere.

In Telescopium
lJ)ijs, dicat, liceat tandem mortalibus esse,
Si procul et prope, et hic esse et ubique queunt.J"
The tone of Huygens's utterance does not present a challenge but rather a
tribute to God's devising. He takes a positive stance toward what was, to
many at the time, an unnerving new view of man's place in the world. Perhaps
Huygens suggest some uncertainty when he, like Milton after him, hands a
telescope to the Devil:
On the Same Glasses [lenses]
Who is to say that the Tempter
Did not have the use of that lens,
Since he showed the Lord
All the Earth's Kingdoms?

Des M esmes Lunettes

[Qui dira si Ie Tentateur
.·orld. N'auoit I'usage de ce verre,
Des lors qu'il monstra au Seigneur
Tous les Roijaumes de la Terre?]"
But the real issue was not the hands into which the glasses fell. This rhyme
offers a rational explanation of how Jesus was enabled to see. The issue was
rather man 's place or, more specifically, his measure in this new world.
It followed, as part and parcel of the primacy granted to sight, that the issue
of scale or the estimation of relative size became a pressing one. An immediate
and devasting result of the possibility of bringing to men's eyes the minutest
18 Chapter One

of living things (the organisms viewed in the microscopic lens), or the farthest
and largest (the heavenly bodies viewed through the telescopic lens), was the
calling into question of any fixed sense of scale and proportion. The related
problem of how we perceive distance and estimate relative size still exercises
students of perception. Whatever the solution might be, there is general
conclusion that the eyes cannot by themselves estimate distance and size. It
is this that telescopes and mi croscopes made clear in the seventeenth century.
To many it seemed a devasting dislocation of the previously understood
measure of the world , or, in sh ort, of man as its measure. The simple enthu-
siasm with which Huygens greets this dislocation of man is astonishing . Part
of the passage praising Drebbel at the conclusion of the Autobiography reads
as follows:

If nothing else, let us learn this, that the estimation which we commonly
make of the size of things is variable, untrustworthy, and fatuous insofar
as we believe that we can eliminate every comparison and can di scern any
great difference in size merely by the evidence of our senses. Let us in short
be aware that it is impossible to call anything "little" or "large" except by
comparison. And then , as a result, let us firmly establish the proposition
that the multiplying of bodies .. . is infinite; once we accept this as a
fundamental rule then no body, even th e most minute, may be so greatly
magnified by lenses without there being reason to assert that it can be
magnified more by other lenses , and then by still others, and so on end-
lessly .

lSi non aliud, hoc sane edocti, quae magnitudinis rerum vulgo aestimatio
est, f1uxam, futilem et insanam esse, quatenus omiss. comparatione aliquo
sensuum indicio absolute discerni creditur. Tandem hoc sciatur, nihil
usquam parvi aut magni extare nisi ex parallelo; denique ex hoc statuatur,
multiplicationem istam corporum infinitam esse et , his rei principiis tradi-
tis, nullum de minimis corpusculum tantopere vitris augeri, quin asserendi
locus sit, in immensum aliis item atgue aliis auctum iri.r 9
Huygens delights in offering specific examples of the loss of measure and
proportion in his Daghwerck (I am quoting once more from the prose com-
mentary that clarifies his points):
For example: a city gate as we now see it is but a mere crevice, compared
to a crevice as seen through the magnifying lenses, which looks like a huge
gate. And if one viewed with such glasses one of the 360 degrees, one
would find space in it for 1000 miles instead of 15.

[Bij voorbeeld: Een' Stads poorte, sao wijse nu sien, is maer een splete, by
een splete door het vergrootglas gesien, die sich als een onmatighe Poorte
verthoont. Ende alsmen met suleke Brillen eenen van de 360. grad en be-
sagh, men souder ruijmte in vi nden voor 1000 mijlen in plaets van 15. yo
The juxtaposition of a tiny crevice and huge town gate, or the expansion of
the degree into a panoramic view, brings to mind characteristic features of
Constantijn Huygens and "The New World" 19

_ Part
reads

_':""'n any
ii1short
':'1Hby
:00$1000
1is as a
greatly
! can be
on end-
8. PAULUS POTTER, The Young Bull, 1647. Mauricshuis. The H ague.

les tlmatIO
p" ....III Cali quo Dutch art. Pau lus Potter's famous Young Bull looms against a dwarfed church
-,ru r, nihil tower and sports a tiny fly on its extensive flank (fig. 8). Philips Koninck's
panoramas extend the small reach of th e Dutch land into an expanse that rivals
the dimensions of the globe itself (fig. 86). The curious image of the artist is
often reflected in miniature on the surface of a wine jug in Abraham van
Beyeren's stilllifes (figs . 9, 10). Equating through juxtaposition of near and
-easure and far, or small and large, had occupied northern painters since at least Van
... ?rose cOm- Eyck. He had depicted himself in miniature reflected in his works (fig . 11)
and had juxtaposed the hands of Chancellor Rolin against the towers of a
distant town. Did artists in the north ever, one wonders, posit any fixed
measure or proportion?
It is this question that forms the basis of that famous complaint against
northern art attributed to Michelangelo. It is the final sentence of this passage
that concerns us:
;plete, by In F landers they paint with a view to external exactness or such things as
e Poorte may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and
:raden be- prophets. They paint sruffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the
an 15.]" 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
-:!':.itu res of it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry
20 Chapter One

9. ABRAHAM VAN B EY ER EN, Still Life with a Silv er Wine Jar and a Reflected Portrait of
the Artist. The Cleveland Museum of Art, purchased from the Mr. and Mrs. William
H. Marlatt Fund.
Constantijn H uygens and "The New World" 21

10. ABRAHAM VAN BEYEREN, detai l of fig. 9 (artist's reflection) . 11. JAN VAN EYCK, Madonna
with the Canon van der
Pae/e, detai l (artist's
reflection). Musee
Communal des Beaux Arts,
Bruges. Copyright A.C.L.
Brussels.
22 Chapter One

or proportion, without skilfu l choice or boldness and, finally, without

substance or vigour. }'
We usually remember the emphasis on detailed description from this passage.
But the speaker significantly ties such detail to a lack of reason, art, sym-
metry, and proportion. Alberti had written that
large, small, long, short, high, low, wide, narrow, light, dark, bright,
gloomy, and everything of the kind, which philosophers termed accidents,
because they mayor may not be present in things,-all these are such as
to be known only by comparison. "
But in the face of such relativism, he confidently asserted that man provides
the measure in a way that determines and assures the nature of Italian pic-
tures:
As man is best known of all things to man, perhaps Protagoras, in saying
that man is the scale and the measure of all things, meant that accidents in
all things are duly compared to and known by the accidents in man. 3J

Huygens does not accept this reasoning. On the contrary, his celebration of
the conjunction of small and large, and of near and far, accepts the absence
of any fixed proportion or human measure. What had long been characteristic
of northern art became the proven human condition in the seventeenth cen-
tury. We shall see in the following chapters that this is not the only respect
in which northern pictures anticipated certain seventeenth-century ways of
understanding the world.
Accepting the relativity of size, as revealed to the eye strengthened by the
lens, raises the question of the truth or status of vision. We see a crevice in
one way when it is enlarged by a lens to the size of a city gate, and in another
way when it appears much smaller than a city gate. Which view is the true
one? How do we define the identity of things in the world when they are seen
as so variable in size? Can we trust our eyes? (Lenses had been rejected before
this time just because it was thought that they misled or distorted true vision.)
Huygens's delight in the unresolvable question of size means that he accepts
the fact that in making an image our sight plays tricks. To accept the decep-
tions of sight, and sight itself as a useful artifice, is, paradoxically, a condition
of his single-minded concentration on sight and things seen. This surfaces
particularly in his attention to the question of the truthfulness of lifelike
images. The issue occupies Huygens at one point in his Autobiography and
to a lesser extent in the Daghwerck. First of all, he gives evidence that he
himself painted paintings to fool the eyes. He describes with pleasure his still
life with hazelnu ts, a pipe, a candle, and a large fly in the De Gheyn manner.
With uneasy excitement he describes the fearful likeness of a head of Medusa
by Rubens. It awakens so much uncertainty in the viewer as to its status- real
or painted-th at the friend who owned it kept it covered and as it were
disarmed. Although Huygens uses the Medusa to discuss the relationship of
beauty to ugliness or horror, the basic problem concerns the truth of such a
Constantijn Huygensand "The New World" 23

representation . It is this theme that Huygens raises in his remarks on contem-

porary artists when he turns to portraiture and to the Dutch portraitist he
considers the greatest of all, Michiel van Miereveld. In attempting to put his
finger on the lifelike quality of his portraits, Huygens concludes that in the
end, as Seneca had written, the likeness of art is inferior to reality. But he does
not let the issue rest there. He proceeds to give examples of the tangled
relationship between sitter and representation or between life and art. He
adds a phrase from Tacitus to the effect that art borders directly on deception,
"breve confinium artis et falsi."" Even when it is true, a human making
borders on falseness. The "art" (in the sense of the human making) that
Tacitus had characterized in this way was a predicti on by certain astrologers
that was believed but misunderstood. " Therefore, when it came true, it came
true in unexpected ways and was thought to be false. This anecdote, like its
motto quoted by Huygens, suggest how close to each other truth and error
are.
It is Huygens's preoccupation with the problem of the truth of a represen-
tation that I wish to emphasize. It is a problem he raises when he comes to
praise Drebbel's camera obscura in the Autobiography. It is in the nature of
the device that it upends the world imaged in it: the image it casts is upside
down unless something is done to right it. Though Drebbel himself claimed
to be able to correct this imperfection, the falsifi cation was disturbing to
Huygens. The instrument whose image-making he extols is itself falsifying.
In the midst of the evocation of the camera obscura as the bearer of new truths
to his wife in the Daghwerck, Huygens interrupts himself to warn her of this
danger. Indeed, from the figure of truth he turns to its opposite. Huygens
proceeds to relate the camera obscura's reversal of the world to the reversal
of truths or lies that are produced by men (historians among others) in the
world .J6 The concern with the nature of this image is part of a continuing
concern with the truth of images. The instance of a real-looking, but still in
some aspects false, representation is situated right on the borderline between
reality and artifice, which, on the evidence of their eye-fooling pictures,
intrigued the Dutch. Far from minimizing the importance of images, it sug-
gests how much they depended on them. .
With his rare combination of public service, great learning, and diverse
talents, Constantijn Huygens could be described as a Renaissance figure
transported to seventeenth-century Holland. But in important respects he is
completely at home in his time and place. He turned away from the estab-
lished knowledge and texts of the past for the newest discoveries being made
in the advancement of natural knowledge. His unbounded confidence in the
technologies that strengthened human sight led him to value images and sights
of all kinds as the basis for new knowledge. His enthusiasm took quite
practical forms. The link between pictorial depiction and natural knowledge
in the writings of Huygens is not based on mathematics or scientific theory,
but rather on observations, experimental procedures, and their practical out-
come. It was the medicine, land-drainage, mapmaking, and the little animals
24 Chapter One

in Leeuwenhoek's lenses that interested him. J7 And therefore it was quite

natural for Huygens to associate art, or image-making, with such practical
tasks.
In the Autobiography, as part of his general discussion of the artistic
training that his father planned for him, Huygens argues for the utility of a
skill in drawing. He offers the example of the kind of record of one's travels
that one can make if one knows how to draw. The Autobiography is of course
an outline of a proper education. Drawing had already been considered 'a skill
suitable to the wealthy in ancient times. Huygens establishes this by quoting
Pliny, to which we can add the example of Castiglione's The Courtier, which
also commends drawing. But perhaps because of the theoretical weight given
internationally to disegno (the conceptual role of drawing in the invention of
images), the craft and social utility of tekening (the Dutch word for drawing)
has not been defined. There is much evidence from the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries that art served as a pictorial record or description.
Huygens tells us in his Autobiography how his great-uncle Joris Hoefnagel
had traveled widely in Europe from the 1560s to the 1590s preparing drawings
of cities for use in the great Civitates Orbis Terrarum of Braun and Ho-
genberg. Botanical description, maps, topography, and costume study all
were tasks "for the artist as illustrator at the time. Until recently, art historians
have tended to separate high art, on the one hand, from image-making as a
craft with utilitarian uses. The line is drawn so that what is considered to be
a craft has not been considered to be art. 38 What happens to the practical
images praised by Huygens? To the interest in mapping, archaeology, and
botany that are present in a landscape by Van Goyen, a church interior by
Saenredam, or a vase of flowers by Bosschaert? Artful images such as these
make it hard to dismiss pictorial craft.
The pursuit of natural knowledge in the seventeenth century provides a
model for the consideration of both craft and high art. Here the relationship
between craft and theory is a recognized problem. Let us propose that the
empirically based pursuit of natural knowledge, for which Huygens opts,
contrasts with the classical, mathematically based studies, even as the craft
concerns of Dutch artists do with the aims and ideals of high art. The so-called
\ Merton thesis, which linked the Protestant ethic-a strong utilitarian strain,
a work ethic and, a mistrust of system-with the development of science, has
been much disputed. It attempted to explain more than it could. In a recent
reconsideration, Thomas Kuhn wisely relates the Merton thesis not to the
development of science in general but to the experimental, Baconian strain in
particular. This was the form of science that was at its strongest in England
and in the Netherlands. It is this experimental, Baconian strain to which
Huygens implicitly binds Dutch art. J9
The social history of the Dutch artist has yet to be written. But to the extent
that we acknowledge art as a practical craft, we must reconsider our notion
of the occupation of the artist as well as of his product. The advantage of
drawing an analogy between the artist and the experimenter in natural knowl-
Constantijn Huygens and "The New World" 25

edge is that it encourages us to focus anew on what went into the making of
Dutch images: an absence of any learned discourse and no connection with
any institution engaged in it; the use of traditional skills; a renewed sense of
purpose and delight in discovery.
There is a two-way street here between art and natural knowledge. The
analogy to the new experimental science suggests certain things about art and
- .:ourse artistic practice, and the nature of the established tradition of art suggests a
-=-<'- a skill certain cultural receptivity necessary for the acceptance and development of
the new science. With the single exception of Galileo in Italy, northern
which Europe was the center for the use of the lens. The Dutchman Leeuwenhoek
was amazingly the first, and for a while the only, man in Europe to pursue
the study of what was seen in microscopic lenses . The fact that the country
that first used microscopes and telescopes had Van Eyck and other works like
his in its past is not just an amusing coincidence, as Panofsky once claimed. 4 0
Didn't northern viewers find it easier to trust to what was presented to their
eyes in the lens, because they were accustomed to pictures being a detailed
_ ::raWIngs record of the world seen? Given the extraordinary articulateness and persis-
m d Ho- tence of the pictorial tradition in the north-a tradition that neither the
snI dy all cultural movement of the Renaissance nor the crisis over religious confession
managed to undo- one is hard put to assign precedence in these matters . The
cultural space that images can be said to occupy in Huygens's world and
writing raises but does not answer such questions.

o ur nOtion
Jd\'antage of
knowl-
2
"Dt pictura, ita visio":
Kepler's Model of the Eye and the
Nature of Picturing in the North

I want to turn from the general cul-

tural role of images in the Netherlands to one specific aspect: their lifelike
appearance. To deal with this I shall be introducing a new and concrete piece
of evidence: the definition of the picture arrived at by Kepler in his descrip-
tion of the eye. Concrete though this is, its use requires some delicacy. I am
not claiming a source for or influence upon the art, but rather pointing to a
cultural ambiance and to a particular model of a picture that offers appropriate
terms and suggests strategies for dealing with the nature of northern images.
But before I continue a note on usage is in order. In the title of this chapter,
as elsewhere in the book, I employ the word "picturing" instead of the usual
"picture" to refer to my object of study. I have elected to use the verbal form
of the noun for essentially three reasons: it calls attention to the making of
images rather than to the finished product; it emphasizes the inseparability of
maker, picture, and what is pictured; and it allows us to broaden the scope
of what we study since mirrors, maps, and, as in this chapter, eyes also can
take their place alongside of art as forms of picturing so understOod.
It has become fashionable of late among some art historians to dismiss
Dutch realism as an invention of the nineteenth ceritury. Though we might
agree to lay what is frequently referred to as the "concept" of realism at the
door of the nineteenth century, when the term itself was first widely em-
ployed, the beguiling visual presence, the "look" common to so many Dutch
pictures is part of their birthright, which is only evaded by the current
attention to emblematic meanings. Henry James, as acute a commentator as
any in this regard, placed the phenomenon I want to deal with in this chapter
at the center of his sense of Dutch art.

When you are looking at the originals, you seem to be looking at the
copies; and when you are looking at the copies, you seem to be looking at
the originals. Is it a canal-side in Haarlem, or is it a Van der Heyden .
. . . The maid-servants in the streets seem to have stepped out of the frame

26
"Utpictura, ita visio" 27

of a Gerald Dow and appear equally well adapted for stepping back again .
. . . We have to put on a very particular pair of spectacles and bend our nose
well over our task, and, beyond our consciousness that our gains are real
gains, remain decidely at loss how to classify them. I
Where is the art? When images are situated at the threshold between the world
and our perception of it how can they be considered as art? These are ques-
tions that puzzled Henry James as they have puzzled viewers before and
since. We have already touched on a number of pictorial features that conjoin
to produce this appearance of a world existing prior to us which we view. Let
me rehearse them once more: the absence of a prior frame -that rectangle or
framed window which Alberti offers as his initial definition of the picture-
so that the image spread out on the pictorial surface appears to be an un-
bounded fragment of a world that continues beyond the canvas (to frame such
a fragment, as Dou often does by painting one into the picture, is a decisive
act [fig. 12]); the world staining the surface with color and light, impressing
itself upon it; the viewer, neither located nor characterized, perceiving all
with an attentive eye but leaving no trace of his presence. We might take
Vermeer's View of Delft (fig. 13) as the consummate example. Delft is hardly
grasped, or taken in- it is just there for the looking. These features are
commonly explained by an appeal to nature. The Dutch artist, the argument
lc::In " to a goes, adds actual viewing experience to the artificial perspective system of the
Italians. In this wide vista, which presumes an aggregate of views made
Images. possible by a mobile eye, the retinal or optical has been added on to the
chapter, perspectival. An imitative picture, it is assumed, is perspectival and Italian by
the usual definition and the Dutch add nature to it. Images made by the camera obscura
form and the photograph have frequently been invoked as analogues to this direct,
rna/em!!. of natural vision. Thus Lord Clark has written (a bit crudely) of the View of
anLUIJ.llV of
Delft that "this unique work of art is certainly the nearest which [sic] painting
has ever come to a coloured photograph. ,, ' But the appeal to nature (for that
is what Clark means this to be) leaves us justifiably uncomfortable. Nature
cannot solve the question of art-particularly in this post-Gombrichian age.
And this has now led to painstaking studies of the techniques of these realist
painters. Maybe, it is thought, if we look into exactly how Vermeer laid on
his paints we can locate and testify to the art in his art. But the craft and skill
that produced the Dutch pictorial illusion of life are curiously unassertive.
They do not call attention to themselves through the kind of admission to or
celebration of the primacy of medium that becomes a hallmark of realist
bp,,,,,,nr as
painting in the nineteenth century. With Dutch painting we are, as it were,
chapter prior to such recognition . It was a particular assumption of the seventeenth
century that finding and making, our discovery of the world and our crafting
of it, are presumed to be as one. This assumption was common, as we shall
the see in the following chapter, to the project of inventing a universal language,
to the experiments of Bacon's natural history, and to picturing. It was in just
this spirit that a Dutchman could refer to the image cast by a camera obscura
as a "truly natural painting." )
28 Chapter Two

12 . GERARD D o u, A Poult erer 's Shop. By p ermission of th e Trustees of the National

Gall ery, London.

It is in pursuit of just what this "truly natural painting" might be that there
has understandably been much attention devoted to the camera obscura and
its relationship to Dutch images.' There were basically two forms of this
device at the time: one immobile, with a hole perhaps fitted with a lens in the
wall or window shutter of a darkened room casting the image of sunlit things
outside onto a paper or a wall (fig. 18), and the other a mobile version (fig.
23). This image-making device, found most commonly in America today in

-
"Utpictura, ita visio" 29

13. JAN VERMEER. View of Delft . Mauritshuis, The Hagu e.

children's science museums, appears early on in the literature on Dutch art.

Reynolds was the first who, with knowledge of the techniques used and
effects created by the Italian vedusti, claimed that the paintings of Jan van der
Heyden "have very much the effect of nature, seen in· a camera obscura. ,, '
Reynolds defines this effect as great breadth of light combined with a very
minute finish-an effect that led nineteenth-century commentators to com-
pare Van der· Heyden's work to photographs. Fromentin makes the same
point about breadth-this time, however, of view-in his passage about
Ruisdael's panoramic landscapes. He speaks of the "circular field of vision,"
of the painter'S "grand eye open to everything that lives"; an eye, he adds,
with " the property of a camera obscura: it reduces, diminishes the light and
preserves in things the exact proportions of their form and coloring.'" "He
regarded the immense vault, which arches the country or the sea, as the
actual, compact and stable ceiling of his pictures. He curves and spreads it,
measures it, determines its value in relation to the variations of light on the
terrestrial horizon.'" Eye, world seen, and picture surface are here elided in
]0 Chapter Two

a manner that suggests that the world described-painting as we spoke of it

in the first chapter-is none other than the world perfectly seen. Fromentin's
example is drawn from landscape, the image of which was commonly cast by
the camera obscura when the device was described and illustrated in the
seventeenth century. But his characterization is continuous with his sense of
other kinds of painting. Ter Borch, for example, he writes, produces an
artless art "which adapts itself to the nature of things, a knowledge that is
forgotten in presence of special circumstances in life, nothing preconceived,
nothing which precedes the simple, strong and sensitive observation of what
is.'" It is the surfaces, the materials of the world that have caught the eye in
Ter Borch. Fromentin catalogues for our eyes "the apparel, the satins, furs,
stuffs, velvets, silks, felt hats, feathers, swords, the gold, the embroidery, the
carpets, the beds with tapestry hangings, the floors so perfectly smooth, so
perfectly solid. ,, ' It is as if visual phenomena are captured and made present
without the intervention of a human maker. This is the rightness of the
connection made to the eye or to its equivalent, the camera obscura. The
geometrically calculated dimension of space and figures and the solidity of
objects found in an art constructed according to linear perspective give way
to this, Fromentin implies. He writes of there being "no science or tech-
nique" to be learned. When Reynolds and Fromentin and others appeal to the
camera obscura it is by way of suggesting the difference of Dutch art-the
difference from the established art of Italy or of the academy.
Since the nineteenth century with the advent of photography and the
attention to Vermeer, his works have been prominent among those related to
the tradition of mechanically made images. Some commentators continue to
stress the familiar analogy of the camera obscura, as when Claudel describes
Vermeer's Soldier and Laughing Girl (fig. 14) in the Frick collection: "Ce qui
me fascine, c' est ce regard pur, dq,ouille, sterilise, rince de toute matiere,
d'une candeur en quelque sorte mathematique ou angelique, ou disons sim-
plement photographique, mais quelle photographie: en qui ce peintre, reclus
al'interieur de sa lentille, capte Ie monde exterieur." Others begin to insist on
the actual use of an instrument to achieve certain effects. The scale of these
figures-the large man placed in the foreground before the small woman-
was termed "a photographic scale" by Joseph Pennell in 1891 and suggested
to him that Vermeer had employed an optical device. 10 This is only the first
of many such comments on the striking formal organization and pictorial
presence of Vermeer's paintings. The relationship to image-making devices
shifts subtly from proclaiming lifelikeness to the aesthetic claims of art. The
problem is that although many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises
that discuss the artistic use of the camera obscura recommend tracing its
image, we have no evidence of cases in which artists actually did this. The
argument from use, rather than from analogy, has had to proceed therefore
by trying to establish specific phenomena present in paintings that are nOt
seen by unaided vision and that, it is thus concluded, must result from the use
of the camera obscura.
"Utpictura, itavisio" 31

- what

so

t:: <::;mle to

14. JAN V ERMEER, Soldier and Laughing Girl. Copyrigh t the Frick Collection, New
York.

In the case of Vermeer, everything from spatial organization to the render-

ing of objects and the use of pigment-in short, much of what we think of
as his distinctive style-has been at some time attributed to the camera
obscura. But to prove the use of the camera obscura in this sense is in effect
to distinguish the viewing device and its effects from nature . Instead of being
tantamount to seeing the world, the camera obscura becomes a source of
style. Further, the artist is seen attending not to the world and its replication
in his image , but to copying the quirks of this device. Of the list of ten
phenomena put forth by the most comprehensive study of this kind only one
has been generally accepted . It would appear that those small globules of paint
that we find in several works-the threads in the Lace-maker, the ship in the
View of Delft -are painted equivalents of the circles of confusion, diffused
32 Chapter Two

circles of light, that form around unfocused specular highlights in the camera
.
o bscura Image. "
Practically speaking, from the point of view of the use of a device and the
production of the entire image presented by each picture, the attempt to prove
how Vermeer used the camera obscura has been disappointing in its results.
The basic issues remain muddled, because rather than offering a solution to
the problem posed by the nature of the painting, the analogy of the camera
obscura has so far just mirrored that problem in all its complexity. On the one
hand there is the suspicion-which we can trace from the seventeenth century
up to the attacks on photography in our time- of the bad faith shown by an
artist who is dependent on a mechanical instrument. This is particularly true
in the case of the camera obscura, which is sometimes implicitly seen as the
untutored (Dutch) craftsman's shortcut means to perspective. In other words,
it is only if you cannot make a perspective picture (geometrically) like the
Italians that you copy the picture in a camera obscura. Art is assumed to be
that which is not due to an instrument but to the free choices of a human
maker. There is an attempt to rescue the art in art from the encroaching
machine. However, this point is in turn in some doubt because of uncertainty
as to the nature and status of the camera obscura image itself. Seen by some
as developing the image of perspective seeing, it is also seen-and today much
more commonly-as offering an alternative to that. It offers what has often
been called an "optical" versus a "perspectival" image. In this view, the
camera obscura corresponds to the impetus and makings in Dutch art that
strove, as a recent writer put it, "to overcome the limitations of linear per-
spective in a very innovative way." It supplies direct visual impressions to an
empirical age and particularly to the Dutch who, as the same scholar suggests,
"were using their eyes with fewer preconceptions than their predecessors." 12
Rather than serving as an access to a constructed image of the visible world,
the camera obscura in this view supplies the visible world direct empirical
evidence, as it were, which the artist then uses in his art. Mechanical guide,
constructor of perspectival images, or mirror of nature: the uncertainty about
how to specify the use or force of the camera obscura reflects a genuine
uncertainty about the nature of the art it has been thought to evoke or to
which it has so consistently been bound.
Though it is generally agreed that there is an important sense in which the
camera obscura is paradigmatic of Dutch images, it is not clear what this
constitutes as a notion of art. Let us look at the evidence again, but in a
different way. The appeal to nature in the understanding of Dutch images is
grounded in a specific cultural ambiance-the empirical interests of what is
commonly referred to as the age of observation. The skies are scanned, land
surveyed, flora, fauna, the human body and its fluids are all observed and
described. But if we consider what all this empirical observation of nature
entails, we are in for a surprise. Instead of finding a direct confrontation with
nature, we find a trust to devices, to intermediaries that represent nature to
us. The major example is the lens . Its images and those engendered by it take
"Utpictura, ita visio" 33

their place beside the images of art, which are also, of course, representations .
The artifice of the image is embraced along with its immediacy. The situation
is summed up in the Autobiography of Constantijn Huygens who, as we have
seen, praises his eyeglasses, marvels at the camera obscura image, and calls for
De Gheyn to draw the new world made visible in the microscope.
Historians of science tell us that though the lens was long known, it had
been considered distorting and deceptive. It was not until the seventeenth
century that it was trusted. Indeed, empirical observation in Holland is made
possible by a trust in a host of representations of the world. It is less the
nature or use made of the camera obscura image than the trust placed in it that
is of interest to us in understanding Dutch painting. And this is the relevance
of Kepler, to whom we now turn. For in defining the human eye itself as a
mechanical maker of pictures and in defining "to see" as "to picture," he
provides the model we need for that particular binding of finding and making,
of nature and art, that characterizes the picture in the north.
I
Kepler seems to have backed into the problem of the optical mechanism,
and the way he did it has an interesting relationship to the early history of the
camera obscura or its predecessor, the pinhole camera. Since antiquity this
J}

device had been used as a method of making certain astronomical

observations-in particular observing lunar and solar eclipses. It was a way
of studying light rays . When we try to understand the use of the camera
obscura as a maker of those pictures of the world that so fascinated Huygens
and Hoogstraten, we must remember that though the mechanism was old, its
picture-making function was quite new. In the past, me pinhole camera had
made possible indirect and hence eye-saving observations of me sun, the
world, moon, and their eclipses. This was Kepler's first interest in it.
empirical There was, however, a problem, an enigma as he called it, about these
guide, observations: the lunar diameter as formed by the rays in the pinhole camera
about appeared smaller during a solar eclipse than at other times, although it was
rightly assumed that the moon had not changed size nor moved farther away
or to from the earth . It w as this observation, made by Tycho Brahe in Prague when
Kepler was serving as his assistant in 1600, that Kepler was able to explain.
His radical answer was to turn his attention away from the sky and the nature
of light rays to the instrument of observation itself: to turn from astronomy
but in a to optics. Kepler argued that what was at issue was the precise optics of the
images formed behind small apertures in the pinhole camera. The apparent
changing diameter of the moon is, so he argues in his Paralipomena -or
additions to (literally "things omitted from") the work of the older astrono-
k '"",Ied and mer Witelo-an inevitable result of the means of observation. The size and
of nature shape of the refracted ray bundles were related, so he argued, to the size of
with the aperture. The optical mechanism, in short, intersected the rays. To under-
stand our view of sun, or moon, or world, we must understand the instru-
ment with which we view it, an instrument, so Kepler argued, with distortion
34 Chapter Two

or errors built in. In this 1604 publication Kepler went on to take the next step
of recognizing the necessity of investigating our most fundamental instru-
ment of observation, the eye, which he now in effect described as an optical
mechanism supplied with a lens with focusing properties (fig. 15). It was by
studying and defining the function of the parts of the eye, with some help
from the discoveries of anatomists and an arguable relationship to the knowl-
edge of cadavers, that Kepler was led to define vision as the formation of a
retinal image, which he significantly called a picture:
Thu s vision is brought about by a picture [pictura] of the thing seen being
formed on the concave surface of the retina.

[Visio igitur fit per picturam rei visiblis ad album retinae et cauum pari-
etem. J"
But we are getting ahead of ourselves . For before we tu rn to the forming-
th e "painting" Kepler was to call it-of the pi cture itself, let us turn back to
Kepler's initi al strategy. First, note the
,,6 LA DIOPTRIQ.UE.
words he chose in coming to terms
with the contradictory observations of
the eclipsed sun or moon in the pin-
hole camera:

As long as the diameters of the

luminaries and the extent of solar
eclipses are noted as fundamental by
astronomers ... some decep tion of
vision [visus deceptio] arises partly
from th e artifice of observin g . . .
and partly just from vision itself .
. . . And thus the origin of errors in
vision must be sought in th e con-
formati on and functions of the eye
itself.

[Dum diametri luminarium et quan-

titates Solis Eclipsium , fundamenti
loco annotantur ab Astronomis:
oritur ali qua visus deceptio, partim
ab artificio obseruandi orta ... par-
tim ab ipso visu simplici .... Erroris
itaque in visu , occasio quaerenda est
in ipsius oculi conformatione et
. 'b us. ] "
f unctIonl
IS. Illustration of the theory of the retinal
image in RENt. D ESCARTES, La Kepler here attributes the eni gma of
DioptriqIfe (Lciden, 1637). Courtesy,
the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, the astronomical observations to th e
California. deception of vision, which consists of
HUtpictura, itavisio" 35

two things: the artifice of observing (in other words, the aperture intersecting
the rays in the pinhole camera) and vision itself, the eye. Thus the observation
of the moon, the images of it on the retina, are necessary distortions . Two
things are clear here: a definition of sight as distorting, and an acceptance of
that fact. Far from raising doubts about the value or use of the deceiving
instrument of sight (and this of course had been the case not only about the
sense itself, but about lenses, which were known but not trusted for use in
earlier times), Kepler seeks to give an account and to take the measure of its
deception or artifice. We are justly reminded here of the enthusiastic trusting
to the lens and picturing that we find among the Dutch - indeed, that we
found at the center of Huygens's account of his life, his eyeglasses, and the
new world seen through Drebbel's lens . But let us also remember the con-
suming Dutch interest in deception and the status of the image. Huygens's
meditation on the nature of Miereveld's portraits summons up Tacitus's
words on the thin line between the truth and falsehood of the astrologers.
What fascinated Huygens was precisely the problem of the relationship be-
tween art(ifice) and nature. And we recall that his discussion of Miereveld
ends by almost collapsing them into each other. In Miereveld, Huygens
concludes, nature is art and art is nature. We might then consider Vermeer's
View of Delft not as a copy done after a camera obscura or as a photograph
(both of which claims have been made in the past), but as a display of this
notion of artifice. A claim is made on us that this picture is at the meeting-
place of the world seen and the world pictured. That border line between
nature and artifice that Kepler defined mathematically, the Dutch made a
matter of paint. And when we turn to works like the stilllifes of Kalf we have
to consider if, more often than scholars have been willing to admit, deception
here engages not a moral but an epistemological view: the recognition that
there is no escape from representation.
To speak of the View of Delft in this way is eccentric since it separates the
picture as a "seeing object" from the world and the maker. We might attempt,
as has been done, to locate a viewing device in a particular building over-
looking Delft. But we only confirm that it is the eye, not a human observer
of a certain size, that is at issue. The Dutch peep-box, which provides the
viewer with an eye-hole through which to look at an interior illusionistic'ally
depicted on the inner surfaces of the box, also confirms this characteristic
:ronomlS:
.".::<>.partIm northern isolation of the eye .
. .. par- And this is indeed just what Kepler did . In order to argue in this way, or
. . Erroris more concretely, in order to address himself to the study of the eye in this
est way, he had to separate as his object of study the mechanism of the eye-what
et the eye considered as an optic system does with rays- from the person who
sees, from the observer of the world, and from the question of how we see.
It was to this question of how we see that studies of vision had historically
enigma of addressed themselves . It was the power of Kepler'S invention , then, to split
,"-,om]> to the apart the hitherto unified human field. H is strategy was to separate the
of physical problem of the formation of retinal images (the world seen) from the
36 Chapter Two

psychological problems of perception and sensation. The study of optics so

defined starts with the eye receiving the light and ceases with the formation
of the picture on the retina. What happens before and after- how the picture
so formed, upside down and reversed, was perceived by the observer-
troubled Kepler but was of no concern to him.
I leave it to natural philosophers to discuss the way in which this image or
picture [pit'tura] is put together by the spiritual principles of vision residing
in the retina and in the nerves, and whether it is made to appear before the
soul or tribunal of the faculty of vision by a spirit within the cerebral
cavities, or the faculty of vision, like a magistrate sent by the soul, goes out
from the council chamber of the brain to meet this image in the optic nerves
and retina, as it were descending to a lower court. 16
Neither the observer looking out into the world nor the process of perceiving
the picture formed is Kepler's concern. The power of his strategy is that he
deanthropomorphizes vision. He stands aside and speaks of the prior world
picturing itself in light and color on the eye. It is a dead eye, and the model
of vision, or of painting if you will, is a passive one. The function of the
mechanism of seeing is defined as making a representation: representation in
the dual sense that it is an artifice- in the very making- and that it resolves
the rays of light into a picture. Visual perception is itself an act of represen-
tation in Kepler's analysis:
Thus vision is brought about by a picture of the thing seen being formed
on the concave surface of the retina. 17
As he puts it in another passage, "ut pictura, ita visio"; \8 or, sight is like a
pIcture.
Despite differences of opinion about what part of his analysis of the eye is
based on the analogy of the camera obscura, or as to whether his research is
a perfection of or a break with medieval views, all modern commentators
agree on one clear innovation: Kepler was the first person ever to employ the
termpictura in discussing the inverted retinal image. As a recent study put it:
"This ;s the first genuine instance in the history of visual theory of a real
optical image within the eye- a picture, having an' existence independent of
the observer, formed by the focusing of all available rays on a surface."I'
Two main things, among others, worked together to make this innovation
possible. One is Kepler's physical reconstruction of the mechanism of the eye
and the role of the refracting lens and retinal screen. The other is the dis-
tinction, which he is the first to make clearly, between the image of the world
outside the eye (previously called idola, or visual species), which he called the
imago rerum, and the picture of the world cast on the retinal screen, which
he called the pictura. Because of insufficient knowledge of the refraction of
light through the lens, all previous attempts to describe the picture in the eye
had to imagine that theidola or species itself slipped through into the eye and
thence to the brain. It was Kepler who for the first time turned away from the
world to a representation of it, to the picture of it on the retina. In structural
HUtpictura, itavisio" 37

terms, Kepler not only defines the picture on the retina as a representation but
turns away from the actual world to the world "painted" there. This involves
an extraordinary objectivity and an unwillingness to prejudge or to classify
the world so imaged. Kepler's strategy and the resulting privileging of the
world pictured on the eye helps us understand the particular justness of
Gowing's evocation of Vermeer:
Vermeer seems almost not to care, or not even to know, what it is that he
is painting. What do men call this wedge of light? A nose? A finger? What
do we know of its shape? To Vermeer none of this matters, the conceptual
world of names and knowledge is forgotten, nothing concerns him bu t
what is visible, the tone, the wedge of light. 20
Gowing is describing a common experience we have in looking at Vermeer's
works. If we concentrate on a detail-the hand of the painter, for example,
in the Art of Painting (fig. 16; pI. 2)-our experience is vertiginous because
of the way the hand is assembled out of tone and light without declaring its
identity as a hand. My point is not that Vermeer is painting retinal images-
though even Gowing makes this not too helpful suggestion-but that his
stance toward the world pictured can be called Keplerian. Gowing might have
had Kepler's strategy in mind when, in the sentence preceding the passage just
quoted, he writes : "[Vermeer'sl detachment is so complete, his observation
of tone so impersonal, yet so efficient."
Kepler does not employ the simile of the picture lightly. In later studies,
in which he develops its implications further, he effectively enriches its appro-
priateness as a model of Dutch pictures. Having first defined vision in the
. is like a
Paralipomena of 1604 as "brought about by the picture of the thing seen being
formed on the concave surface of the, retina," Kepler goes on in the Dioptrice

. .
mnovatlon
of the eye
is the dis-
: th e world
;;e called the
Jsc,eell, which
of
in the eye
:he eye and 16, JAN VERMEER, The Art of
Painting, detail (the artist's
from the hand). Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna.
38 Chapter Two

of 1611 to refer to the retina as painted with the colored rays of visible things.
The word that he chooses for what does the painting is pencilli - or little
brushes-th e very little brushes that Huygens called on De Gheyn to uSe in
replicating the view in the microscopic lens." Artists' brushes paint a picture
of the world outside the eye on the opaque screen of the retina in the back of
the eye:
The retina is painted with the colored rays of visible things.
[Retiformis tunica pingitur it radijs coloratis rerum visibilium.]22
In its formation the picture evokes that peculiar absorption into each other
of drawing and painting that is characteristic of Netherlandish artists. Many
drawings are situated on the very border of painting: the colored drawings
favored by De Gheyn, whose sheets dazzle the eye (or would if one saw the
original) with the colors of the flora and fauna of the world (fig. 3), or
Saenredam's church portraits drawn in pen and brushed with fine washes or
chalks, which his paintings emulate in oil. (This northern practice is con-
firmed in the works of that northern internationalist Peter Paul Rubens. The
preparatory studies that he executed in colored oils on panel and that we refer
to as sketches were commonly called drawings at the time.) Colored drawings
call attention to the double aspect of a pictorial representation: they docu-
ment what appears and also render how it appears. This is also called atten-
tion to by another Dutch borderline medium - pen-painting or penschilderij
(fig. 17). Delicately drawn works are executed in pen on a prepared board to
document a particular sea-battle or, in one case, the dwellings of a rich
Haarlem merchant. While the colored drawing adds attributes of painting to
drawing, the pen-painting presents drawings as if they were paintings. There
is, finally, the notable absence of any drawings at all by a number of Holland's
leading artists-Hals, De Hooch, Vermeer- an absence shared by other
artists of the time commonly perceived to share northern sympathies (Cara-
vaggio and Velazquez , for example). This suggests that for such artists - and
this is most self-consciously true of Vermeer- representation takes place
directly in color and therefore in paint.
The attitude that informs these phenomena is corroborated by the Dutch
artist and writer Samuel van Hoogstraten in a passage of his 1678 handbook
on painting, in which he refers to drawing as "imitating things after life even
as they appear. " lJ Hoogstraten introduces this formulation at the end of
giving an account of Michelangelo's well-known criticism of Titian's works
for revealing a lack of knowledge of disegno. In criticizing the famous Ve-
netian colorist, Michelangelo, according to Vasari, had introduced the com-
mon Italian distinction between drawing (disegno) as the basis for rendering
things selected from nature with an eye to beauty, and that interest in follow-
ing nature exactly that is related to the use of color (colore). Without ever
using the word disegno, Hoogstraten subtly alters Vasari's terms. He directs
the issue instead toward twO different notions of one thing, which he refers
to as teykenkunst. Hoogstraten presents M.ichelangelo as arguing for a
CCUtpictura, ita visio" 39

17. JACOB MATHAM , The Brewery and the Country House of Jan Claesz. Loo (pen on
panel), 1627. Frans Halsmuseum, H aarlem.

teykenkunst concerned only with the beautiful, while Titian presumes that it
means drawing all things after life just as th ey are seen. In Hoogstraten's text,
as in Dutch images, we find that there is n o fruitfu l grasp of what the Italians
called disegno -th e notion of drawing that refers not to the appearance of
things but to their selection and ordering according to th e judgment of the
artist and in parti cular to the ordering of the human body. Therefore, in what
is a characteristic alteration of th e very Italian attitudes th at he cites, Hoog-
straten surprisingly praises Titian as a draftsman. To render things after life
as they appear is tantamount to drawing well. Though h e does speak for
ordering, Hoogstraten manifests none of Michelangelo's concern about the
dangers for an artist who starts to draw after life when young. Indeed, this
is just what he recommends to the Dutch. In another reversal of Italian
priorities, which posit drawing as the basis for painting, Hoogstraten is
moved to assure th e artist he is addressing that painting will not hinder but
will indeed actually help his drawing!
Ve-
:11l1 0 US
With the emph asis on replication of the world, northern art engages yet
the com- another kind of absorption-that of the maker into his work. We have
rendering already noted Fromentin's remark on th e lack of any perceived manner of
in follow- drawing by Dutch artists becau se they produce an art "which adapts itself to
ever th e nature of thin gs. ,, " The p oint is not that one cannot tell the drawings by
H e directs Dutch artists apart, but that th ey do not seem to b e practicing a notion of
he refers correct drawing as much as capturing or receiving what is seen. This attitude
for a is reiterated by Dutch spokesmen, who specifically urge against artists having
40 Chapter Two

a manner of their own. One author went so far as to write that the artist must
follow life so closely that one cannot see any manner at all. 25 The Italian
writers on art, at least since Vasari, has of course argued against a mannered
style, but they argued this significantly in the name of a better, more natural
styLe. The Dutch, by contrast, sidestep the issue of style or manner almost
completely to put nature seen before personal style or self. We are reminded
once again of the model provided by Kepler's eye.
As we move between the model of the eye, Dutch images, and Dutch texts
about images, we are charting a territory in which the representation of
appearance-Kepler's ut pictura, ita visio -not only defines images to the
exclusion of distinctions between drawing and painting, but also dominates
the artist's sense of self and invades his very mind. While the Italians moved-
as Panofsky skillfully demonstrated-to distinguish between what we can
simply refer to as the real and the ideal, or between images done after life and
those also shaped by judgment or by concepts in the mind, the Dutch hardly
ever relaxed their representational assumptions. 26 This is as true of their texts
as it is of their images. Their term naer het Leven (after life) and uyt den geest
(from the mind or spirit), as employed by Van Mander and other northern
writers who came after him, do not involve distinctions between real and
ideal, between physical and mental, but rather clistinguish between different
sources of visual perception. While naer het Leven refers to everything visible
in the world, uyt den geest refers to images of the world as they are stored
mnemonically in the mind. Certain surprising formulations both verbal and
pictorial result from this. First, unlike their Italian counterparts (and unlike
the entire academic tradition that followed), the Dutch did not restrict naer
het Leven to the notion of drawing after the live model, but used it to denote
drawing after anything in the world presented to the eyes. A drawing after an
antique statue, as it is casually recorded, for example, in the inventory done
of Rembrandt's belongings, could be done "nae't leven." " Perhaps we have
in this an explanation of the making and high appreciation accorded those
curious northern works such as Goltzius's prints after Durer's Meisterstucke,
in which the artist mimics deceptively the works of an earlier master. These
prints, like Rubens's remarkably deceptive painted copies after other masters,
are renderings of art done, as it were, "after life. "
Goltzius's prints could, however, have as well been done uyt den geest,
because working out of the mind was itself considered not a selection process
or a matter of judgment, but a matter of mirroring. Goltzius is reported by
Van Mander to have left Rome with no drawings after the great Italian
paintings but instead with the paintings "in his memory as in a mirror always
before the eyes."" Indeed, the self of the artist, which was sacrificed for the
world seen, finds itself here: the self is identified with the images of the world
stored in the mind. In what is a peculiarly circular argument, Dutch commen-
tators considered that working out of one's store of visual memories, working
uyt den geest, constituted working out of oneself, or uit zijn zel[ doen, as the
phrase went. " The most famous description of this notion of selving out of
memories of things seen is the description of Pieter Bruegel offered by a
HUtpictura, itavisio" 41

fellow northerner. Bruegel is said to have drawn the Alps naer het [even so
that when people saw his later works they said that he had swallowed up the
Alps and spit them out onto his canvas. 30
The concept of the mind as a place for storing visual images was of course
a common one at the time. But it was in the north of Europe that artists
pictured such a state of mind. For better or for worse, depending on one's
view, the general lack of what we might call an ideal or elevated style and the
tendency toward a descriptive approach to the representation of even elevated
subject matter are due to this representational practice.

II

Kepler was, of course, not the first to yoke together painting and the study
of vision. If, as has been suggested, his decision to call the retinal image a
picture is based on the previous connections that were made between picture-
making and vision, it must be carefully distinguished from them. Though his
work confirmed the principle of rectilinear propagation of light in homo-
geneous media assumed by the perspectivists and installed in artificial or
linear perspective, he invokes or defines a picture differently. )1The diagram
that Descartes offers of Kepler's eye is less helpful to us in this regard than the
r:"-"'g visible illustration used to demonstrate the operation of the eye in a Dutch medical
handbook of the later seventeenth century (fig. 18)." Two gentlemen are in
a dark room equipped with a light-hole fitted with a lens. They hold out a
surface on which is cast the image of the landscape beyond - people, trees,
boats on a river are all brought inside, represented for their delectation. Van
Beverwyck tells of having set this device up in the tower of his Dordrecht
house, where it cast on a wall or paper the image of people walking along the
Waal and boats with their colorful flags. This is the way, he claims, that sight
gets into the eye (though he goes on to puzzle about how the inverted scene
is righted). There is no awkwardness for Van Beverwyck about making the
invisible image in the eye visible. "In a small circle of paper," as della Porta
lI=;:er. These had written earlier of his eyelike camera obscura, "you shall see as it were the
Epitomy of the whole world."" Van Beverwyck's illustration is a kind of
domestic reenactment of the forming of the Keplerian image as well as a
model of Dutch painting. This could be a view of Delft. Kepler'S eye and
Vermeer's image are both evoked in this unframed image of the world com-
pressed onto a bit of paper with no prior viewer to establish a position or a
human scale from which , as we say, to take in the work. The gentlemen
standing by, detached observers, also remind us that such an image, rather
than being calculated to fit our space, provides its own.
Alberti's picture, by contrast, begins not with the world seen, but with a
viewer who is actively looking out at objects-preferably human figures-in
space, figures whose appearance is a function of their distance from the
VIewer:
In the first place, when we look at a thing, we see it as an object which
. H
occupIes a space.
42 Chapter Two

B EVERWYCK, Schat der

18. Illu stration of the working of the eye in j OH AN VAN
Genees- Konste
Ongesonth eyt (Amste rdam, 1664 ). vol. II , p. 87. Tn Wercken der
.
(Amsterdam, 1667). Courtesy of th e Royal Library, The H ague

certain
We can let Diirer' s rendering of a draftsman at work (fig. 19) represent
d to be part of vision
aspects of the Albertian picture. The picture is not claime
i says,
but is indeed the artist's constr uction , an expression in paint, as Albert
er:
of the intersection of the visual pyramid at a given distance from the observ
le
First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectang
windo w throug h which
of whatever si ze I want, which I regard as an open
the subject to be painted is seen; and I decide how large I wish the human
fi gures in the painting to be. JS
model of
It is Alberti who instructs the artist to lay down a rectangle on the
that Albert i's great invent ion was this
the windo w frame. It could be argued
out that Italian pictu re frames
picture itself. James Ackerman has pointed
one mi ght respon d
were once designed like windo w surrou nds, to which
Metsu
that in the Nether lands in the seventeenth centur y, as a paintin g by
placed
clearly records (fig. 144), picture frames resemb le instead the frames
on mirrors. 36
name
Bound to the Albertian view is a privile ging of man, for it is in the
HUtpictura, ita visio" 43

19. ALBRECHT DOR ER, draftsman drawing a nude (woodcut), in Unterw eyszmg der
Messung (Nurem berg, 1538). Kupferst ichkabinett, Staatliche Museen Preu ssischer
Kulturbesitz, Berlin (West).

of the istoria, the representation of significant human actions, that this picture
is made. In the face of the admitted relative size of all things Alberti, following
Protagoras, claims that man, as the best known of all things to man, is the
measure. The prior viewer is confirmed once again. So many aspects of
Renaissance culture, its painting, its literature, its historiography are born of
this perception of an active confidence in human powers. And so much are
we heir to this view of man, or perhaps more particularly so much are art
historians heir to this view of artistic representation, that it is hard to see it
as a particular modality and not just the way representational art is. Although
Alberti's treatise cannot fairly be said to propose the famous simile, it implic-
mres<,nt certain itly builds "ut pictura poesis" into its definition of the relationship between
part of vision the picture and vision.
Alberti says, The perspectival confirmation offered by both modes of picturing confuses
the observer: or masks the distinction that we must draw between them. The distinction lies
not in the realm of the nature of vision but in its m·ode of visualization, its
mode of representation. What continue to be major problems posed by
photography- is it art, and if so what kind of art is it- are related to this
issue. This is not properly a conflict between art and nature but between
different modes of pictorial making. Many characteristics of photographs-
those very characteristics that make them so real- are common also to the
northern descriptive mode: fragmentariness; arbitrary frames; the immediacy
rmen! reframes that the first practitioners expressed by claiming that the photograph gave
respond Nature the power to reproduce herself directly unaided by man. If we want
by Metsu historical precedence for the photographic image it is in the rich mixture of
:rames placed seeing, knowing, and picturing that manifested itself in seventeenth-century
images. The photographic image can, like Dutch painting, mimic the Al-
bertian mode. But the conditions of its making place it in what I call the
44 Chapter Tw o

20. J AN VANEYCK, Madonna with the Canon van der Paele. Musee Communal des
Beaux Arts, Bruges. Copyright A.C.L. Brussels.

Keplerian mode-or, to use a modern term, among Peirce's indexical signs.)7

A comparison of the proposed pictures of Kepler and Alberti touches on
what is a textbook contrast between Renaissance art in the north and south
of Europe. If we go back to the fifteenth century we can contrast Van Eyck's
Van der Paele altarpiece with the Saint Lucy altarpiece of Domenico
Veneziano (figs. 20, 21). We might summarize the well-established contrast
between north and south in the following ways: attention to many small
things versus a few large ones; light reflected off objects versus objects mod-
eled by light and shadow; the surface of objects, their colors and textures,
dealt with rather than their placement in a legible space; an unframed image
versus one that is clearly framed; one with no clearly situated viewer com-
pared to one with such a viewer. The distinction follows a hierarchical model
of distinguishing between phenomena commonly referred to as primary and
secondary: objects and space versus the surfaces, forms versus the textures of
the world. 38 Whether the Italian perspective system is taken as visual truth or
as a convention- and both claims have an arguable basis depending on the
force with which one makes a claim for truth- the litany of qualities sets up
"Ut pictura, itavisio" 45

21. D OMEN ICO VENEZIANO, Madonna and Child with Saints. Galler ia degli Uffi zi,
Florence. Alinari / Edirorial Ph otocolor A rchives.

a duality. " As James Ackerman, speaking for Italian art, has put it; "If the
artist wants to communicate as precise a record of fact as he can he should
follow Alberti; if he wishes to communicate the way things look to him he
is not obliged to follow anyone." " Modern students of northern art have
been moved to speak of artists who are "fully aware of the differences be-
tween artificial perspective and natural vision" and to compliment them for
"using their eyes with fewer preconceptions than their predecesso rs.,, 41 With
Kepler's assistance I think we can better suggest that the issu e is not "record
textures, of fact" versus the " look" of things, it is not different ways of perceiving the
rramf,d Image world , but two different modes of picturing the world: on the one hand the
VIewer com- picture considered as an object in the world, a framed window to which we
rchlcal model bring our eyes, on the other hand the picture taking the place of the eye with
primary and the frame and our location thus left undefined. 42
textures of As we make and pursue distinctions between pictorial modes the reader is
truth or probably aware that philosophical issues, and psychological ones as well,
on the threaten to take over from the pictures. It is inevitable, I think, that the nature
sets up or statu s of the picture as knowledge is an issue because we are considering
46 Chapter Two

pictures produced in a culture that employs a perceptual metaphor for knowl-

edge. By this I mean a culture that assumes that we know what we know
through the mind's mirroring of nature. " Our problem, then, is how to deal
with actual pictures given their assumed overlap with mental or visual ones.
One strategy is that of E. H. Gombrich, who has attempted to ground
Western pictorial representation in the nature of human perception. (This
strategy has been adopted recently, and for similar reasons of proof, in the
psychological interests of advanced analytic philosophy.) While I differ from
Gombrich in that I do not assume that art must necessarily be defined by the
perceptual model of knowledge, I have accepted this as the interpretive bias
in this book and have even tried to differentiate modes within that model. My
aim is to work within the framework offered by the time to understand how
the Dutch in the seventeenth century produced and validated their images.
There is probably no artist or writer who meditated as continuously and
as deeply on the relationship between seeing, knowing, and picturing the
world as did Leonardo da Vinci. For that reason, though he is geographically
and chronologically removed from the center of our concerns, to turn to him
is to consider more deeply the problems at hand. Leonardo, who was fasci -
nated by the eye as an instrument (he was one of the first to propose the
camera obscura as its model) and by its powers of observation, testifies
poignantly in his writing and in his picturing to the dilemma presented by the
choice between these two pictorial modes-what I am calling southern and
northern. His praise of the eye as the road to knowledge of the world is as
total as we shall find anywhere in Europe at the time. All the more so because
Italian culture was so preoccupied with the question of the comparative value
of text and image. In defending and defining the eye he is also defending and
defining the painter versus the poet, the image versus the word:
Whoever loses sight, loses the beautiful view of the world and is as one
who is shut alive in a tomb wherein he can move and live. Now, do you
not see that the eye embraces the beauties of all the world? It is the master
of astronomy, it makes cosmography, it advises and corrects all human
arts, it carries men to different parts of the. world, it is the prince of
mathematics, its sciences are most certain, it has measured the heights and
the dimensions of the stars, it has found the elements and their locations.
It has predicted future events through the course of the stars, it has created
architecture, and perspective, and divine painting. H
Leonardo gives himself over to the eye most totally in those passages in his
writing where he recommends the mirror as a model for an art striving to
attain the condition of total reflection.
The painter'S mind should be like a mirror, which transforms itself into
the color of the thing that it has as its object, and is filled with as many
likenesses as there are things placed before it. Therefore, painter, knowing
that you cannot be good, if you are not a versatile master in reproducing
through your art all the kinds of forms that nature produces - which you
"Utpictura, ita visio" 47

will not know how to do if you do not see and represent them in your
mind. 45
The argument here has three parts. They remind us of the condition of
Kepler's picture even as they do of the objections to northern art on the part
of the sou th: first , the mind not only is like a mirror, but, colored by the
objects it reflects, it is actually transformed into a mirror; second, the image
so produced is unselective-every form produced by nanlre is imaged, so
man has no privilege; finally, in his concluding phrase Leonardo clearly
oy the
distinguishes the mirrored representation in the mind from the sight of the
bias
world itself. In this view of picturing, the mirror is the master or guide and
eel. My Leonardo in this spirit advises th e artist to check his art against mirrored
nature. We are reminded of the visual catalogue of observations contained in
his notebooks and introduced-in the flowers and the rocks of the first
Madonna of the Rocks -into his works. In this view a picture opens itself up
to the repres entation of appearances such as atmospheric perspective (the
perceptual fact that contours appear softened, shapes rounded off at a distance
from our eyes) or curved space. But if the picture takes th e place of the eye
as fasci- then the viewer is nowhere. " Though fascinated with appearances, Leonardo
pose the
o

fears giving himself over to such demands of total absorption and fears the
testifies sacrifice of rational human choices that this notion of picturing assumed. The
"""·oed by the
conflict is one between passive self-absorption and active making. The tension
"',-'-'lern and it produces is evident in the psychological demeanor of figures like his Saint
John or Saint Anne, where it contributes to what we perceive as their power-
ful and disturbin g presence. These figures are suspended between action and
value rest, or between active self-assertion and passive receptivity (fig. 22). So on
and occasion Leonardo turns against this mirror view:

d is as one
w, do you
the master
all human
:z;e prince of
heights and
locations.
,: has created

::=ages in his
1.:": stnvlng to

itself into
-ith as many
, knowing
22. LEONARDO DA VIN CI, The Virgin and
- reproducing Child with St. Anne. Musce du Louvre.
-which you Cuche des Mu sees Nationaux.
48 Chapter Two

The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any
reason, is like a mirror which copies every, thing placed in front of it,
without being conscious of their existence. 7
Offering us the improbable hybrid of a selective mirror, Leonardo at one
point attempts to negotiate, as he did in his works, between two models of
art- a mirrorlike reflection and the making of a second world:
The painter should be solitary and consider what he sees, discussing it
with himself, selecting the most excellent parts of the appearance of what
he sees, acting as the mirror whi ch transmutes itself into as many colors as
exist in the things placed before it. And if he does this he will be like a
second nature. -48
H ow can a mirror reflect choice or reason? The answer is found in the
injunction to the artist- spoken by Leonardo as it was earlier by Alberti-to
use the mirror as the judge of his own picrures. The mirror then becomes a
witness not to life but to art. By distancing th e artist from his art, it serves,
as Alberti says, to judge the faults of things taken from narure and thus
corrects art.
It would seem that the mirroring, the giving-over to the narure of things
that he instinctively pulls away from, is more closely related to the sources of
Leonardo's inventive genius than is his appeal to reason . For in his oft-cited
recommendation that one rouse the mind by looking at crumbled walls,
glowing embers, speckled stOnes or clouds, Leonardo turns the artist himself
into the creator. Rousing the mind to inventions in this way exposes us to the
crowded indeterminancy of things. But in Leonardo's view, rather than giv-
ing over to the makings of narure, he takes that making, Prospera-like, upon
himself. Everything then becomes a crearure of his eye. Northern mirroring
is thus rurned on its head, which is why it is finally impossible to fix Leonardo
in this scheme . .,
The distinction that Leonardo makes between simple mirroring and selec-
tive or rational mirroring is related to a distinction that was commonly made
at the time between twO kinds of vision. The locus classicus in art histOrical
literarure is a passage in a letter of Poussin's in which he is seeking to defend
the replacing of some earlier decorations in the Long Gallery of the Louvre
with works of his own. He sets forth the basis of his works by offering a
distinction between "deux manieres de voir les objets." The terms Poussin
offers us are aspect On the one hand and prospect on the other. There are, he
wntes,

two ways of viewing objects: simply seeing them, and looking at them
attentively. Simply seeing is merely to let the eye take in narurally the form
and likeness of the thing seen. But to contemplate an object signifies that
one seeks diligently the means by which to know that object well, beyond
the simple and natural reception of its form in the eye. Thus it can be said
that mere aspect is a natural operation, and that what I call Prospect is an
"Utpictura, itavisio" 49

office of reason which dep ends on three things: the discriminating eye, the
- It, visual ray, and the distance from the eye to the object.

[deux manieres de voir les objets, I'une en les voyent simplement, et I'autre .
- one
en les considerant avec attention. Voir simplement n'est autre chose que
of recevoir naturellement dans I'oeilla forme et la ressemblance de la ch ose
veu e. Mais voir un objet en Ie considerant, c'est qu'outre la simple et
ng It naturelle reception de la forme dans l'oeil, l'on cherche avec une application
: what particuliere les moyens de bien connoistre ce mesme objet: Ainsi on peut
dire que Ie simple aspect est une operation naturelle, et que ce que je
nomme Ie Prospect est un office de raison qui depend de trois choses,
s,avoir de l'oeil , du rayon visuel, et de la distance de l'oeil ii I'objet.]"
The final clause, with its reference to the visual ray and the distance of eye
-to from object, clearly reveals that by prospect Poussin refers to nothing other
a
than seeing according to perspective theory. Indeed, this entire passage, like
others of this th eoretical kind in Poussin's works, has been traced back to a
well-known Italian treatise. It is nof surprising that Poussin would defi ne and
defend hi s own art in terms of prospect. Nor is it surpri sing that he presents
an argument ab out the nature of painting in terms of notions of seeing. The
identity assumed between seeing and picturing-with the resulting confusion
that picturing has been th ought of as a way of seeing rather than a visual-
ization of it- was after all laid down in the perspective construction. But the
argument is not a symmetri cal one. While seeing in a prospective way implic-
itly corresponds to perspective picturing, seeing in an aspect way isleft as just
that-simple seeing with no related kind of picturing. With Kepler's ut
glv-
pictura, ita visio before us, Poussin's evocation of aspect has a familiar ring
and leads us back to a by-now famili ar definition. "Voir simplement n'est
autre chose que recevoir naturellement dans I'oeilla forme et la ressemblance
de la chose veue." What else is this but a description of that replicative picture
cast on the retina to which Kepler devoted his stu dies ? It is an "operation
naturelle," as Poussin calls it, which corresponds to that natural painting that
the Dutch spoke of as cast by the cam era obscura. It was Kepler, as we have
seen, who demonstrated that the retinal picture is itself a representation.
The problem inherent in appealing to the world seen "aspectively" is that
no one ever sees the picnlre on the retina. The appeal risks that mindless
identity of eye and world that Leonardo feared. But the picturing- of this
picture was a major concern in th e seventeenth century in the north. Kepler
himself did it.
III
Let us return once more briefly to Kepler. In a field near his house in
Austria he set up a device- presumab ly like the one found today in a drawing
among his papers (fig . 23) - to observe the rays of the sun. 51 He also used it
to make a landscape image. Kepler's landscape is an established part of the
camera obscura li terature. But we tend to forg et that he set up his device in
50 Chapter Two

a field not for picture-making but for astronomy. In attending to the picture
it made, and in subsequently tracing it off on paper, Kepler re-creates for us
his radical redefinition of the eye as a picture-making optical instrument. His
use of the camera obscura to make a lands cape picture makes visible the
invisible picture he had located in the eye.

:':- -- - -

•
. .,

23. Drawing of an optica l device from the papers of JOHANNES KEPLER. Manuscript
Archive of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, Leningrad.

Many strands of Our account come together in the well-documented visit

of Sir Henry Wotton to Kepler in Linz in 1620. Wotton's social connections
reconfirm that community of concerns which we have described: as Engli sh
ambassador to The Hague in 1615 he had been a neighbor of the Huygens
family and was, so Huygens tells us in his Autobiography, a companion to
them in music-making. The letter he wrote home on the Kepler picture was
sent to none other than Francis Bacon, the ph ilosopher so admired by Huy-
gens, whose views and programs for human makings educated and confirm ed
his own. Wotton writes to Bacon of his excitement about a landscape drawn
on a piece of paper that he saw in Kepler's study. When he asks Kepler how
he did it, Wotton is finally told that the drawing was traced from a camera
obscura image made "non tanquam pictor, sed tanquam mathematicus" by
the device set up in the field. Here are Wotton's words:
"Utpictu.ra, itavisio H
51

::Dre He hath a little black tent (of what stuff is not much importing) whi ch
he can suddenly set up where he will in a field, and it is convertible (like
a windmill) to all quarters at pleasure, capable of not much more than one
man, as I conceive, and perhaps at no great ease; exactly close and dark,
save at one hole, about an inch and a half in the diameter, to which he
applies a long perspective trunk, with a convex glass fitted to the said hole,
and the concave taken out at the other end, which extendeth to about the
middle of this erected tent, through which the visible radiations of all the
objects without are intromitted, falling upon a paper, which is accommo-
dated to receive them; and so he traceth them with his pen in their natural
: .:.·1 .... appearance, turning his little tent round by degrees, till he hath designed
, ,(\ ".t' the whole aspect of the field. This I have described to your Lordship,
because I think there might be good use made of it for chorography : for
otherwise, to make landscafes by it were illiberal, though surely no painter
can do them so precisely. 5

Though WottOn echoes Kepler's disclaimer about the art of the picture, the
account nevertheless tells us something about the image that bears on notions
of picturing.
Wotton writes that the device that Kepler used was made to turn around
like a windmill. The drawing or drawings that resulted must have been a series
of discrete views taken one by one, in succession, of the entire field around
the camera obscura. Each view was, as WottOn testifies a "tracing" in pen of
the "natural appearance" of the "visible radiation of all objects without." The
series of views so taken would add up to what Wotton then terms the "whole
aspect" of the field. The word aspect, though employed casually, reminds us
not inappropriately of the distinction made by Poussin that we have just
discussed. It is hard to figure out what this might produce by way of a single
image- a long strip of paper or a series of pieces. But I want to call attention
to that fact that clearly the world so pictured is an assemblage or aggregate of
parti al aspects, and that world is itself but part of a larger whole. Is there a
way for a draftsman to capture the extent of his vision on a flat surface? This
is not idle speculation but indeed speaks to the circumstances and intent of
many Dutch pictures. It was with this end in view that Hoogstraten titled a
chapter "How Visible Nature Presents Herself in a Particular Fashion.""
Northern artists characteristically sought to represent by transforming the
extent of vision ontO their small, flat working surface. This is true of the
sweep of a panoramic landscape that continues beyond the arbitrary rectangle
of the canvas, or the multiplication of rooms that are assembled for our view
in a Dutch peep- box.
It is the capacity of the picture surface to contain such a semblance of the
world- an aggregate of views - that characterizes many pictures in the north.
A source of confusion in looking at and writing about Du tch art is due to the
fact that in the north the very word perspective, or deurzigtkunde, rather than
referring to the representation of an object in respect to its spatial relationship
to the viewer, is taken to refer to th e way by which appearances are replicated
52 Chapter Two

on the pictorial surface. Perspective in this sense is concerned with the repre-
sentation of what Poussin called aspect.
Let us now consider some pictorial examples of this phenomenon. Despite
their striking idiosyncracies, perhaps indeed becau se of them, the architec-
tural portraits of Pieter Saenredam have repeatedly been chosen as examples
of certain deeply rooted and pervasive characteristics of Dutch images. 54 We
shall, however, get much farther in understanding them if we start with this
notion of the picture rather than assuming that Saenredam is indulging in a
free handling of the linear perspective mode. We might summarize the look
of his paintings as follows: for all their interest in architecture-which nor-
mally we consider under the rubric of architectural space- it is the surface of
the works that is remarkable. The delicate linear patterns-arch laid on arch
with doors folded over, trimmed by pillars thick and thin and bound by walls
of the palest tones of wash - have reminded many contemporary viewers (and
not without reason) of the surfaces of a Mondrian in nuce. What is further
distinctive about these as patterns is that they are notably asymmetrical. The
works often display a wide-angle view. A drawing from the north aisle
looking across the nave of the Buur church in Utrecht (fig . 24) clearly assem-
bles two views on one surface. From a point marked on the central pillar the
artist looked left and right and then combined these two views. Without
moving one's head and eyes a viewer in the church, situated at the eye point
noted by Saenredam, could not at once see to the left and to the right. The
work therefore does not present a fictive, framed window through which we
look into the church interior.
In further disregard of a prior frame, Saenredam proceeds to divide this
image in two. He makes one painting that corresponds to the left half, and one
to the right half of this drawing with the central pillar eliminated (figs. 25, 26).
Saenredam does not redesign the halves during this cropping operation. We
end up with two very different-looking works, each displaying another
characteristic-an extreme, oblique view. In making two images out of one,
Saenredam preserves the eye position from which the architecture was origi-
nally viewed in the first work. The left panel is thus viewed from off the right
edge, the right obliquely from off the left. This explains the looming pillars
opposite each obliquely situated viewpoint. What remains constant in these
works is not the frame and an externally posited viewer, but rather what was
seen by the viewer or viewing eye within the image. Saenredam accords such
privilege to the view seen that, in a quite unprecedented fashion, he annotates
his drawings done in churches when, sometimes years later, he makes or
(takes) a picture from them. As testimony to the world seen, the drawing is
not preparatory to anything but is the thing, or the representation of the
thing, itself. We are looking at architecture the seeing of which was already
recorded within the representation. We might justly say- with reference to
the notion of picturing with which we started-that such pictures are not
properly architecture viewed, in which an external viewer is presented with
a view of architecture, but rather views of architecture viewed. 55
"Utpictura, itavisio" 53

My attempt to define represented seeing in painting is parallel in certain

respects to some recent attempts to define what is known as represented
thought and speech in written language. I am referring to the grammatical
- :ec- study of what is familiar to most readers in the stream of consciousness
technique of the novel: speech is represented as perceived or experienced
\VIe expression whose communicative function is removed." Each of these
phenomena- represented seeing and represented thought and speech -
manifests extraordinary attentiveness, without, however, acknowledging that
interplay between sender and receiver-be it world and viewer or two
speakers-toat normally characterizes pictures in the Italian mode or lan-
guage when spoken . What one writer acutely described as "that remarkable
mixture of distance and absorption" which characterizes Saenredam and
other Dutch images is a symptom of such a pictorial state. 57
Perhaps the best way of explicating the phenomenon is by considering for
a moment the special northern tradition of perspective construction to which
Saenredam's works belong : that so-called distance point construction long
considered the northern draftsmen's answer to Alberti. While Alberti's text
assem- on painting was all words with no illustrations, his northern counterparts
:>illar the offered, by contrast, annotated pictures. They offered a geometric way to
\'i'ithout transform the world onto a working surface without the intervention of
fo e pOInt viewer and picture plane, without, in other words, the invention of an Alber-
:;ht. The tian picture. If we start with the first northern treatise on perspective, De
..,,-J,ich we Artificiali Perspectiva (1505) by the French priest Jean Pelerin, known as
Viator, we find that he assumes that representation replicates vision, which he
livide this defines in terms of a moving eye reflecting the light it receives like a burning
and one mirror or miroir ardente. S8 (The reference is to a curved mirror that can cause
;s. 25, 26). fire by concentrating rays of light.) Alberti, by contrast, explicitly states that
ation. We the operation of the eye itself is of no consequence to an understanding of his
g another pictorial construction. Viator then proceeds to locate the eye point not at a
ut of one, distance in front of the picture, but rather on the very picture surface itself,
was ongl- where it determines the horizontal line that marks the eye level of persons in
f the right the picture. The eye of the viewer (who in Alberti's construction is prior and
ing pillars external to the picture plane), and the single, central vanishing point to which
It in these it is related in distance and position, have their counterparts here within the
what was picture. The first eye point located by Viator is joined on each side, at equal
:ords such distances, by two so-called distance points from which the objects in the work
annotates are jointly viewed. The points are functions of the world seen rather than
makes or prior places where a viewer was situated. It is solely to people and objects in
!rawing is the work, not to the external viewer, that these three points refer. Placed side
o n of by side, the two constructions appear confusingly similar and, indeed, they
as already have been claimed to be different constructions with the same aim and iden-
Ference to tical result of offering artists a geometric means of representing objects in
:s are not space. The difference is clearly exposed in the diagrammatic comparison
oted with between the two perspective systems (figs. 27, 28) offered some years later by
the Italian architect Vignola. 59 We might say that, in Italian terms, there is no
"Ut pictura, ita visio" 55

24. P IETER SAENREDAM, Interior of the Bu.u.r Church, Utrecht (pen and chalk on blue
paper), 1636. Topographical Aclas, Mu nicipal Arch ives, Utrecht, Ja 4.1.

25. SAENRFDA M, Interior of lbe Buur Church, Utrecht, 1644. Location unknown.

26. P IETER SAEN REDA""I, Interior of the Buur Chlll'ch, Utrecht, 1644. By permiss ion of
the Trustees of the National Ga ll er y, London.
56 Chapter Two

..........._... .... - .... _....... ............... ··········r ··-,.·.

: !
'- . .. .. .. "" ........ .. .... , ..

27. The first " regol a" o r the "costruzion e legittima," in G IACOMO BAROZZI DA
VIGNOLA, Le due regole della prospettiva practica (Rome, 1583), p. 55 . Un iversity of
Chicago Library.

: ..•..:..
",', .

...;. .... . .
.......
............ .

..,'
.. ....
E F

28. The second " regol a" or the di stance-point method , in GI ACOMO BAROZZI DA
VIG NOLA , Le due regole della prospettiva practica (Rome, 1583), p. 100. Univers ity of
Chicago Library .

picture in th e distance point construction, for there is no framed window pane

to look through. Viator's picture is not separate from and related to an
external viewer. It is itself identified with pieces of the world seen. The
representation of figures in proportion to the pictorial architecture is put in
terms of their.view: "ainsi qu'il sera vu par les figures." Although the model
of the eye is not Kepler's, Viator's impulse to identify th e picture with the
eye, rather than with the world seen by a man situated before it at a certain
place, is lik e Kepler's. Viator's praise of works that employ his mode of
perspective not surprisingly echoes the Keplerian picture we have been defi-
ning: "[th e artists] representent les choses depassees et lointaines comme
immediates et presentes et connaissables au premier coup d' oei!."6O It re-
mained for followers to articulate this in pictures.
Th e distance point method can be manipulated to produce the unified cen-
tral perspective favored by Alberti. Vignola, who in 1583 introduced this meth-
od to the Italians, did just that with it since he was no more able than most
"Utpictu ra, itavisio" 57

modern commentators to imagine away the viewer and the picture plane. But
the distance point method does not favor mis choice. It easily produces
oblique and multiple views. While Viator did produce a number of illustra-
tions that mimic the centralized view, successors in the north emphasized its
more native peculiarities. Vredeman de Vries, the Flemish artist-engraver and
designer of architecture on paper, reiterated Viator's identification of the eye,
perspective, and picture surface when he subtitled his Perspective 1604-5
"that is the most famous art of eye-sight wh ich looks upon or through ob jects
painted on a wall, panel or canvas."" The first twO plates (figs. 29, 30)
beautifully illustrate the basic terms of Viator's visual geometry. The first
plate shows the circular arc transcribed by the turning eye, and the second the
section of this which, when laid out flat, is th e horizon line crossing the

_ - \-ersi ty of

29 . JA N VRED EMA N DE VRIES,

Persp ective (Leiden, 1604-5), plate
1. Courtesy, the Bancroft Library,
Berkeley. California.

1
-
.', .. ,.....\" . " :

windowpane
related to an
seen. The

with the

comme
. It re-
.. 60

} .
"-"-- - - - -
this meth- 30. J AN VRED EMA N DE VR IES, Perspective (Leiden, 1604-5) , plate 2. Courtesy, the
Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CaJifornia.
,.ole than most
58 Chapter Tw o

3 1. JAN VRED EMAN DE VRIF.S , Perspective (Leid en, 1604 - 5), plate 28 . Courtesy, [he
Bancroft Li brary, Berkeley, Californ ia.

pictorial surface. In a later plate a multipli cation of distance points leads the
eye to a variety of views up and down, in and out of an empty room. The effect
is that adding-on of views of the moving eye suggested by Viator. Wh en
fi gures enter th ey are captives of the world seen, entangled G ulliver-like in the
lines of sight that situate th em (fi g. 31 ). The many eyes and many things
viewed that make up such surfaces produce a syncopated effect. There is no
way that w e can stand back and take in a homogeneous space.
Before we return to Saenredam's versions of this traditi on, let us look at
one more bit of evidence th at confirms, but also compli cates, our und er-
standing of this special northern notion of perspective. It is not surprising,
given the title an d ambitions of Vredeman's Perspective, th at some seventy
years later anoth er Netherland er, Samuel van Hoogstraten, would comm end
it in the chapter on perspectiv e in his theoretical handbook , the Academy of
Painting. Alth ough he speaks of it with traditi onal respect, H oogstraten gives
perspective rather short sh rift. But rather than dismiss it completel y, he
presents it in such a manner th at it is transformed to arti culate the northern
preoccupation with optical illu sion. 62 What is surprising and most telling is
the company th at Vredeman keeps. His representation of open doors and
inner rooms, as H oogstraten describes it , is grouped with twO rather unlikely
examples of perspective in art- a famou s lost nude by G io rgione and an
engraving of Venus by Goltziu s (fi g. 32). The Giorg'one nude was depicted
with its back toward the viewer and the oth er sides of th e fi gure were vi sibl e
"Utpictura, itavisio" 59

by means of the ingenious use of reflections: one side was imaged in a mirror,
another in shining armor, and the front turned away from the viewer in the
surface of a pool of water. The strategy, chosen by Giorgione to demonstrate
painting's ability to outdo sculpture, has, like Giorgione's works in general,
a decidedly northern flavor. Van Eyck had done a similarly constructed work
showing a woman at her bath. But what is northern about it goes beyond an
attraction for reflecting surfaces . Giorgione achieves a comprehensive view of
the figure by addition, as it were, by putting together separate views. Al-
though a view of the whole is assembled, the result does not confirm the unity
of a body in space, as the Italians wished. It rather deconstructs it. A single
prospect, to use the relevant term, is sacrificed for an aggregate of aspects.
And yet it is just this that Hoogstraten offers as an example of perspective.
Vasari, on whose account of Giorgione's nude Hoogstraten based his own,
gives special praise to Giorgione for having the viewer enabled to see all
around the figure in a single glance. 63 But he does not remark how different
this is from the devices traditionally employed by Italian artists to achieve a
comprehensive view of a figure. Italian artists were normally unable or else
unwilling to sacrifice either the authority of the individual viewer or the unity
of the figure viewed. One strategy, therefore, was to double a figure . We find
the device known as figure come fratelli in Pollaiuolo's Martyrdom of St.
esy, the Sebastian (fig. 33), in which the back and front of crossbowmen are displayed
in two paired figures. Or the device of thefigura serpentinata, a figure twisted
around itself like Bronzino's St. John the Baptist (fig . 34), is used in such a
nts leads the way as to reveal more sides to view. We can trace the history of this Italian
m. The effect manner of picturing right up to Picasso (fig. 35) . In combining different views
\·iator. When to make one face or one body, Picasso elected to go so far as to distort or to
i,oer-like in the reconstruct the human anatomy . He paints, to paraphrase Leo Steinberg's
1 many things felicitous phrase, as if to possess, rather than relinquishing the authority of
:t o There is no the single viewer or the solidity of the figure viewed. 64
Any doubts that we might have about Hoogstraten's understanding of the
. let us look at Giorgione nude are dispelled in the third of his perspective examples. He cites
!S, our under- the print after Goltzius that shows Venus looking at herself in a mirror while
lot surpnsIng, a painter is painting her (fig . 32) . There are three views of Venus: in the flesh,
some seventy in the mirror, and on the painter's canvas. We are not in fact shown all sides
)Old commend of the figure, as we were by Giorgione. The Goltzius print does not answer
le Academy of the challenge for a comprehensive view of the figure, but rather demonstrates
ogstraten gIves that what Hoogstraten calls a perspective picture is made up of a sum of
:ompletely, he representations. We know Venus in pieces just as we know the churches of
e the northern Saenredam. Putting it this way, we can perhaps better understand why the
most telling is figures represented by Giorgione and Goltzius are related by contiguity in
Den doors and Hoogstraten's text to the additive spaces of Vredeman's architectural views .
unlikely Like others of its genre, Hoogstraten's handbook is a patchwork of tradi-
___ one and an tional examples plus some new ones of his own collected to illustrate estab-
" -"'as depicted lished topics. Since it provides the best testimony to what the Dutch could say
were visible about images at the full maturity of their own tradition, and since I shall be
60 Chapter Tw o

32. JanSaenredam, after HENDR ICK GOLTZIUS, An Artist and His Model (engraving). By
permissi o n of th e British Museum .
"Utpictura, itavisio" 61

33

33. Attributed to ANlDNIO AND PIERO DEL

POLLAIUOLO, The Martyrdom of St.
Sebastian. By permission of the Trustees of
the National Gallery, London.
34. AGNOLO BRONZINO, St. John the Baptist.
Galleria Borghese, Rome. Alinari / Editorial
Photocolor Archi ves.
35. PABLO PICASSSO, Seated Woman, 1927.
ograving). By
Collection , the Museu m of Modern Art,
New York. Gift of James Thrall Soby,

35
62 Chapter Two

referring to it again in the course of this book, it is important to establish the

nature of reading his text. The difficulty in reading it is that the assemblage,
more often th an not, does not present a linear argument but rath er an associa-
tive display. In this respect it might be said to be cu riously related to the
pictures it describes. Although the examples taken individually are often
traditional ones (by which I mean ones commonly set forth in Italian trea-
tises) , we must always be alert to the unstated interplay of associations that
leads Hoogstraten to group th em together as he does. The sum of this inter-
play is different from each example taken individually. In th e present passage
the three examples of perspective that we have di scuss ed are bracketed by
traditional examples of illusion. The peep-box (referred to here in Dutch as
perspectifkas) and the grapes of Zemas clearly belong to a discussion of
illu sion. But placed here th ey appear in a rath er specifi c ligh t. It is the
accumulated nature of th e picturing of th e world fit into a peep-box that is
emphasized and conjoined with the examples of Giorgione's picturing of the
nude and Goltzius's Venus that follow. The peep-box, Hoostraten suggests,
presents a stru cture not unlike Vredeman's buildings - an unframed sequence
of rooms or vistas successively viewed. Such an experience of sequential
viewing is confirmed in Hoogstraten's own peep-box (now in the Nati onal
Gallery in London) by the unusual addition of a second peep-h ole and by the
addition of a man visibl e outside the far window who is looking in (figs. 36 ,
37). Similarly, the example of the deceptiveness ofZeuxis's grapes plays back
on our understanding of the accumulative representations of Giorgione and
Goltzius and assimilates them (unlikely th ought this might seem) to illusion.
Zeuxis's grap es define the nature of what has been put togeth er before our
eyes by Giorgione, Goltzius , or Vredeman: representation as replication
instead of spatial devising is confirmed as the basis of pictorial illusion . If we .
sense that Hoogstraten here is of a like mind with Kepler we are right. On the
previous page, where he defines art as an imitation of appearance (at iss ue is
th e picturing of Seneca's famou s line of pillars, whi ch deceptively blend
together when seen a certain way), Hoogstraten takes the stance toward art's
pictures that Kepler had taken toward th e pictures on the retina. Let us put
th e two side by side. .
Kepler:
As long as the diameters of the luminaries and the extent of solar eclipses
are noted as fundam ental by astronomers, [it needs to be understood that]
some deception of vision arises pardy from th e artifice of observing....
And thus the origin of errors in vision must be sought in the conformation
and functions of th e eye itself. 65
Opposite page:
36. SAMUEL VAN HOOGSTRATEN, peep- box, detail. By perm ission of the Trustees o f [he
Nat ional Gallery, London.

37 . SAMUEL VAN HOOGSTRATEN, peep -box, detail. By perm ission of the T rustees of [he
National Gallery, London.
"Utpictura, ita visio" 63

- me

sequence
sequential
=e National
36
eand by me
ill (figs. 36,

plays back
. and
to illusion .
before our
as replication
illusion. If we .
right. On the
(at issue is
tively blend
toward art's
Let us put

solar eclipses
iderstclod that]

conformation

of the

of the
64 Chapter Two

Hoogstraten:
But I say that a painter whose work it is to fool the sense of sight, also
must have so much understanding of the nature of things that he thor-
oughly understands by what means the eyes are fooled.
[Maar ik zegge dat een Schilder, diens werk het is, het gezigt te bedriegen,
oak zoo veel kennis van de natuur der dingen moet hebben, dat hy grondig
verstaet, waer door het oog bedroogen wort.]"
Of course there is a significant difference: what Kepler accepts as the neces-
sary condition of retinal picturing Hoogstraten presents as the artist's task.
After this extended digression let us now return to Saenredam as a prime
example of painting done in this northern mode. Far from rejecting the
aggregate views assembled by Vredeman de Vries, Saenredam clearly accepts
them. The apparent stylistic differences between what is commonly referred
to as Vredeman's mannerism and Saenredam's realism blind us to this con-
tinuity. We might compare Saenredam's view before the library entrance of
Saint Lawrence at Alkmaar (fig . 38) with Vredeman for diversity of views that
enable us to see more. The eye passes low through two doors and through free
space to the left, and is stopped by a high, lean slice of space behind the pi llar
at the right. In turning his attention to actual churches, Saenredam grounds
or applies this lcind of picturing in a new and surprising way. The small figures
at the right are markers, at their eye level, of the horizon line. There is a
certainty displayed in what the surface can contain. There are the few deco-
rations of the white-washed church: the painted organ case, the hanging that
ends with the truncated image of a man's head , and a death shield . And
finally , though not in this work, figures concurrent with the artist's viewpoint
in the church make their object of sight into ours. In many of his studies
Saenredam marks the eye point, which locates th e horizon line and also a
point on that line from which the building was viewed. We find theoog point,
for example, on the bottom of the pillar at the right foreground of a drawing
of the great Saint Bavo in Haarlem (fig. 39). It is from here that the view could
be seen across the nave into the complex of space beyond and also up into the
vault with the painted shutters of its great organ.' One could see this, that is,
if one adjusted one's gaze. Once again the surface traversed by the eyes is the
field of vision that the panel lays out for us. The definitive gaze of the human
eye is then fortified with the figure of a man. In a painting that follows (fig.
40), Saenredam introduces (slightly to the left and on the horizon line itself)
a small figure, a viewer who directs our eyes to the organ, which in this
painting is the end in view. Saenredam's major innovation is to use his upward
gaze to establish the view of the organ. Like Vredeman's figures he is, in turn,
literally a captive of that view.
In the rendering of the organ, its decoration, and its accompanying inscrip-
tion, as in the frequent notation of place and date of excution that Saenredam
enters on the su rface of his works, he documents in image and in word the
HUtpictura, itavisio" 65

- neces-
task .
.. pnme
IIC.-:mg the

up into the
this , that is,
eyes is the
th e human
JOlJlJWS (fig.

line itself)
in this
upward

Interior of the St. Laurens Church at Alkmaar, 1661. Museum

38 . PIETER SAE NREDAM,
Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
66 Chapter Two

39 . Pr ETER SAENREDAM, Int erior of the Church of St . Bavo in Haarlem (pen, wash, and
black chalk heighten ed with white on blue paper), 1635. Kupferstichkab inctt,
Staatliche Museen Preuss ischer Kulturbcs itz, Berlin (West).
HUtpictura, itavisio" 67

, wash , and of the Ch f-trch of St. Bavo in Haar/em, 1636. By

40. PI ETER SAENRI'DA M, In terior
cou rtesy of the Rijksmuseum -Stichting, Amsterdam .
68 Chapter Two

Jlu n

41. Jan van de Velde, after PIETER SAENREDAM, St. Bavo, Haarlem (etching). Municipal
Archives, Haarlem.

experience of the viewer that the work represents. It has been argued persua-
sively that the organ, whose role in the Protestant service and in society was
a matter of great public dispute in the Netherlands at the time, is the proper
subject of this picture. Its clearly visible inscription, a common one on organs
at the time, argues approval for the organ's appropriate use. The picture
represents such approval. 67 But it is characteristic of Dutch art and of the
visual culture of which it is part that something seen, not performed, bearing
witness rather than dramatizing an event, makes for significance. The rare
instance in which Saenredam presents a single, central vanishing point, thus
identifying the church viewed with our own external view, is due to special
circumstances. It is the design for an etching of Sairit Bavo that was published
in a book as part of a tribute to the artist's native Haarlem (fig. 41). A
hortatory inscription specifically urges us to look at the beautiful church "if
your eyes can see." Here the entire church seen is made the object of our view
in order to honor the craft of its making, the city in which it stands, and
God. "
Saenredam's "lookers" within the picture (I use the word here to dis-
tinguish them from viewers external to the work) do not look out of the
picture at us. That would indeed be a contradiction, since the picture does not
assume our existence as viewers prior and external to it in the Albertian mode.
(The frame establishes the window relationship, for the mode of art itself does
not.) To look out from such a replication of the world seen would be to
contradict it or to call into question the very nature of the picture. We would
"Utpictura, itavisio" 69

not know whether to take it as the world we see (Albertian) or as the world
that is seen (northern or Keplerian). In fact, Velazquez's Las Meninas (fig.
42), one of the most subtle and powerful experiments in representation in all
of Western art, can be understood as being ambiguous in just this way . It
seems appropriate to close our discussion of this aspect of Dutch images with
a bri ef look at this great work.
In Las Meninas the "looker" in the picture-the one whose view it is-is
suitably none other than the artist himself, Velazquez, who, however, turns
from his canvas to look out at th e viewer (at us and the royal couple) in front
of the picture. Like so many of Velazquez's works that present powerful

· Municipal

III socIety was

is the proper
one on organs
The picture
art and of the
bearing
The rare
point, thus
to special
was published
(fig. 41). A
riful church "if
of our view
it stands, and

OIeTl llre does not

C- .lDelrrJ'tnmode .
0: art itself does
would be to
We would 42. D IEGO VELAzQUEZ , Las Meninas. Mu seo del Prado, Mad rid .
70 Chapter Two

human figures through elusive surfaces, this is a conflation of the northern

mode (the world prior to us made visible) and the southern mode (we prior
to the world and commanding its presence). What is extraordinary about this
picture as representation (apart from what I would want to say about the
poise, power, and fullness of its portrayal of the Infanta, her royal lineage, the
court and its expectations) is that we must take it as at once a replication of
the world and as a substitute world that we view through a window frame.
The world seen has priority, but so also do we. Paradoxically, the world seen
that is prior to us is precisely what, by looking out (and here the p ainter is
joined by the princess and her retinue), confirms or acknowledges us. But if
we had not arrived to stand before this world to look at it, the priority of the
world seen would not have been defined in the first place. Indeed, to come
full circle, the world seen is before us because we (and the king and queen as
noted in the distant mirror) are what commanded its presence. Las Meninas
confounds a single reading because it depends on and holds in suspension two
contradictory (but, to Velazquez's sense of things, inseparable) ways of un-
derstanding the relationship of a picture, and of the viewer, to the world. The
attempts to make a single sense out of it are mistaken. As Foucault has best
set forth, it is a picture born out of and defined by a trust in representation.
But even in the seventeenth century representation is not, as Foucault claims,
a thing unto itself. It has its disparate modes, by which I mean it is dependent
on notions of human measure, at least two of which Velazquez works to
reconcile in a particularly heightened way in his masterpiece."

IV

A leading historian of science has written recently of Kepler: "We know

now that the passive, camera-like features of the eye that took such intel-
lectual efforts to discover and are so fundamental to its optical system, never-
theless raise the least interesting questions about vision." " This explains why
the relationship between Dutch art and Kepler's optical discoveries have not
been noted by students of science and perception: But how do we explain the
general absence of concerted attention by art historians? I think because the
model of the art-science link has long been linear perspective and optics in the
Renaissance . In Italy, knowledge of nature was appropriated by practitioners
of art as a move to legitimize and elevate picture-making to the status of a
liberal art. Indeed, the desire for art to be up-to-date and scientifically true
in order to acquire status has also repeatedly been offered as the model of the
art-science link in later centuries." This model clearly does not obtain with
Kepler and the northern artists. The artists and the few theorists were either
unaware of Kepler or, if they were, did not accept his analysis of vision.
We have commented that Huygens is on record as doubting his findings,
and Hoogstraten argued (against Kepler) that light rays were emitted from
the eye.
"Utpictura, itavisio" 71

ern Instead it was established concerns of artists in the north that were in effect
taken up by Kepler. He turned his attention not only to the camera obscura,
but also to lenses, mirrors, and even to glass urinary bottles filled with clear
liquid, all of which served him as models of refracted light. Contemplating
these models , we cannot help but be struck that these are phenomena that had
traditionally fascinated northern artists. The reflecting jewels, various tex-
tures, light, glass, glass vials, and eyeglasses are, as Gombrich once wrote, all
done with mirrors. 72 Viewed from the vantage point of Kepler's optical
-e painter is studies, we could say that the image- making property of light had long been
us. But if a concern in the north. Van Eyck shows us in the Van der Paelealtarpiece that
_ .ority of the
each illuminated, shiny, reflecting surface makes an image. The nature of
- -=:I, to come representation is thus already being pursued. In the centuries preceeding
m d queen as Kepler, lenses and mirrors were not objects of study but were the product of
Las Meninas craftsmen and part of the studio equipment and delight of painters in their
s:::sp enSlOn two works. A number of Dutch painters were the sons of glassblowers. Jan van
< ways of un- der Heyden in the seventeenth century made and sold mirrors. It is a case of
:he world. The traditional crafts and skills eventually becoming the subject of natural knowl-
- :xlcault has best edge.
representation. The relationship between art, craft, and natural knowledge has been much
Foucault claims, debated. In the case of perspective it has been suggested that artists' workshop
it is dependent practice moved in the direction that was then confirmed, mathematicized as
F-"<ql.ez works to it were, in the perspective construction. A similar process, I think, took place
in the north in the seventeenth century, but it has gone largely unremarked.
It would seem to have been not innovating artistic practices but the estab-
lished practices of the craft, its age-old recording of light and reflecting
surfaces, its commitment to descriptive concerns in maps or to botanical
illustrations, in short, its fascination with and trust in the representation of
: "We know
the world, that in the seventeenth century helped spawn new knowledge of
such intel- nature.
system, never-
In the north natural knowledge, rather than emphasizing the forces of
explains why change in the art, was itself part of the past. It based its findings, modern and
have not
mathematical though they often were in their working out, on the new
do we explain the technology born of the old established craftsmanly concerns of an earlier age.
think because the (It is as if in Italy it had been Pisanello, not Masaccio, who was linked to
and optics in the experimentation and thought.) In playing a significant role in the new world
by practitioners of the seventeenth century, northern art did not change its old habits, but
to the status of a rather became newly confirmed in them. We can say that in this respect
scientifically true northern art never took part in the Renaissance in spite of the struggle of the
th e model of the Italianizers. (Though, of course, insofar as intellectual accomplishments are
not obtain with claimed for artists in the north they are those claimed in the south -
were either humanistic learning, the nude, and perspective.) We have a case of traditional
,,1:.Jys:·,s of vision.
crafts and skills sustaining or keeping alive certain interests that eventually
his findings, become the subject of natural knowledge. 78 Northern art came of age, came
emi tted from into a new age, by staying close to its roots. In Kepler's study of the eye,
natural knowledge caught up with the art.
3
"With a Sincere Hand and
a Faithful Eye":
The Craft of Representation

1: appear lifelike, a picture has to be

carefully made. Indeed, a second feature of northern art is its extraordinary
display of craft. Here, too, the contemporary interest in the eye, in particular
in its active use, is an appropriate way to comprehend the nature of Dutch
picturing. Attentive looking, transcribed by the hand-what might be called
the observational craft- led to the recording of the multitude of things that
make up the visible world. In the seventeenth century this was celebrated as
giving basic access to knowledge and understanding of the world. The phrase
from Hooke's Micrographia that heads this chapter is meant to suggest that
it is in this arena that we shall discover the language and the societal circum-
stances in which to locate some crucial aspects of Dutch art. Nowhere was
this program more powerfully expounded than in the writing of Francis
Bacon, and nowhere more persistently carried out than in the annals of the
Royal Society for the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge and in separate but
related educational projects of Johann Comenius. The various subjects set
forth by Bacon in his Preparative toward a Natural and Experimental His-
tory, like the pictured words of Comenius's Orbis Pictus and the objects
fami liar to us in the stilllifes of the Dutch , all treat knowledge as visible and
possessible. We are dealing here, I hasten to add, with what is properly
termed a Dutch reading of Bacon. Bacon's dreams of surveillance and power
as the fruit of man's knowledge of nature were not taken up in the Nether-
lands, where it was rather the experimental program and its taxonomic format
that attracted followers.
As we turn our attention to the crafting of pictures, we shall find that the
visual analogy once again introduces (appropriately, I think) a certain elu-
siveness to our analysis. Once again we find ourselves faced with the prob-
lematic question of the nature of representation. But now the terms are not
perceptual, as they were in the previous chapter, but rather involve areas of
experience that we might best collect under the heading of praxis. By praxis
I mean to refer to that curious seventeenth -century obsession with the craft-

72
"With a Sincere Handand a Faithful Eye" 73

ing of Nature, of language, of the human trades or arts . If in the last chapter
the model for pictorial representation was presented by the artifice of sight,
in the present chapter it is presented rather by the skills of craft. I want to
define the new emphasis that was brought to b'ear in the seventeenth century
on the exercise of the traditional representational skills of the Dutch artist,
The chapter has four sections: the first deals with the attentive eye and what
a commitment to this means for those using microscopes as well as for those
wielding a brush; section two considers the picture as an instrument of
language learning and as a form of language in the works of Comenius;
section three turns to Bacon's interest in techni! as a model for art's pursuit
of knowledge through experiment; and the conclusion speaks to those social
circumstances that encouraged the Dutch artist to consider himself as supreme
among the craftsmen of the day. My argument will move back and forth
between the intellectual and social circumstances and the images themselves
in an attempt to suggest the manner in which these phenomena were inter-
::ure has to be woven at the time. !
- extraordinary
e, in particular I
--:ure of Dutch When Robert Hooke published his Micrographia in 1664 he claimed to be
;night be called contributing to what he termed a "reformation in Philosophy." The eye,
of things that helped by the lens, was a means by which men were able to turn from the
...s celebrated as misleading world of Brain and Fancy to the concrete world of things. And the
Forl O . The phrase
recording of such visual observations, which were the subject of his book,
to suggest that was to be the basis for new and true knowledge. As Hooke put it himself, his
societal circum- studies would be by way of
Nowhere was
of Francis Shewing, that there is not so much requir'd towards it, any strength of
the annals of the Imagination, or exactness of Method, or depth of Contemplation (though
in separate bu t the addition of these, where they can be had, must needs produce a much
more perfect composure) as a sincere Hand, and afaithful Eye, to examine,
subjects set
and to record, the things themselves as they appear. 2 .
,F.xperilnelltal H is-
and the objects Hooke's preface, from which this passage is taken, articulates the binding of
as visible and the attentive or, as he calls it, fai thful eye to the manual craft of the recording
is properly hand. H e binds sight to crafted description and, further, places this activity
power in the context of the greater Baconian project. Hooke's book was published
in the Nether- under the auspices of the fledgling Royal Society, which in 1663 asked Hooke
format to contribute one of his microscopic observations to each weekly meeting.
His study was central to the wave of Baconianism that flourished in publica-
find that the tions after Bacon's death and that was finally confirmed in the founding of the
a certain elu - Royal Society. That "reformation ' in Philosophy" to which Hooke allies
with the prob- himself is the casting out of th e intellectual authority granted to those false
the terms are not notions or "Idols," as Bacon termed them, that had previously captured
in"olve areas of men's minds. Observation and recording things seen and set forth in words
"T.H" . By praxis and pictures is to be the basis of new knowledge. Hooke's interest in right
with the craft- seeing and its record embraced th e camera obscura as well as the microscope.
74 Chapter Three

In a report to the Royal Society of 1694, he argues that the camera obscura
is a device that can be used to produce truthful drawings of foreign places to
counter the false images then circulating in the form of travel literature. J This
suggestion does not seem to have been practical and did not gain acceptance.
But its aim-to achieve a true picture-surely accorded well with the inter-
ests of the Dutch. We have already seen that they were fascinated with the
camera obscura. As we shall find in the chapter to follow, they were also
among the most dedicated world-describers (to take "geographer" literally,
as it then was) of the time.
At the conclusion of his preface to the Miaographia, however, Hooke's
frame of reference becomes distinctly more practical and commercial than
Bacon's:
But that that yet farther convinces me of the Real esteem that the more
serious part of men have of this Society, is, that several Merchants, men
who act in earnest (whose Object is meum & tuum, that great Rudder of
humane affairs) have adventur'd considerable sums of Money, to put in
practice what some of our Members have contrived .... [[]heir attempts
will bring Philosophy from words to action, seeing the men of Business
have had so great a share in their first foundation. 4
Despite Hooke's claim, there was a nagging sense that while England had the
Royal Society with its commercial connections, Holland lacked the Society
but had the trade. This was the respect in which Dutch Baconianism was
recognized. Thomas Sprat returns to this theme several times in the course of
his History of the Royal Society of 1667. He is a bit puzzled by the lack of
institutionally supported experimentation in Holland (though the lack of a
real monarchy and aristocratic sponsorship is an obvious explanation), but he
is full of praise for the proverbial industriousness, inventiveness, and trade of
the Dutch. The Hague, Sprat writes with reference to Bacon, "may be soon
made the very Copy of a Town in the New Atlantis. ,, ' Social factors present
in Holland and sadly absent in England are basic to this success. Sprat's
comparison of England with Holland could stand in good stead even today:
The English [are] avers from admitting of new Inventions, and shorter ways
of labor, and from naturalizing New-people: Both which are the fatal
mistakes that have made the Hollanders exceed us in Riches and Trafic:
They receive all Projects and all People, and have few or no Poor. '
But the activities of the English Baconians had other reverbations in HoI-
land. Constantijn Huygens was not alone in his enthusiasm for Bacon's
writings. Their popularity is testified to not only by the good number of
editions of his works that appeared in Holland, but further by the very early
date at which his ideas and, most significantly, his practical procedures were
discussed . Isaac Beeckman, the head of the Dordrecht Latin school, a leading
student of nature and a friend and correspondent of Descartes and Mersennes,
was already testing the experiments compiled by Bacon in 1628, the year after
the publication of Sylva Sylvarum. Beeckman's enthusiasm for Bacon led him
"With a Sincere HandandaFaithful Eye" 75

:: cu ra to try to correct the many mistakes that he found in specific experiments and
to
-..;,:es in their results. The precision, even fussiness, of his undertaking seems tem-
,_ This peramentally Dutch. Others among his countrymen joined him in the task of
offering corrections of this sort to Bacon. Beeckman clearly did not take issue
with the plan Bacon set forth, he simply wanted to bring it up to snuff so that
it could fulfill its great promise. He approvingly copied into his notebook the
well-known passage from the Ncrvum Organum that defines and assails the
Idols. The record of Beeckman's own thought and experiments suggests that
Holland was well prepared to receive Bacon's message. 7
Beeckman was an ordained minister with a medical degree from Caen who
kept a detailed diary on his intellectual and scientific interests. 8 The diary is
on the one hand a kind of commonp lace book in which he could copy down
truths such as Bacon on the Idols, but it also gave him the chance to set down
wonderful and telling scenes from his intellectual life. Though Beeck-
man was an educated man who corresponded with and visited the leading
, to put in thinkers of his day, he lacked the public opportunities to promote his ideas
"':"'Pei r attempts that were common for his English contemporaries. In this respect his situ-
of Business ation was not unlike that of the uneducated microscopist Leeuwenhoek. The
account of his experiments was only brought to public notice in his corre-
=1liafLO had the spondence, instituted with the London Royal Society upon the advice of
Constantijn Huygens. Baconian attitudes inform the making of Dutch im-
was ages, but they never had the institutional suppOrt in Holland that they gained
in the course of in England.
by the lack of Beeckman's diary records a play of mind that he appropriately refers to as
the lack of a his sensible imagination. He sits with Johan van Beverwyck (the author of the
tll'Lllaltl(llli, buthe standard medical handbook of the time, whom we met in the last chapter
and trade of exhibiting his eyelike camera obscura) and Jacob Cats (the man whose writ-
ings provided the moral touchstone for the Netherlands, where families put
Father Cats on the shelf beside the Bible). As the three men sip their wine
together they note the way a lump of sugar sucks up the liquid and a lively
discussion of capillary action ensues. 9 Or, coming home from sitting in his
appoi nted pew at church, Beeckman regrets that he could not prevent his
mind from drifting away from the sermon to take up the mathematical prob-
lem presented by the disposition of panes in the window just over his seat. He
questions the movement of clouds, the flicker of a candle, the fact that books
are normally high er than they are wide. In an extraordinary act of obser-
",t'atl<DnS in Hol- vation, he even turns to the body of his brother, on which he performs an
for Bacon's autopsy to determine the cause of his untimely death. 10 It is the appearance
good number of and in that sense the nature of the world that rouses Beeckman's interest. His
by the very early curiosity makes no distinction between man and his makings and Nature and
procedures were hers . Beeckman's bent is practical. Though his diary is written in both Dutch
school, a leading and Latin, he favored starting a school to educate common craftsmen in
and Mersennes, physics that would be conducted entirely in Dutch. Whatever the subject, it
, the year after is not meditation as such that Beeckman prizes, but results. He wants to get
Bacon led him things clearly into focus. Everything visible in the world (and everything that
76 Chapter Three

is important can be seen) is to be arranged in a Baconian way as part of a great

taxonomy that constitutes knowledge.
In recording his observations, Beeckman compiles the bits and pieces of a
program for Dutch art. Dutch artists shared a passion for visual attentiveness
with this kind of experimenter and savant. Indeed, their works attend to
many of the same things that he does: Ruisdael's billowing clouds lifted high
over the land (fig. 88); the swaying of the candle and the curled pages of piled
books captured for our eyes in Leiden still-life paintings; the cadavers de-
picted by portraitists, to whom death presents itself in the form of a surgeon's
lesson in anatOmical observation. Like the painters of his land, Beeckman had
a predilection for proverbs and other common sayings. Why is it, he won-
ders, that people can sing tOgether but not speak tOgether? Why is it said that
when the sun is hot it will rain? 11 Beeckman treats verbal commonplaces as
observations of the natural world, and as such they tOo are subject to his
attentive eye. He puts forth verbal truisms and grants them something akin
to the presence they assume on the printed pages of Dutch emblem books and
in the paintings that are their counterparts. One reason for the popularity of
pictured proverbs such as we find in the works of Jan Steen (fig. 163) is that
instead of opening up human behavior to the uncertainties of interpretation,
they categorize it and make it plainly visible to the eye.
Dutch Baconianism rested on an extraordinary trust in the attentive eye.
This is the active form of the concern with the appearance of things that we
discussed in the previous chalrer. If we look for textual evidence of this in the
literature on art, the most articulate account is by Samuel van Hoogstraten.
Although drawing "after life" was an established procedure in the making of
images in Renaissance art in the West, Hoogstraten's emphasis on the atten-
tive eye is distinctive. In the chapter following that on "How Visible Nature
Presents Herself in a Particular Fashion," he addresses the need of using milch
attention (opletting) in drawing, to the point that a measure is, as it were, built
intO one's eyes. 12Getting used to observing (opmerken) serves the eye as well
as the hand. Almost any part of nature, Hoogstraten continues, can feed or
sharpen the eye.(His expression "de scherpte des oogs te wetten" is what one
would use of a knife.) Therefore, while advising that the eye be used keenly,
he adds none of the strictures commonly found in treatises of this kind about
what one ought to look at. Hoogstraten's concentration on the use of the eye
in the making of pictures appears to be almost a function of the Dutch
language. He entitles the chapter in which he defines what painting is "Van
hetoogmerk der Schilderkonst" or, literally, the aim or "eye-mark" of the art
of painting. He proceeds to argue that painting. is a study· that represents all
the ideas of the visible world with the aim of fooling the eyes. With the
exception of the particular emphasis given fooling the eyes, the sentiments
expressed are traditional ones. But the words chosen have a parti'cular reso-
nance: represent is verbeelden or repicture, ideas are "ideen ofte denk-
beelden," which introduces a word for ideas referring to them specifically as
mental pictures, and "oog te bedriegen," or fooling of the eyes, echoes the
"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 77

- • great oogmerk of the chapter title. In the brief passage, Hoogstraten is engaged in
a common kind of Dutch word play that lends a material presence to abstract
terms such as aims, ideas, and representation itself. Let us look at the entire
passage now in this light:
to
Concerning the aim of the Art of Painting; 'what it is and what it produces.
-'oed high The Art of Painting is a science for representing all the ideas or notions
of piled which the whole of visible nature is able to produce and for deceiving the
-n-ers de- eye with drawing and color.

[Van het oogmerk der Schilderkonst; watze is, en te weeg brengt. De

Schilderkonst is een wetenschap, om aile ideen, ofte denkbeelden, die de
gansche zichtbaere natuer kan geven, te verbeelden: en met omtrek en
.,..,·: qlaces as verwe het oog te bedriegen.]
- ect to his In calling for an attentive eye, Hoogstraten professes not only a notion of
p""e:run!g akin drawing, but also a notion of the world that is seen and drawn. He cautions
and the young artist against taking on a mannered style by appealing to him to
=_. ularity of humble his brush and his hand to the eye so that the diversity of the individual
:63) is that things in the world can be represented. lJ This is very much the world as seen
through a microscope. When Hooke looks at the seeds of thyme, he testifies
to the way in which each is different from the other "both as to the eye and
-move eye. light . . . . They seemed each of them a little creas'd or wrinckled, but E
- !!S that we [indicated on the engraving] was very conspicuously furrowed" (fig. 45).14
. this in the Even in tiny seeds the attentive viewer perceives the differences. An art
conceived of in this way is indeed an unending mirroring, as Hoogstraten calls
it elsewhere.
If the world is looked at in this way, it is not the differences between things
but their resemblance that is most problematic. Apparent resemblances can
: using much produce confusions in our perception of the separate and distinct identities of
it were, built things. This attitude explains a number of passages in which Hoogstraten
I :3e eye as well disputes the attribution to pictures of meanings, interpretations, or what he
, can feed or considers to be confused identities. Although he is an advocate of what we call
!CO" is what one trompe l'oeil images, he assails the inexcusable magic of the Italian church
used keenly, ceilings that pretend to represent heaven . In a similar vein he also chides those
- 's kind about who (Leonardo-like, perhaps) read meanings into the clouds in the sky. 15
Ie use of the eye When Hoogstraten encourages the painter to use his eyes to see clouds as
I of the Dutch clouds, he confirms the nature of Ruisdael's pictures and of Beeckman's
among is "Van pursuit of natural knowledge.
"",k" of the art This fixation on discrimination between things and on individual identity
- represents all explains a curious and unprecedented chapter that Hoogstraten devotes to
eyes . With the resemblance. 16 In a world in which each face is marvelously created to be
:he sentiments different from every other one, it is all the more remarkable, he observes,
•.• rticular reso- when two people happen to look so exactly alike that they cannot be told
ofte denk- apart. Hoogstraten focuses on the confusions-sometimes comic-that can
specifically as be brought about by people like identical twins who look alike to all but their
es, echoes the families. In his customary manner he assembles examples from both texts and
78 Chapter Three

life, but one instance from his own life is most suggestive. Hoogstraten tells
of having seen a nobleman riding through the streets of London who attracted
such a crowd of followers that he scarcely knew where to hide. "The reason
for the pursuit was that, unbeknownst to him, he was a likeness or double for
the king. Mistaken for the ruler, he was followed as if he were the king. The
radical demystification of the basis of royalty implied by the tale does not
occur to Hoogstraten. The incident of mistaken identity does not suggest to
him that kingliness is only a function of appearance. It never enters Hoogstra-
ten's mind that the "king's clothes" might be an example of mere appearance
sustained by belief. In fact, quite the reverse, the tale suggests to him that even
the recognition of the king is a function of individual identity. A king, in this
essentially leveling view, is but one individual among all the others and the
problem is how to tell him apart as an individual. Identity (in this case of an
individual man) is valued over and even opposed to resemblance (in this case
to a kingly look).
Hoogstraten does not make clear what conclusion he draws for the making
of art from this consideration of resemblance and identity. And indeed, given
the way in which his own text, as we have already seen, is delicately poised
between the rhetoric of the south and the pictorial practice of the north, a
clear conclusion is hardly to be expected. There is, however, I think, a link
between the problem Hoogstraten raises and the idea and practice of art. Put
simply, one could say that Italian art was based on an intentional turning
away from individuality in the name of general human traits and general
truths. In such an art resemblance to certain ideals of appearance or of action,
and thus resemblance between things, was constitutive of truth. This not only
helped give the art a certain ideal cast, it also encouraged the differentiation
between kinds of works. Portraiture, since it must attend to individuals, was
considered inferior to works that engaged higher, more general human truths.
The Dutch trust to and privileging of portraiture, which is at the center of
their entire pictorial tradition, is connected on the other hand to a desire to
preserve the identity of each person and each thing in the world. At the heart
of Hoogstraten's chapter on resemblance is this alternative notion of art and
of truth.
The anecdotes in Hoogstraten's chapter on resemblance locate in the visible
world those phenomena that Bacon put in more abstract, philosophical terms.
It is the meeting and passing of people in the streets of London, or the
relationships within a family that serve Hoogstraten as examples of mistaken
identity. But his concern is consistent with Bacon's concern about mistaken
identities that are of the mind's making:
The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the exis-
tence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds."
As we saw in our discussion of Kepler's study of vision, what had long been
a basis for northern art came into its own as a generally accepted way of
understanding the world in the seventeenth century. Hoogstraten, like Ba-
con, takes part in that seventeenth-century mode of constituting knowledge
"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 79

which Foucault has-to my mind somewhat confusingly- called classical.

Foucault, in The Order of Things, persistently argues that this new order of
understanding is in effect a rejection of the established Renaissance tradition
of interpretation through resemblance. His analysis provides an appropriate
summary and coda to our discussion of Hoogstraten's chapter on resem-
blance:
Resemblance, which had for long been the fundamental category of
knowledge-both the form and Content of what we know-became disas-
sociated in an analysis based on terms of identity and difference .... The
activity of the mind .. . will no longer consist in drawing things together
... but, on the contrary, in discriminating, that is, in establishing their
identities, then the inevitability of the connections with all the successive
degrees of a series. "
- mis case Foucault opens his book with his remarkable viewing of Velazquez's Las
Meninas, but otherwise his materials are textual in nature. Because he offers
--e making examples and arguments from literature, philosophy, natural knowledge,
,,"weed, gIven linguistics, and economics, the centrality of the image to this new mode of
poised knowing the world is never made clear. To the extent that my work owes a
e north, a measure of its impetus to Foucault's formulation, it also offers a supplement
:iUnk, a link to it as far the place of the image is concerned.
of art. Put Bacon, as far as I know, does not employ the example of images. But
within his circle I have fo und at least one occasion that testifies directly to the
relationship between the nature of images and the sea-change in the notion of
knowledge at the time. It concerns a common Renaissance dispute about the
manner in which to make an image: Does one model art after nature or after
previous art? In the prefatory ode commissioned from him for Sprat's History
, was of the Royal Society, Cowley invokes this artistic dispute as a way of clari-
UIlI".1l truths. fying his exposition of Bacon. The famous passage in which Cowley hails
Bacon as a second Moses is preceded by less famous lines that counsel a
rejectIOn of high art and a return to nature. First, Cowley questions the
masters:
Who to the life an exact Piece would make,
Must nOt from others Work a Copy take;
No, not from Rubens or Vandike.
or the He then proceeds to warn against resorting to one's own fancy:
of mistaken Much less content himself to make it like
mistaken Th' Ideas and the Images which ly
In his own Fancy, or his Memory.
the exis- And concludes with the same formula, or one close to it, that is put forth by
Hooke and that serves as the title of this chapter:
long been No, he before his sight must place
way of The Natural and Living Face:
like Ba- The real Object must command
knowledge Each judgment of his Eye, and Motion of his Hand. "
80 Chapter Three

For him who pursues natural knowledge, as for the maker of images, Cowley
says, it is necessary to choose between the true testimony of sight and mis-
leading interpretations. Most Dutch images, I would maintain, can be said to
support this view, but there is one in particular that declares it outright.
I have in mind an odd occasional print after Pieter Saenredam (fig. 44). 21
This etching of 1628 represents, so the lengthy inscription tells us, several
cross sections cut through an old apple tree growing on a farm just outside of
Haarlem. This image was made to repudiate an earlier one th at had repre-
sented the widespread belief that the dark core of the apple tree represents th e
miraculous appearance of Roman Catholic priests (fi g. 43) . In a Holland sti ll

JiG , 'RI:. II JEVOII D EN I N f:EJI TA CK. OlffROlT .

l
)

4 3. Miracu lo us im ages found in an apple tree. Municipal Archives, Haarlem.

"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 81

ley at war with Catholic Spain, with troops not far off, the religious issue was a
lively one. But Saenredam's print speaks to the nature of images as well as to
issues of faith. He shows us the shape and thickness of the cuts through the
tree and then isolates the dark cores for our view. He carefully names the date
it was found and the location of the tree. This print, published, as the
inscription says, out of the love of truth, seeks to replace a false picture with
a true one. Its strategy is to separate the object seen from those beliefs or
interpretations to which it had given rise. It argues, in effect, that the miracle
is bound to a mistake in image-reading or to a mistake in interpretation.
Saenredam's image of the tree replaces man's fancy, to recall Cowley's words,

j •

l!co un pbn:g!Jmomann btkmb tIlat

tnt gnuc!JC al!Jitt: U I,)arrlnn opnt(Jam is ban
frill! ilIofflrbr/tllfrhrn
ttrOUllf Clnrflillic IlIlIJIftn (nile'
B,.d<t<><I<,1n bel !Jntr _llntll Il!l\llUfI,ltbilTrlrifp.
prlbollll'l\lll1lllfJinltntlr fjfx ooli btlfrllM' ObtT '[Willl mbr bIll"
tII.11r....DI'n I, btrftt'llJ'lDlmllr IIPIWblrin: fa IJalllargl!lllr IJI;f1
.n.t 1I.-nrm1llll" rtrbrc IIo'rilIC IU;in '1110)" Cffrtufbm.6tm.l'flr colE
"I1,otT ","",!jilt iJl / bat mIlInu bo In . Oplf grfnrbrn mbC tJill ltCl

tGilfr '*'1 btl11ffll!lflllblQr mtnfdJru'(nOlbtn bfbl"llrn. t>o i)tbbtn \:upbl:

2k11!Jtlml cftr bffl mIG nornlfnl ralT ID4n1Jrl'tlll'llr fOll lll./lft
1'1l" .-n tin! tIIQ IijtnQrn ImlltnlDP 11<1,.11, b.I1181lbigrn mcgln (1m Inbl ITIn!l'!I 'milt
men bIIn blir brdbcll mllf frbMmtutn bwbtn _lloomfn 0011 btrHlrlJt IIftr tlmn
t( tiJ Adriaen Roomao, Ct"bilhltis • 11I"bt
.J!l/t.:'61Ifle-ftmd 1 (i $.

44. Corne/is Korning, after PJETER SAENREDAM, Prin t to Belie Rumors about the Images
Found in an Apple Tree (etchin g), 1628. Muni cip al Archives, Haarlem .
82 Chapter Three

with the real object seen. T he core of an apple tree is not much to look at.
Saenredam denied any resemblance between these dark shapes and priests. At
the concl usion of the commentary he says: "There are no other images except
these and they could not find any others. Even when you have a good look at
them with a crystal glass." D ispensing with interpretation, Saenredam calls
attention to the particular thing seen in itself. Significantly, he looks at it
through glasses and represents it in a picture. The inscription has the advantage
of articulating a common intent: understanding is located in representing what
IS seen.
An illuminating contrast is offered by th e quite different reception Rubens
gave to the original print that recorded the miracle. As luck would have it, a
copy of the engraving fell into his hands. In a letter written from Antwerp in
March, 1628, he reports what he refers to as "the nonsense [bagatelli] from
Holland": a vision has been reported of a bishop walking on the Haarlem
Meer and an engraving has been widely distributed of an apple tree with nuns
and monks. 22 Rubens quickly fills in what is to him an obvious context: the
imperial Spanish army is nearby and fears have been raised among the Dutch
that these are both omens of a Catholic resurgence. He then generalizes as
follows: "How great an impression the dread or fear of something new will
make upon the minds of men." It is the nature of human feelings and reac-
tions, not the status of the tree, that Rubens attends to. And to give the event
fu rther grounding , Rubens predictably turns to antiquity. He cites a passage
in which Pliny had referred to readings done on the basis of defects in the
wood of a lemon tree. This, Rubens implies, is how people behave under
certain circumstances, and defects in trees have traditionally been an object of
interpretation. We can imagine Rubens representing the worsh ip of false
omens as a narrative picture: a crowd falls down or lifts its arms to honor the
tree. He would find an antique counterpart to represent the modern errors.
A painter's access to truth, as Rubens's works amply demonstrate, is through
the depiction of human actions. Saenredam differs from Rubens in the nature
of his understanding of the way images mean. Of course these things are
linked. While Rubens's letter appeals to human nature and historical prece-
dent, Saenredam offers instead to correct our sight.
The contrast offered us by these two reactions to the small instance of the
apple tree outside Haarlem resounds in the program Bacon outlines in his
Great Instauration. Bacon in effect sets Saenredam's view over and against
that of Rubens by basing his plan of the natural histories on the belief that
all depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed upon the facts of nature and
so receiving their images simply as they are. For God forbid that we should
give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world. 23
But what is it to know nature through attentive looking? Or to put th e
question differently, what does one know if this is knowledge? There were a
number of kinds of answers to question at the time, one of which-the
microscopic model-is introduced by Saenredam himself in his invocation of
"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 83

f_ at. the crystalline lens . His procedure and his claims about looking at the apple
. At tree are familiar to us from the reports of oiliers who were viewing ilie world
ilirough a lens. Leeuwenhoek, for example, repeatedly uses his microscope to
disprove previous interpretations. When people iliink iliat a fever iliey have
contracted is due to the fiery red color iliat ilieir shoes pick up from meadow
grass, Leeuwenhoek decides to look into it. He walks out to the meadow,
srudies ilie grass to discover what makes it red, and describes in detail the
strucrure of the stalks." Like ilie shapes in the apple tree, ilie feverish nature
of the grass is put aside in face of what is seen. The red grass, like the apple
"'·::i(1O Rubens tree, then has the starus of a deconstructed wonder. This speaks to a general
d have it, a problem about the starus and use of observations such as Leeuwenhoek's: to
:\ntwerp in what extent does description take ilie place of oilier kinds of explanation? The
agatellil from example of ilie red grass is magnified by ilie larger one of his discovery and
"' the Haarlem careful description of protozoa and bacteria-his animalcules. One is struck
, tree with nuns by ilie almost indiscriminate breadili of Leeuwenhoek's attentiveness - he
",s context: the turns his microscope on his sputum, feces, and even his semen as easily as he
• ong the Dutch did on ilie flowers of ilie field .
] generalizes as Leeuwenhoek combines absorption in what is seen wiili a selflessness or
"thing new will anonymity that is also characteristic of the Dutch artist. Indeed, ilie condi-
dings and reac- tions of visibility iliat Leeuwenhoek required in order to see better with his
o give the event instruments resemble the arrangements made by artists . He brings his object,
, CItes a passage fixed on a holder, into focus beyond ilie lens . He adjusts ilie light and the
,f defects in the setting as the artists were to do. To make the object of sight visible-in one
e behave under case globules of blood-Leeuwenhoek arranges ilie light and background (in
een an object of a way iliat is still not completely understood) so iliat ilie globules will, in his
rorship of false words, stand out like sand grains on a piece of black taffeta. 25 It is as if
tD5 to honor the
Leeuwenhoek had in mind the dark ground favored by Dutch still-life paint-
modern errors. ers . From Bosschaert early in ilie century to Kalf later, Dutch painters under-
crate, is through stood iliat ilie visibility of surface (as contrasted wiili solidity of volume)
!l1S in the nature depends precisely on this effect of relief (fig. 59). In keeping wiili the domes-
these things are tic mode of Dutch art, Leeuwenhoek's diaries describe wiili infinite care the
listorical prece- household settings required for his observations: his study, its source of light
and air, and the glass of water in which the animalcules are observed.26 But
I instance of the iliere is another, more special sense in which his work, like that of the
I outlines in his painters, acknowledges ilie conditions of sight. Leeuwenhoek was possessed
)Ver and against by a fascination with the eyes of insects and animals. He looked not only at
n the belief that them but ilirough them. In describing what animal or insect eyes see, he
repeatedly calls attention to ilie fact that the world is known not ilirough
1:5of narure and being visible, but through ilie particular instruments iliat mediate what is
d that we should seen. Size, for example, is relative and dependent on the seer. Leeuwenhoek
i the world. 23 observes the church tower that artists recorded, but he looks at it through ilie
Or to put the eye of a dragon fly : "When I looked at the Tower of the New Church which
There were a ... I found to have a height of 299 feet and from which my Srudy, as I
e of which-the guessed, is 750 feet distant, through the Cornea a great many Towers were
:tis invocation of
presented, also upside down, and they appeared no bigger ilian does the point
84 Chapter Three

of a small pin to our Eye." " When Paulus Potter or Aelbert Cuyp juxtaposes
a bull (fig. 8) or a looming cow against a tower made tiny by its distance, he
similarly acknowledges the conditions of sight.
This common interest is summed up in Leeuwenhoek's posthumous gift to
the Royal Society. A contemporary account of the bequest, itself sadly long
since misplaced, records that it, "consists of a small Indian cabinet, in the
Drawers of which are 13 little Boxes or Cases, each containing two Micro-
scopes .... They seem to have been put in Order in the Cabinet by himself,
as he design'd them to be presented to the Royal Society each Microscope
having had an Object placed before it." Leeuwenhoek not only bequeathed
his instruments but, as the commentator goes on, methodically determined
"those Minute subjects, that may in a particular Manner deserve his atten-
tion." " Three of the microscopes offered a view of eyes: the eye of a gnat;
the eye of a fly, and the crystalline humor from the eye of a whale. To the end
Leeuwenhoek played with questions of scale.
r shall not take up here the interesting problem of the nature and role of
illustration in the works of the Dutch naturalists. Leeuwenhoek himself em-
ployed a pictorial scribe to note down in a simple form what he saw. Other
Netherlandish students of natural knowledge such as the entomologist
Joannes Goedart, and Maria Sibylla Merian, known for her splendid botani-
cal images, made their own images. But I want to consider at least three useful
terms of comparison between the activity of the microscopist and the artists,
terms that are based on notions of seeing held in common and posited on an
attentive eye. First and second, the double cutting edge of the world seen
microscopically is that it both multiplies and divides. It multiplies when it
dwells on the innumerable small elements within a larger body (Leeuw-
enhoek's animalcules in a drop of liquid) or the differences between individ-
uals of a single species. It divides when it enables us to see an enlargement of
a small part of a larger body or surface- as Leeuwenhoek studied the grain
in wood or Hooke the weave of a bit of taffeta. Third, it treats everything as
a visible surface either by slicing across or through to make a section (as
Leeuwenhoek was one of the first to do) or by opening something up to
expose the innards to reveal how it is made.
We know seeds of the thyme plant, Hooke assumes, by looking carefully
at a number of individual seeds. A page illustrates this with nine greatly
magnified seeds, each one distinct in its furrows, creases, or wrinkles, but
having in common a very conspicuous part where they had been joined to a
stem (fig. 45) . Reflecting on the magnified forms, Hooke instinctively con-
strues them as a Dutch picture: "the Grain affords a very pretty Object for
the Microscope, namely, a Dish of Lemmons plac'd in a very little room." "
This is similar to the way in which De Gheyn knows a mouse: he draws one
seen four times from different views (fig. 46). Or it is the way in which we
know a skull as we are shown by one Abraham van der SchoOf, who made
an unusual painting with multiple views of a number of skulls (fig. 47). There
is a common interest. Whether the strategy is to see multiple views of one

) =---
"With a Sincere Handand a Faithful Eye" 85

individual (the mouse), or to multiply the number of individuals seen (the

P""'_.cc, he skulls), the aim is to draw our attention to the various features of mouse or
skulL It is a fragmenting approach. Fragments are prized. We saw this already
in an earlier chapter in Saenredam's additive approach to arch itectural space,
which corresponded to Hoogstraten's additive understanding of perspective.
No need is felt to pull together, assemble, or in some way resolve individual
_ [icro- views into a unified sense of a whole. The attitude is conditional on a double
= self, fragmentation: first, the viewer's eye is isolated from the rest of his body at the
lens; second, what is seen is detached from the rest of the object and from the
Ir-.:amed rest of the world. A contrast can be made between such fragmentary beauty, a
function of infinite attentive glances, and a notion of beauty that assumes the
just proportion of a w ho le and thus admits to a prior notion about what makes
an entire object beautifuL The prime example for Renaissance picture-makers
of beauty so conceived was the justly proportioned human body- constructed
or imagined, but never seen. In Italy human proportions were also identified
with those of buildings in order to confirm the symmetry of the body and to
confer anthropomorphic presence on architecture. The scale of architecture is
also related to the human scale. The ideal nude did not win general understand-
ing or acceptance in the north. Architecture often featured complexly worked
surfaces that had to be scanned by the eye. And architecture viewed by the
disembodied eye placed at the viewing hole of a Dutch peep-box is denied that
relationship to the viewer's scale that Italian pictures deemed necessary. T he
eye of the northern viewer inserts itself right into the wo rld, while the
southern viewer stands at a measured distance to take it all in.
Early in the century, De Gheyn manifests this eye with
more persistence than any other Dutch artist. He strives to show the multi-
plicity of what is seen.)Q A drawing in Berlin represents nine views of the head
of a youth with tousled hair (fig. 48). If we feel that the mouse was brought
close, intimately viewed, we feel curiously distanced here from the look,
as character, feeling, or stance that we expect would attract us to the head of a
(as youth. De Gheyn's fascinati on with the quality of the youth's hair is com-
parable to Hooke's absorption in the marked surface of the seeds of thyme.
What is surprising is that De Gheyn's attentive eye does not credit the head
with any human inwardness that would distinguish it from the seed of the
plant.
This helps us perhaps to make some sense of a powerful but curious sheet
of his drawings in Berli n (fig. 49). Two grapevines executed in pen and ink
are placed diagonally across the upper part of the sheet, their finely cut leaves
and spiraling tendrils reaching out over the paper's surface . At one place they
meet the ""likely figure of a woman, small, round, firm of form, present only
to her hips, the red-chalk flesh of her face and hands standing out from the
black chalk of her dress. Below rests a plump melon with ample leaves whose
firm contours echo the woman above and which, like her, is executed in the
86

45
__ __

(;
J

I
46

aphia (Lond on. 1665), pJare

45. Illustrat ion of seeds of thyme in ROB ERT HOOKE , Microgr
18.
w ith waterco lor). By
46. J ACQUES DE G HEYN. Fotty Mi ce (pen, ink, and gray wash
courtesy of the Rijksmu seum -Stichtin g, Am sterdam .

4 7 . ABRAHA M VAN DER S CHOOR , Vanilas Still Life. By courtesy of the Rijksmu seum -
Slichrin g. Amsterd am.
ti ch kabincu , Staatl ich e
48. JACQUES DE GHEY N, Studies of a Head (drawin g). Kupfers
Museen Preussischer Kul turbesit z, Berlin (West).
-w n;)sn'

All

,-

L
88 Chapter Three

....___ 1'1 ..
____

49. J ACQUES DE GH EYN, Old Woman and Vine (black and red chalk).
Kupferstichkabin ett, Staatliche Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (West).
-- J
Vic: -
"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 89

soft chalk. De Gheyn's serious descriptive care deals equally with plants and
with the human form. It adjudicates between disjunctive shifts in scale: the
woman is made small by the vine while her rotund form is strengthened by
the presence of the melon. Even if, as it appears, the sheet was executed in
stages at different times, and is a set of jottings, nOt a single invention, this
does not contradict our sense that it represents De Gheyn's sense of the world
viewed. The most curious feature of the sheet, I think, confirms this. For at
the right, nestled among the central leaves, and once again just above this at
the right edge of the sheet, an eye is drawn with a sight line marked out across
the page. It is a mark of the place of the attentive eye in the making of the
sheet.
Whatever Dutch art might engage, an attentive eye can surely be said to be
a factor in the making of a majority of seventeenth -century Dutch images. It
can further be said to be a major theme of De G heyn's picturing: he often
elects to make attentiveness itself the object of representation. A surprising
number of his drawings present people looking at or reading books. But the
key work is a remarkable painting now in Ham House, Richmond, that
depicts the unprecedented subject of Caesar dictating to his scribes (fig. 50).

50. JACQUES DE GHEYN, Caesar Dictating to His Scribes. Richmond, Ham House.
Victoria and Albert Mu seum Crown copyright.
90 Chapter Three

De Gheyn loosely follows the account in Plutarch's Lives, which praises

Caesar for being able to dictate two or more letters at once while on horse-
back. 31 The picture is a most eccentric gesture toward an antique world in
which De Gheyn otherwise seems to have had no abiding interest. (Aside
from the wreathed head of Caesar, his name inscribed at the upper left, and
the trophy within the tent, one would not even guess that this work depicts
the ancient world.) The emperor, seated on his horse at the right, dips his pen
into the ink held up by his groom and prepares to write a letter while he
glances to our left, where twO scribes are at their work and a third reads a
completed letter. Each of the other three young men attends either to the
dictating, the writing, or to the reading that is going on. The figures are all
cut off at the waist to intensify our concentration on the heads and hands that
crowd the canvas-inscribing, listening, reading.
The story told of Caesar's dictation became in later times an emblem of
attention itself. No less a student of the subject than William James, in a
section of The Principles of Psychology entitled "To How Many Things Can
We Attend at Once," refers to what is in his view the futile attempt on
Caesar's part to attend to multiple directions:
Where, however the processes are less automatic, as in the story of Julius
Caesar dictating four letters whilst he writes a fifth, there must be a rapid
oscillation of the mind from one to the next and no consequent gain of
time . 32

In many respects James's discussion of attention fits what we learn from the
Dutch pictorial example: its reflective and passive nature, its selectivity, the
need to hold attention by rolling a topic over and over incessantly to consider
different aspects of it. The major and sigrtificant difference is that the roots of
attention for James lie in consciousness of self, while De Gheyn (and the
Dutch artists in general) seem to let attention stand for the self. It is not really
Caesar's powers that interest De Gheyn as much as the multiplication of
attentive behavior manifested in his servants and scribes. In De Gheyn's
picture Caesar-like the artist himself-is the source of attentiveness in oth-
ers. And it is not only those within the picture, b·u t also the viewer without
who is presented with a detailed assemblage of heads (and hands) not unlike
the youth drawn nine times on the sheet in Berlin. "
Finally, in the category of the microscopic taste for displaying multiple
surfaces, we should consider the common Dutch practice of opening, in order
to reveal to our sight, the makings of the objects in their stilllifes (fig. 51 ).
Whether it is edibles such as cheese, a pie, herring, fruit, and nuts, or col-
lectibles such as shells, vessels, and watches, we are offered the inside, or
underside, as well as the outer view. Cheeses are cut into, pies spill out their
fillings beneath the shelter of crust, herring are cut to reveal flesh as well as
gleaming skin. Shells and vessels of precious metal or glasses topple on their
sides (occasionally we even see the jagged edge of a broken goblet), and
watches are inevitably opened to reveal their works. Objects are exposed to
"With a Sincere HandandaFaithful Eye" 91

:-'r21ses the probing eye not only by the technique of flaying them, but also by
reflection: the play of light on the surface distinguishes glass from metal, from
cloth, from pastry, and also serves to multiply surfaces. The underside of a
Aside vessel's foot is doubled by its reflection in the adjacent pewter plate. Each
thing exposes multiple surfaces in order to be more fully present to the eye.
Consider the lemon, one of the favored objects of Dutch vision . Its repre-
sentation characteristically maximizes surface: the peel is sliced and unwound
to reveal a glistening interior from which a seed or two is frequently discarded
-;: reads a to one side. In the hands of Willem Kalf, particularly, the lemon offers a
-er to the splendid instance of what I have termed division (fig. 59): The representation
_ -es are all of the wrinkled gold of its mottled surface, with the peel here pitted, there
. ::.ands that swelling, loosened from the flesh and sinously extended, totally transforms
the fruit . We have never seen a lemon in this way before. Modern inter-
- em blem of pretations notwithstanding, Kalf's lemons are subject not to the ravages of
- .
. .lII1es, In a time but to the probings of the eye. 34 Compare the lemons of Kalf to the
:rungs Can lemons of Zurbaran (fig. 52). Here is the familiar significant shape: bumpy
.ia empt on ovals slightly drawn in at one end and pulled out to a pointed protruberance
at the other, the entire form a steady yellow. What is more, Zurbar,m's lemon
is a solid object. It would fit into the hand, is graspable, and is piled with
'). of Julius
_-: be a rapid others of its kind to confirm its solid nature.
"'o.:,ceIlt gain of Whatever other aspects there are to such works, it is clear that they are
devised as a feast for the attentive eye. "But to resolve nature into abstractions
is less to our purpose than to dissect her into parts," writes Bacon in the
Novum Organum. 35 The motto applies to Dutch stililifes. It suggests further
ectivity , the what they are willing to sacrifice-the selection of a single, prime, or privi-
,. to consider leged view ("abstraction," in Bacon's terms) that is empowered to summarize
the roots of knowledge. In a memorable passage written some years later, John Locke
- -eyn (and the specified the disturbing potentiality of the microscopic view:
It is not really
...:tiplication of
If that most instructive of our senses, seeing, were in any man a thousand,
or a hundred times more acute than it is by the best microscope, things
-- De Gheyn's several millions of times less than the smallest object of his sight now would
l<o:]ye:ne:ss in oth- then be visible to his naked eyes, and so he would come nearer to the
discovery of the texture and motion of the minute parts of corporeal things
... but then he would be in a quite different world from other people:
nothing would appear the same to him and others. l6
.ng multiple
Far from acknowledging that their vision engaged the sublime- for that is the
":;"'f11111<. in order
"different world" that Locke's remarks suggest-the Dutch greeted their new
lifes (fig. 51).
sights with wonder and delight as offering new and concrete knowledge of
nuts, or col-
our common world.
the inside, or
spill out their
tlesh as well as II
:opple on their The interest in the view through the lens was hardly an isolated phenom-
goblet), and enon at the time. It was supported by a ground swell of views about knowl-
are exposed to edge and language, and in a somewhat more practical vein by schemes of
92 Chapter Three

5 1. WILLEM CLAESZ. H EDA, Still Life, 1634. Museum Boy man s-van B euningen,
Rotterdam.

52. F RANCISCO DE ZURBARAN , Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose. The Norton
Simon Foundation. Pasadena.
"With a Sincere H and and a Faithful Eye" 93

education. If we are to understand the kinds of presence, and thus the kinds
of meaning, that Dutch descriptive paintings had at the time, it is useful to
consider the nature of this support. We might start with the definition offered
by Comenius, the leading Protestant theorist of education:
If you demand what it is to be a good scholar, take this for an answer: to
know how one thing differeth from another, and to be able to [note, or]
marke out everything by its owne name. J7
We are by now familiar with this sentiment in favor of discriminating between
the identities of things. Comenius considers the kind of discrimination with
which we have just been concerned in terms of naming. And by defining this
as the purview of the scholar, he clearly plays off naming against the inherited
body of texts associated with scholarship. It is not said of microscopy, but it
is clear that it might have been. Hooke acknowledges the Adamic nature of
his project in a passage of the Micrographia. But when he does this, in what
he calls a "digression about Nature's method" at the conclusion of the chapter
on the seeds of thyme, he invokes another, older notion of naming that his
own project had superseded. It had been an established view in the previous
century, articulated notably by Paracelsus in his doctrine of signatures, that
a name itself was significant of a creature's or an object's nature. Therefore,
our job was to read the "True Book of Nature" inscribed in both names and
in the things that they resembled. Hooke ends his chapter by questioning the
idea that Adam's names "had any significancy in them of the creatures nature
on which he impos'd them." But then, echoing Paracelsus, he courts just
what he has disputed: "The Creator may in those characters have written and
engraven many of his most mysterious designs and counsels and given man
a capacity to read and understand them."'s Though he turns away from the
authority of texts to nature herself, Hooke still wants nature to be not only
visible, but also readable. But the vanguard of language studies at the time had
led away from names redolent with meaning to the things themselves and to
what Bacon variously referred to as "the creator's own signature and marks"
or "footprints" or "stamps" on them. God creates by imprinting himself (as
in the imprinting of a coin or a seal) in things rather than by writing texts.
Adam, it would seem, did not have to decipher what he named, he simply
saw. Names are not essentially created by God, as things are, but are part of
a conventional system, A representation referring to real objects in the world.
While it would be too reductive to refer to this simply as a picture theory of
language, it is true that it was a notion of language that treated pictures as one
of its possible modes or manifestations.
It was such an understanding of the nature of language that led to the
invention and printing of the first illustrated school book for teaching lan-
guage to children (fig. 53). Comenius, from whose view of education we
quoted just above, is a central figure in the history of educational theory and
:be Norton
reform. H is Orbis Sensualium Pictus or The Visible World Pictured of 1658
is still recognized as a landmark in the history of education. Though the
94 Chapter Three

extent of his contribution to the study of language is frequ ently questioned,

his proposals for educational reform have been saluted from the Baconians to
Goethe (who used the Orbis Pictus as a child) to Piaget (wh o edited a mod ern
selection of his works). " But because he tOok no independent interest in
pictures as such , Comenius has never figur ed in an investigation of images.
The evidence that he should is provided not only by his use of pictures but
by the invocation of visual attenti on and the craft of the painter we find in
some of his major works.
First let us locate him in his time. Comenius was active and celebrated in
the northern European Protestant world with whi ch we are already familiar.
A persecuted Moravian (Czech) prelate who was forced to fl ee his homeland,
he devoted his life in exile to educational reform as part of a program of
Protestant universalism known as pansophy. He promoted this cause in a
steady stream of publications . He was living in Poland in 1631 when he
published his first great success, theJanua Linguarum R eserta or The Gates
of Languages Unlocked. It was the first of a graded series of texts that
propos ed a new way of teaching Latin. Comenius proposed shifting the entire
emphasis from instruction in words to instruction in things-the things to
which th e words referred. Comeni us wish ed to replace the previous emphasis
on language as rhetOric with language as description. Bacon's Great In -
stauration was a central text for him , and he acknowledged that his manner
was Baconian. All teaching must be achieved, he argued, not from books and
traditions but from things. This material emphasis, and the schemes in which
he ordered it, were recognized by Baconians in England , who in 1641 per-
suaded Comenius to come and join them in a plan to create an institution to
furth er their common aims. Through the intervention of the Dutch en-
trepreneur De Geer, Comenius left England for Sweden during the revolution
of 1642. He appears to have turned down an invitation from Cotton Mather
to take up the presidency of a forward-looking insti tution of higher learning
just being set up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bu t Harvard, demonstrating
a faith in educati on equal to Comenius's own, apparently employed his
methods to teach Latin and some Greek to its few American Indian students.
Only near the end of a lifetime of wandering did Comenius finally join the
many exiles who found refu ge in th e N eth erlands. He is buri ed just south of
Amsterdam in the tOwn of Naarden. Given his intellectual interests and the
nature of his writings, it was most fitting that Comeniu s's collected works
were published in Amsterdam (1657), bearing a dedication to the Dutch East
India Company and to the city counselors of Amsterdam, th e city that
subsidized its publication. "
My interest in nOt in his educati onal schemes as such, bu t in the specifi cally
visual basis that he gives to them. In theCreat Didactic of 164 1, his detailed
program for school reform, Comenius argu es that "seeing is believing." The
Baconian (or Dutch) examp le he offers is seeing an actual dissection in con-
trast to reading about one in a treatise in anatOmy:
"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 95

ed , Whoever has once seen a dissection of the human body will understand and
remember the relative position of its parts with far greater certainty than
if he had read the most exhaustive treatises on anatomy , but had never
actually seen a dissection performed. H ence me saying "Seeing is beli ev-
- c es. ing. ,, -I!
-es but In mis early text, Comenius dissects visual attention itself. Here is me passage
.:indin in which he explains how to take in or understand mings in the world mrough
looking:
We will now sp eak of the mode in which objects mu st be presented to the
senses, if the impression is to be distin ct. This can be readily understood
if we consider the processes of actual vision. If the object is to be clearly
seen it is necessary: (1) mat it be placed before the eyes ; (2) not far off, but
at a reasonable distance; (3) not on one side, but straight before m e eyes;
(4) and so that the front of me object be not turned away from, but directed
towards, the observer; (5) that the eyes first take in the object as a whole;
:exts that (6) and then proceed to distinguish the parts; (7) inspecting mese in order
me entire from the beginning to me end; (8) that attention be paid to each and every
, mings to part; (9) until they are all grasped by means of meir essential attributes. If
emphasis mese requisites be properly observed, vision takes place successfully; but
Great In- if one be neglected its success is only partial. "

This concentration on the act of visual attention, me drive toward what is

termed "successful" seeing, and me seriousness wim which fruits of such
attention are treated as an end of education, can help us to define me atten-
tiveness demand ed by much Dutch painting. I think, in particular, of the way
in wh ich stilllifes isolate and attend to objects. Each object is displayed not
for use, or as a result of it, but for me attentive eye.
We are so accustomed to mink of pictu re books as appropriate for children
mat it is as hard to imagine when mey were not in use as it is to mink that
mey need a rationale. Comenius appeals nOt just to the appropriateness of
pictures for children-though he did that-but to meir approp riateness given
the nature of language, perception, and our knowledge of me world. The
argument might be put in two parts: perceptual and linguistic. First, the pam
to understanding is mrough the senses (wim sight prime among me rest).
Since we store what we have seen in mental images, the stirring up of visual
attention is basic to educati on. Second, language is essentially denotative .
One must learn the names given to things and engage in acts of pointing or
ci ty that reference rather than acts of expression or statement. Since words are man 's
(not God's) to fashion, language is a representation of all the things in the
sp ecifi cally world. Images clearly have a paradigmatic place in a view such as mis, which
his detailed privileges vision and presents language as a representation.
'''''In','' The Comenius's Orbis Piaus is an assembly of 151 pictures of things juxtaposed
In con- wim meir nam es . It is more precisely described as a table, since the named and
pictured objects are arranged in a sequence of (undesignated) groups or
96 Chapter Three

categories -elements, vegetables, animals , man, arts, crafts, and so on -

which are further broken down into subcategori es. The first, perhaps the
major step in comprehending the world is to indicate the order of things.
Understanding is thus composed of words or other marks referring to this
order. The tree, for example, is placed in the category of the vegetable
kingdom (fig. 53). It is distinguished from plants and shrubs, and then its
parts-roots, trunk, branches, leaves -are enumerated. A felled tree is de-
picted exhibiting its core and its stump. The names and numbered parts of the
picture to which they correspond represent the world as we know it, as Adam
originally knew it. Comenius uses Genesis 2:19, 20 (the Lord bringing to
Adam every beast of the field) as the epigraph for his book. The juxtaposition
of pictures of things and names of things makes manifest Hoogstraten's claim
that drawing is a second form of writing, or ind eed a language. (Comeniu s's
title, The Visible World Pictured, testifies to its common ground with H oog-
straten's Visible World.) John Evelyn put the matter directly when he praised
Comenius's Orbis Pictus for showing that a ''picture is a kind of Universal
Language, ,,4}
Though it was originally published in Polish and Latin, the Orbis Pictus
was translated into English withi n a year of its publication and thence in to
many other languages. The spur to this process of translation was the new
ambition to consider words as names, or as arbitrary or conventional charac-
ters with a real reference. It was not the generation of grammar, but the
nomination of objects in the world that encouraged this process. Stability was
sought not in the nature of the words in anyone language, but in reference
to the system of things that were named. Comenius's pansophic ambitions
went hand in hand with the efforts of men such as John Wilkins and Leibniz
to invent a new, artificial, universal language. The great (and vain) hope was
that such knowledge could bind all men together in peace. Bacon had at one
time flirted with the "Characters Real" of Ch ina only to reject them in favor
of the more wieldy alphabetic writing. Though they did nOt adopt th e picto-
graphic mode, his followers tried unsuccessfully to invent a new system of
notation. It was dubbed "real characters," to bring out the indissoluble links
between its reference to the real world and its stanis as sign. The process was
one of invention, but it had all the earmarks of discovery, as if indeed a
notational system could be found that would at once be an artifice and also
truly . referential.
The idea that pictures are a form of language and hence a way to acquire
knowledge of the world seems to be the assumption of a drawing by De
Gheyn in Berlin (fig. 54). The woman and the child who lean over a book of
pictures could be promoting Comenius's Orbis Pictus. The child looks and
points at the image of a tree while the woman, probably his mother, clearly
takes the role of a patient and encouraging teacher. De Gheyn offers us an
image of instruction or education with the tools of the writer's craft- quill, ;

ink, cand le for light- casually yet prominently displayed on the table surface.
The evidence is that illustrated school books were not in general use in

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CmJrx. 1 f.

iine r:unis;

.l.S Adam
••bid;
Buk """' "
' '''1;'_
to
r::zpoS ltIOn
. . _a
Sf Plam r. pill. E Sr.;Jtt
procrefcit
Beilin
Heul q.
Bird-lime 14·
' ,.1,-
&: L4fr_,

e.:_h!I-, 13.
14.
o.

__--=='s claim g",.., .....

Sted. . PI'tIIl", I. ramiud nlfcitllf :

-
-omemu .,ss tt"tDI
Shoor.
P!anra
alii!
in Frlllict"" 1,
......
lloaS.) \VIIk, al(a
Gumm,
".-.
Rt;'iua,
.m Hoog- a Shoot, fo.
Tree, 3.
£ticRoo(' 4:
_
FnU(l In
Arbor,..., ).
RoGn,
PitCh, l!Cc.
p,m_, &c.
Cu,lmr.
- he praised ArOOrcm. f '\
brant" PP (,. fufi(ntu F,u/lus
i Universal SlCr•• Klltii:" -I .
E R..tdice

53 . "A Tree," in J OHANN A,..·IOS COMENIUS, Orbis Sensualium

Piaus (London , 1685), pp. 28-29. COUrtesy of the J ohn M.
Wing Collection, the Newberry Library, Chicago.

54. J ACQUES DE GHEYN. Woman with Child and Piau fe-book (pen with brown wash) .
Kupferstichkabinett , Staadiche Mu seen Preussischer Kulturb es itz , Berlin (West).
98 Chapter Three

H olland or anywhere else at the time. H Though children did learn to draw,
De Gheyn's drawing tells us not about school practice but about an interest
in the acquisition of what we might call visual literacy. The images of the tree
and cow in the book are the instruments of education. The drawing is De
Gheyn's way of reflecting for himself and for us on that attentive viewing of
the world that his pictures provide and on the knowledge he assumes th ey
convey. Like so many of his works, it is a remarkably self-conscious man-
ifestation of concerns common to Dutch images. It is no revelation to claim
th at Dutch art in general bears out the nominative and representative impulses
attribu ted to langu age at the time. But the relationship gives us further reason
to fix our gaze, as the Dutch artists fixed theirs, on the representation of the
stuffs and makings in the world rather than searching beneath their surfaces . .,
To know is to name is to describe, but it is also to make. The simple plates
to Comenius's Orbis Pictus cannot begin to match the delving into the mate-
rial making of an object that we find in the art of the Dutch. But the gleam
of si lver and its worked surface, the pearly wetness of the filling of a pie, and
the intricately tooled workings of a watch are all accounted for by Comenius
under the rubric of art or, more specifically, craft.
O ne of the major groups of things represented in the Orbis Pictus are those
objects made not by nature but by man. The su btitle to the entire text
accounts for them as "all the chief things that are in the world and Men's
Employments therein." Weaving, spinning, shoemaking, cooking, and glass-
blowing follow the tree and oth er artifices of nature. The plates often depict
the workshops where these products were made (fig. 55). This was not a new
idea for Comenius. In the Great Didactic, in which he first set forth his
general program for school reform and education, Comenius's strategy was
to juxtapose a prime example of Nature's art-the birth and nurturing of a
bird by its mother- with four human trades: gardening, carpentry, painting,
and printing. The argument is that "to place the art of intellectual discipline
on a firm basis" one must "assimilate the processes of art as much as possible
to the processes of nature." Comenius guides us through the principles of
eduation by taking us through the conception, birth, and nurturing of a bird
and the preparation of the canvas, choice of colors, drawing, finishing, and
protection of a painting:

Nature prepares the material, before she begins to give it form .

For example: the bird that wishes to produce a creature similar to its elf first
conceives the embryo from a drop of its blood; it then prepares the nest in
which it is to lay the eggs, but does nOt begin to hatch th em until the chick
is formed and moves within the shell.
Imitation. - In the same way the prudent builder, before he begins to erect Bac
a building, collects a qu antity of wood, lime, stones, iron, and the other ?hilo 0)
things needful, in order that he may not have to stop the work later on from :he pia
lack of materials, nOr find that its solidity has been impaired. In the same and th
"With a Sincere Handand a Faithful Eye" 99

(lIe. ) ( i 13 )
LV.
::-ee
De
-, of
:hey
man-
-Iai m

- reason
of the
l
Larder '1.
b.fnllrfb
l'rovlfio u : .
Dut Dt fbc LanIer; , .
+
::If mate- tall(tl] fJ!m l enD mll-
ftt e[al
::Ie gl eam ·t e fi tl1 plIUelb Gff
jirtOcrlJ,
2 pie, and anb ga!J"
CDt cf Ilml '.
Comenius b£ ; C
plttt;l)
F:Cn J f.
T:, ·

55. "Cookery," in JOHANN Ar.·IOS COM ENI US. Orbis Sensualium

Pi"I/, (London, 1685), pp. 112-13. Cou rtesy of the John M.
Wing Colle.c rion, the Newberry Librar y, Ch icago.

way, the painter who wishes to produce a picture, prepares the canvas,
stretches it on a frame, lays the ground on it, mixes the colours, places his
brushes so that they may be ready to hand, and then at last commences to
. 46
pamt.
A conclusion is then drawn for procedures in school:
Rectification. --It follows, therefore, that in order to effect a thorough
improvement in schools it is necessary: That books and the materials
necessary for teaching be held in readiness.
Pictures in Comenius's scheme of things serve, like words, as representations
of the concrete world of things. But they also serve as models of making. We
are back again where we began this chapter, with Hooke's pairing of the
faithful eye and the sincere hand. But we are also plunged right into the
middle of Bacon's program for the advancement of learning, and it is there
that we must now look for a furth er sense of th e nature of Dutch pictures.

III
to erect Bacon's program in The Advancement of Learning can be seen as a major
the other philosophical enterprise with practical or technological ambitions. This is not
on from the place to try to sort out its complex history within Bacon's own writings
In the same and those of his followers, or its blurred and often competing aims. My point
100 Chapter Three

here is to suggest the ways in which aspects of his enterprise, in particular his
definitive interest in the mechanical arts and its later implementation in a
history of trades, can provide a background for understanding certain central
impulses in Dutch picturing. 47 There seems no question that in the sev-
enteenth century the traditional craft role and concerns of the Dutch artists
were given a new rationale or at least a new lease on life. In the very face of
a humanistic definition of art and what ·would later be called academic train-
ing, the Dutch painters instead developed and employed the craft aspect of
their art . Far from abandoning their traditional craft skills, Dou, Mieris, Kalf,
Vermeer, and others pushed it to new heights. It will not do, of course, to
claim Bacon as a cause for the effect of Dutch painting, in spite of the Dutch
enthusiasm for his writings. However, in arguing for craft or human artifacts
and their making, Bacon, who lived in a country without any notable tradi-
tion of images, can help deepen our understanding of the images produced in
Holland, a country notable for its lack of powerful texts. The utilitarian
emphasis and commercial direction given by his followers to his philosophical
venture neady parallels the Dutch mixture of trade with art. In Holland this
comes to replace the earlier concern with visual literacy as we saw it in De
Gheyn. By mid-century, Dutch stililifes move beyond questions of visual
literacy to attempt to mediate between high artistic craft and a tremendous '>6.•
pride in possessions.
Bacon first put forth his program in the Advancement of Learning of 1605.
He reiterates and develops it in the Novum Organum of 1620 with its separate of
introduction, and the Great Instauration and its appended Parasceve (or
Preparative toward a Natural and Experimental History). Bacon specifically
turns to nature and away from the interpretation and learning offered in
books: away, he writes in 1620, with antiquities, and citations or testimonies
of authors, away with all superstitious stories. The state of human knowl-
edge, as the prefatory note to the Great Instauration states, is dismal:
non .
That the state of knowledge is not prosperous nor greatly advancing; and
that a way must be opened for the human understanding entirely different
from any hitherto known, and other helps provided, in order that the mind
may exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly be-
longs to it. 48
Bacon's solution, one with which we are by now familiar from many sources,
artists
includin g Huygens, Saenredam, and Comenius, is to turn to facts in order to
Baco
dissect:
been fo
Those however who aspire not to guess and divine, but to discover and man's aJ
know; who propose not to devise mimic and fabulous worlds of their own, meruus,
but to examine and dissect the nature of this very world itself; must go to the stu
facts themselves for everything. " Great D
The way out is to be found in the generally neglected notion of natural (versus Bacon p
civil) history, which Bacon refers to as the primary or "mother" history. " twenty c
Natural history in its turn is divided into three parts: the history of the works teen witl
" With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 101

g w it in D e
of visual
56. ANONYMOUS, Nor th ern Netherlandish School, Radish, 1626. By courtesy of th e
Rijksmuseum -Stichting, Amsterda m.
of 1605.
1IS separate of nature, the histories of aberrations in nature (monsters), and the history of
(or man's manipulations of nature , which is the history of the arts. Bacon's
specifically categories immediately suggest interesting connections to Dutch images.
offered in There are, for example, a number of Dutch pictures that surprise us by their
unlikely subjects: a portrait of a giant radish (fig. 56), or a large kidney stone.
Like Saenredam's apple tree, these images represent a category of oddities in
• dismal: nature. They are like those aberrations to which Bacon devoted special atten-
dvancing; and tion. Only a few decades before, such images would have been part of the
rrely different encyclopedic collections of princes. These resembled modern ethnographic
that the mind collections in many ways. But far from calling into question the norms by
properly be- which men expect to live, as ethnographic collections· have in our time, even
the oddities were thought to expand knowledge of God's creation and con-
firm man in his ability to encompass it. About this Bacon and the Dutch
r any sources,
artists agreed.
ru in order to
Bacon's innovation, as he sees it (though indeed earlier precedents have
been found), is to insist on the essential oneness of the srudy of nature and
discover and man's arts or what he calls mechanical and experimental history. As in Co-
of their own, menius, man's crafts and his alteration of nature are made an essential part of
If; must go to the study of nature. The gardening, building, and painting of Comenius's
Great Didactic is included in the list of projected particular histories that
.arural (versus Bacon publishes at the end of the Parasceve. There are 130 topics in a":
history. so twenty are concerned with nature (both ordinary and extraordinary), eigh-
. of the works teen with man, and the great majority (seventy-two) with man's interference
102 Chapter Three

with or accomplishment in the field of nature. The subcategories in the list are
a bit fluid as we move among examples from the mechanical arts, the practical
part of the liberal arts, and areas of practical knowledge not yet systematized.
Painting, music, cooking, baking, wool manufacture, weaving, dying, glass-
making, architecture, gardening, even games are included as basic forms of
human making deserving serious study and attention. Given Bacon's odd and
characteristic combination of a few ordering principles and multifarious ex-
amples, the categories enunciated in his introductory text remain un-
delineated in the flood of examples that he sets forth.
Bacon's list is notable not only for adding human arts on to Nature's, but
also for including within the list of the human arts a large number of non-
mechanical arts - skills without a mathematical basis, which are engaged in by
an otherwise uneducated segment of society. It is interesting for students of
Dutch art that painting, which appears directly under the study of vision in
the Parasceve, is also included with this kind of craft. Much can be learned
from this . One would be correct to protest that many if not most Dutch artists
did not simply identify themselves socially or professionally with craftsmen
of this type. In the hierarchial structure of their own guild they put them-
selves clearly on top. But it is equally true that they did not follow the Italian
Renaissance model of the artist-engineer. He had received a new professional
status in society through a relationship with both established literary tradi-
tions and established scientific ones, namely, with the so-called classical
(mathematical) science- astronomy, harmonics , mathematics, optics, and
statistics. Italian artists emerged from the world of craft and artisans by
contributing their mathematical expertise to the needs of society. War ma-
chinery, fortifications, water supplies -all of these came within their purview
and also significantly shaped their pictorial worlds. By contrast, if we want
to consider the relationship of the Dutch arts to human knowledge, the
project of the Baconian histories is instructive. The Baconian program sug-
gests that the artist's own craft, like those crafts that occupied them within
their pictures, was itself considered at the time to constitute a significant form
of acquiring knowledge. The distinction between the two forms of knowledge
parallels the distinction between two modes of seventeenth-century scientific
thought as it has recently been articulated anew by Thomas Kuhn. As I
suggested at the conclusion of my introductory discussion of Constantijn
Huygens, the nonmathematical, observational bias of the Baconian project,
with its lack of ancient precedent, corresponds to the model of Dutch art; the
mathematical, less empirical, and ancient bias of the classical sciences fits
Italian art. 51 The comparison between a science based on observation and one
based on mathematics, like the comparison between the art of the north and
that of the south, has not been treated as a comparison of equals. A sense of
the inferiority of observation and experiment has persisted. An anecdote
about the teaching of botany at the Jardin du Roi in France in 1770 is relevant.
It tells of the conflict between the professor who lectured and the demon-
strateur who followed him with appropriate experiments. The inferior dem-
"With a Sincere Handand a Faithful Eye" 103

....I. t are onstrateur introduces his demonstration by declaring that all that the pro-
=ractical fessor has just said is ridiculous. The eye, he claims, is proof against the
word. 52 There is also, not unexpectedly , a gender aspect to the differences
-0', glass- between the genres of science. Goethe concluded his Theory of Colours by
ionns of pointing out, as experimentalists long had, that accidents or momentary
odd and observations could lead to discoveries. But his tone is condescending:
ex-
Hence no one perhaps ought to be reluctant to offer his contributions.
remam un- ... All who are endowed only with habits of attention, women, children,
are capable of communicating striking and true remarks. 53
_ Pa ture's, but
The marginality of those groups of people whom Goethe designates as ob-
of non-
servers is consistent with the Italian sense of the inferior nature of an obser-
engaged in by
vational art like that of the Dutch.
students of
It is true that historians of science disagree over the ability and significance
of the Baconian project and especially about whether it could proceed with-
out an admixture of the alternative "classical" tradition. But these issues
(which find analogies in discussions of Dutch and Italian art) need not be
resolved to recognize the fruitfulness of a comparison between modes of art
and modes of science at the time . It allows us to value more justly the
established alliance of the Dutch artist with those craftsmen-goldsmiths,
tapestry weavers, glassblowers, and geographers - whose products became
the crafted objects in their representations. "
It is time that we turned from such general points to a specific artistic
example: a still life by David Bailly, an exemplary work made in mid-century
Leiden, provid es extraordinary testimony to the Dutch painters' embrace of
craft (fig. 57; pi. 1).55 A you ng artist , identified as such by the maulstick
their purview
resting in his hand, sits beside a table on which is strewn a crowded offering
if we want
of objects. We can call it an assemblage of materials made by nature and
the
worked by man . It is a catalogue: wood, pap er, glass , metals, stone, plaster,
clay , bone , hi de, earthenware, pearls, petals, water, smoke, and paint. What
is more, these are materials worked to reveal or, in Bacon's terms, to betray
their natu re: wood is shap ed, paper curled, stone is carved, pearls poli shed
and strung, cloth is drap ed, hides (as vellum) are treated to provide smooth
cover for a book. Several materials betray their multiple natures: glass is solid
and shaped , as in the overturned goblet, but it can contain liquid or sand and
it reflects light even as it offers us a view through its transparent surface; metal
is imprinted in coins, fashioned into links of chain , sharpened to form a knife
blade, turned to a cand lestick, or molded into th e spri ghtly putto supporting
the glass hold er at the far right. Such fashionin gs fulfill Baconian ambitions.
They squ eeze and mold nature in order to reveal her. This for Bacon was a
working definiti on of art or of craft:
Seeing that the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vex-
ations of art than in its natural freedom ."
Bacon's is a modest, one might even say a uti litarian view of art. But it does
inferior dem- make art essential to an understanding of the wo rld. Art does not simply
104 Chapter Three

but i[

57. DAVID B AILLY, Still Life, 165 1. Stedelijk M useum " de Lakenhal," Leiden .

imitate nature, nor is it a play of the imagination, but rather it is the techne
or craft that enables us , through constraint, to grasp nature. Man, humbled, selier,
made equal and childlike th rough the purgation of the idols of understanding, Dou's
it at once the servant and the interp reter of nature and the prophet of a should
technology that will bring mastery. In a subtle yet powerful instrumental why .
manner, art can lead to a new kind of knowledge of the world. Like the "I
Baconian program, Bailly'S pictorial assemblage resists summation or closure. " but on
Crafted objects themselves are subject to replication: the string of pearls the failu
discarded on the table reappears around the painted woman's neck; the gath- toO sm
ered drapery of her painted dress is sculpted in stone at the breast of the bust the uni
beside her and also hangs over head in a swatch that frame s our view; the The Stu
leaves and petals of the rose are wrought in the 'metal of a tiny box. Such means b
transformations also work through corresponding shapes: the painted lute is it does I
hung above an empty palette whose oval shape mimics it only to be repeated nature iJ
in the pair of portraits on the table and the cover of the small box. Colors also nature I
correspond: a subtle gradation of tans relates the sculpted body of Sebastian, weavmg
the skull, and the vellum of the book; the youthful bust is gray as is the female expenm
face faintly visible on the wall, and both are played off against the ruddy flesh us that iI
tones of the young artist and the portrait. Set off against bodies of plaster, in [he s
stone, and metal, the bony skull, and the images in paint, Bailly (for the man particul:
in the oval portrait is the painter himself) and the attendant youth appear as vational
living flesh. But as we withdraw from this painted world we must acknowl- Its aim '
edge that the youth , though realer again than the portraits, is himself an image ment, d
fashioned ou t of paint. X-rays reveal that in this picture Bailly laid painted sought I
"With a Sincere Handand a Faithful Eye" 105

forms upon completed ones beneath : the shadow visage on the wall and the
portraits placed before it were in turn fully executed before further objects
were placed over them. The layered design of the picture thus expresses or
mimics the manner of its execution or craft. Bailly shows us art emerging into
crafted objects from the shadowy female face against the wall. (Is this perhaps
a reference to one version of the origin of painting as found in Pliny?)
By all these intricate devices, Bailly calls attention to various dimensions of
craft and produces a dazzling mixture of making and deceit. His work could
serve as an illustration of the definition of craft given by John Moxon in The
Mechanical Exercises of 1677, his pioneering handbook on trades :
Handycraft signifies Cunning or sleight or Craft of the Hand which cannot
be taught by words, but it is only gained by Practice or Exercise. 5 7
Moxon's book is famous for offering the first account of the printer's trade,
but it contains much more. Characteristically, he includes a number of trades
in what he calls the "Doctrine of Handycrafts": smithing, founding, drawing,
joinery, turning, engraving, printing books and pictures, globe- and map-
making, mathematical instruments, and so on. But it is his quite casual linking
of craft to deceit that calls to mind Bailly's Still Life. 58 It is a nexus that is fully
explored by seventeenth-century painters. Bailly's painting belongs in the
eiden.
company of the other great seventeenth-century pictorial meditations on the
r it is the techne relationship of craft and art, picture-making and deceit : Velazquez's Water-
.'>1an, humbled, seller, his Spinners and Las Meninas, Vermeer's Art of Painting, and even
i understanding, Dou's Quack. Rather than calling such works pictorial meditations, we
le prophet of a should follow Bacon's lead and call them pictorial experiments. Let us see
ful instrumental why.
Like the "I admit nothing," Bacon writes at one point in the Great Instauration,
arion or closure . "but on the faith of the eyes." " But for all his trusting to the eyes, he suspects
string of pearls the failure of the senses . The eyes can give no information (if trained on things
; neck; the gath- too small) or they can give false information (since man is not the measure of
reast of the bust the universe) ." The solution Bacon recommends is to employ experiments.
our view; the The study of Nature squeezed or pressed, the vexations of art, are what he
tiny box. Such means by experiments. There is a double thrust to this argument, relating as
e painted lute is it does to both nature observed and back to the observer : on the one hand
r to be repeated nature is vexed and thus better reveals itself, on the other hand the vexing of
:>ox. Colors also nature helps or assists man's imperfect senses. It is puzzling, perhaps, that
dy of Sebastian, weaving, dyeing, glassmaking, bread-baking, and painting are considered
,. as is the female experimental. The problem is one of definition . Recent studies have reminded
, the ruddy flesh us that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experiment was not intended
:xiies of plaster, in the sense that we think of it today-as a conscious attempt to test a
illy (for the man particular theory or hypothesis by devising specific experimental or obser-
appear as vational situation. It was rather synonymous with the notion of experience. 61
, must acknowl- Its aim was not thought, but accurate circumstantial reporting. By experi-
llmself an image ment, then, Bacon means experiential observation of situations deliberately
. y laid painted sought by the investigator as a source of experience. There is an important
106 Chapter Three

sense in which all the mechanical human arts are experimental. They vex
nature and, through substitution and rectification (to use Bacon's words),
distance the world from the confusions of our senses.
Bacon's treatment of the human arts serves remarkably well as a definition
of Dutch pictorial art. This is despite the fact that Bacon does not of course
refer to art in the specific sense of painting. But in the world of Dutch
pictures, rather than claiming that the notion of experiment 'is indistinguish-
able from experience, one would rather want to say that human experience is
dealt with in terms of pictorial experiments. What this means will become
clear if we now consider the manner in which David Bailly inserts himself and
his life into the objects of his still life.
Bailly painted his Still Life in 1651 when he was already sixty-seven, and
shortly after he rose to become dean of the newly extablished guild of Saint
Luke in Leiden. The work is a celebration of the artist's craft while also
serving as a personal memorial and a legacy. It is possible that Bailly suffered
a serious illness at about the time he painted this work. He is unaccountably
marked "dead" in the guild records, though he was to live until 1657. It is
appropriate to call the picture a memorial because instead of producing a
self-portrait at his easel- a common Dutch format - Bailly introduces him-
self in the form of a portrait. He is one representation among others. The
crafting of art and of self is presented as a seamless whole. (We should keep
this model in mind later when we look at Vermeer's Art of Painting [pI. 2].
Instead of doing a traditional portrait of himself at work, or including himself
in the form of a portrait, Vermeer disappears into the very act of observing
and painting. It is another way of absorbing the artist into his art.) Bailly's life
and work are assembled in the objects on and around this table: the status of
the youth and, indeed, the format of the still life with human actor (a format
common in Antwerp) recalls his family'S roots; the copy of a Venetian statue
of Saint Sebastian recalls his Italian journey; the central rose, rolled paper,
female portrait, the copy after Hals's Lute-pLayer, the hourglass and skull
were all objects previously crafted by Bailly for earlier works and rep-
resented here. Other objects as well might have ties to the artist's life. Bailly
married at a late age, remained childless, and seems to have intended this work
as a legacy to a student. He puts himself and his art into the hands of the youth
of serious demeanor- a younger artist, it has been suggested-who supports
Bailly'S portrait with one hand while taking up the maulstick with the other.
X- rays show that the maulstick was once pointing in the direction of the
woman who is now but a dim shadow on the wall. The comparison that has
been suggested with Sadeler's engraving after Spranger's tribute to his dead
wife (fig. 58) confirms the memorial aspect of Bailly's work, but serves to
bring out the tremendous difference between artistic modes. 62 The Spranger
is a work that engages a richly inventive allegorical mode, while Bailly's is one
that instead displays craft.
It is time that we dealt with an insistent feature of this work: the traditional
reference made by almost every object (candle, bubbles, hourglass, skull,
"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 107

\-ex
rds),

'..;.;:unon
.:ourse
- Dutch

IS
::>ecome
J=5e1I and

and
...,.'-':11.
of Saint
also
suffered

58. Aegidius Sadeler, after BARTHOLOMAU S SPRANG ER, Memorial to the Wtfe of
Bartholomaus Spranger (engraving), 1600_ Kupfers(ichkabineu , Staadich e Museen
Preussischer Kulturb esi[z, Berli n ( West),

jewels, coins, books) and the inscription at the lower right to vanity and hence
to the transience of all human endeavor and particularly of life itself. Bailly's
work is not unusual in this respect, and the theme is particularly relevant
because of the central place given to the painter's own image. But the bril-
liance of the execution puts a common doubleness - the presentation of craft
and rep- and its simultaneous undermining-into sharp relief. Despite the multiple
life. Bailly references to mortality, neither revulsion nor despair intrudes upon this
this work devoted display of the fru its of art. Far from condemning the pleasures
the youth offered by the practice of such craft-or, in the Horatian version of this
theme favored by students of the arts, far from seeking to delight us with
pleasures in order to teach or preach against them-images such as these
instead offer us a mode through which to enjoy craft to the fullest. Acknowl-
edging the fragility of his enterprise, the artist fully, steadi ly, and with loving
care undertakes a version of Baconian experiments or what we have called
experiential observation.
Once again English words and practice can help us to understand the
pictures of the Dutch. Let us turn once more to Thomas Sprat, who addresses
the problem of the legitimacy granted to experiments in a long passage of his
history of the Royal Society. In a section entitled "Experiments useful for the
cure of men's minds," Sprat writes:
108 Chapter Three

What raptures can the most voluptuous men fancy to which these are not
equal? Can they relish nothing but the pleasures of their senses? They may
here enjoy them without guilt or remors .... What ambitious disquiets can
torment that man, who has so much glory before him, for which there are
only requir'd the delightful Works of his hands? What dark, or melancholy
passions can overshadow his heart, whose senses are always full of so many
various productions, of which the least progress, and success, will affect him
with an innocent joy? What anger, envy, hatred, or revenge can long
torment his breast, whome not only the greatest and noblest objects, but
every sand, every pible, every grass, every earth, every fly can divert? "
What agitates and excites Sprat is revealing. Experiments, he claims, offer
raptures and sensuous pleasures without guilt or remorse. In the face of such
delight in the pleasures of the senses and in handiwork, all evil passions can
be dispelled. In the course of the argument, Sprat offers the industry of
experiments as an antidote to idleness and vanity. But his logic is less im-
portant to us than the issue he raises: the competing claims of the passions that
pull us between savoring pleasure and attendant guilt. This arena into which
Sprat rushes with such verbal gusto is also the subject of Bailly'S fine brush.
And in each instance the devotion to experiments offers at least a temporary
respite from conflict. God is never far from Sprat's mind in his overall defense
of experimental learning. He invokes Him not as a guardian of behavior but,
in a standard argument for the pursuit of natural knowledge at the time, as
creator of the world:
What anger, envy, hatred, or revenge can long torment his breast, whome
not only the greatest, and noblest objects, but every sand, every pible,
every grass, every earth, every fly can divert?
Sprat here implicitly locates God in the details of His creation. Experiment
with those details is thus grounded in creation itself.
I hope that with the picture before us and Sprat's text at our side we can
dispel the notion that Bailly'S painting is intended as a doctrinal assault on
human pleasures in general and on the pleasures of craft in particular. Yet it
B.. -
would surely be wrong to dispose in this way of the entire issue of mortality
and transience that is raised by the painting. From the rendering of each
object up to the ordering of the whole, Bailly keeps before our eyes the fact
that this is but a picture-therein lies the ultimate fragility and transience. In
a haunting way Bailly'S art seems to vie with the very fragility that it courts
and admits. The consummation of his art produces bubbles, but bubbles so
crafted that they will never burst. Transience is invoked less by the presence
of emblems of vanity than by their status as crafted representations. Art is
thus not challenged by a moral view, but lies at the very heart of that view.
In saying this I am not making a modernist claim but one very much of the
seventeenth century. We Can see Bailly'S Still Life as the pictorial version of
a subtle yet powerful formulation of Bacon's. Let us consider the following
passage about the accumulation of natural histories:
"With a Sincere Handand a Faithful Eye" 109

But I contrive that the office of the sense shall be only to judge of the
experiment, and that the experiment itself shall judge of the thing. 64
Bacon is describing the mediating role of experiment: it is the link through
which we are enabled to grasp and thus understand nature. If we replace the
word experiment with "picture" or "representation" we find ourselves in
familiar territory:
I contrive the office of the sense shall be only to judge of the picture and
that the picture itself shall judge of the thing.
We are back to the image on Kepler's retina, or Comenius's words, which like
• offer Dutch paintings themselves are located at that place where the world and
r of such
human crafting of it meet. This conjunction defines representation, which is
os can
credited with giving us the capacity to comprehend the world.
ry of
Bacon's definition of art among the human arts gives an account of making
ess lill -
consonant with the nature of the picture that we have been exploring. It is less
ns that
valuable as a definition of art than as a program for art as the production of
which
basic knowledge of the world. Although Bacon's somewhat hectoring and
brush.
repetitious definitions are a far cry from the intimate views given us in Dutch
mporary
paintings , his program for texts on natural history shares certain basic things
defense
with them . Bacon too manifests an intense interest in the minutiae of the
rvior but,
world. This is combined with an anonymity or coolness (it is as if no human
tlme, as
passions but only the love of truth led him on) that is also characteristic of the
Dutch. The world is stilled, as in Dutch paintings, to be subjected to obser-
, whome vation . Detailed descriptions, compiled almost without end and fitted into the
ry pible, table, displace time, since each observation is separate from the next. Indeed,
despite its title, or, provocatively, in the very face of its title, Bacon's natural
history disphces history-at least that history of civil life which admits
>enment
human activities and time and depends on interpretation. It is, like the Dutch
art with which we have linked it, description, not narration.
w e can
>sault on IV
'1". Yet it
Bacon concluded his Parasceve with a note in which he said : " I care little
"ortality about the mechanical arts themselves : only about those things which they
of each contribute to the equipment of philosophy."" He was aware of the con-
, the fact flicting interests that adhered to the studies he proposed. To take two of his
lence. In
examples : the fact that meat must be salted earlier in winter than in summer
I courts
is important for the cook's knowledge of pickling, but it is also important for
bbles so a knowledge of coldness and its effect; and though the red appearance of a
presence cooked crab is of no culinary interest, it is of great interest to a student of
s. Art is redness. 66 Bacon urges on us that the perfection of art-in this case the art of
:at VIew.
cookery-should not displace larger philosophical concerns such as the study
:h of the of coldness or redness. But, indeed, the future of the project lay in just what
TSion of he did not wish for it. A practical interest in trades, their products, and the
,Howing
related improvement of society was soon to replace Bacon's philosophical
ambitions.
110 Chapter Three

Petty's The Advice ofW.P. of 1647 was one of the first statements in which
the natural history of the mechanical arts was casually referred to as the
history of trades-the phrase that was to become the common one. The
project was taken up by John Evelyn, who in the 1650s embarked on the
modern version of Bacon's project. In time this was institutionalized in the
proceedings and publications of the Royal Society for the Improving of
Natural Knowledge, one of whose stated aims was to reach an audience of
tradesmen, who through the work of the Society would improve their prod-
ucts. It was Hooke, a Baconian of the second generation, who articulated this
in the introduction to his Micrographia of 1655: "They do not wholly reject
experiments ... but they principally aim at such, whose Applications will
improve and facilitate the present way of Manual Arts." Indeed, Sprat in his
History feels that he has to argue once more for the value of experiments that
do not bring immediate gain. 67
It is curious for a student of the history of art to find that John Evelyn,
whose Sculptura is a basic text for our knowledge of engraving at the time,
produced his work out of a practical impulse. Far from entertaining a specific
interest in the fine arts, Evelyn was engaged in a general project (for which
he himself drew up a never realized plan) of a history of trades. 68 The three
treatises that he did publish- the Sculptura of 1662, on engraving and etch-
ing, the Sylva or Discourse of Forest Trees of 1664 on gardening, and the
translation of Freart de Chambray'S Parallel of Ancient Architecture with
Modern on building-study three trades listed by Bacon. As it happens they
correspond to the three instances of human craft included by Comenius in his
Opera Didactica. Engraving and architecture are presented under the same
rubric with gardening, and if we look further into the papers of the Society
we find that these are joined by Evelyn'sPanificium -or the Several Manners
of Making Bread in France. An American who cooked through the 1970s,
educated to it by Julia Child, would hardly be surprised by such a study. But
it is perhaps surprising to discover that making bread in the French manner
is considered basic to human understanding and to the well-being of society.
Yet from engraving to bread, from glass making to oyster breeding to trying
to make wine from sugar cane, the Sprat History of ihe Society turns to studies
that are supported more, it would seem, for the good life than for good
thoughts . "
Evelyn admires and encourages attempts that were made to extend such
projects into one's life. In a prefatory essay to his Sculptura entitled "An
Account of Signor Favi," he praises a new conception of the Grand Tour: an
Italian made it his purpose to produce a cycle and history of trades as a result
of his travels. It would surely be worthwhile to consider the reports of
travelers such as Evelyn or the Frenchman Monconys (known primarily to art
historians because of his visit to Vermeer) not simply as eyewitness journals
of life abroad but in the context of knowledge as it was conceived, gathered ,
and codified at the time. Glass tears, the studios of Vermeer and Mieris, a
collection of lenses, the pendulum, some beautiful shells and fine Arab
"With a Sincere Handand a Faithful Eye" 111

books-all these follow one another in quick succession as undifferentiated,

valuabl e experiences in Monconys's account. The nature of this apparent
jumble is clearer in the context of the concerns and categories of Baconian
projects. In travelers' reports of the Netherlands, the particular riches of the
individual collections merge with praise of Amsterdam as the center of world
trade. The history of encyclopedic collections such as the Kunstkammer of
Rudolf II have recently received a good deal of attention. Such princely
collections, organized according to categories of nature and art and demon-
strating a concern with artifice, have been shown to be antecedents of
seventeenth-century Dutch collections. But it is clear that there are significant
changes by the mid-seventeenth century. A major change, and one of interest
to us here, is that the products of both nature and man once assembled to
celebrate the glory and power of a monarch like Rudolf are now the pos-
session, and decorate the lives and households, of the Dutch merchants. 7D We
are no longer dealing with individual emissaries sent out to collect rarities for
an emperor, but with the world of trade in Amsterdam . Bacon's project had
been in some sense suspended or poised between the intellectual schemes of
the sixteenth century and the technology and possessions of the seventeenth.
In Holland, as with the second generation Baconians of the Royal Society, the
intellectual ambitions of Bacon are transformed into commercial ventures.
Craft is practiced less for knowledge than for possession. While the Royal
Society planned and executed studies , the Dutch, it wou ld appear, literally
delivered the goods. They exceed us in riches and traffic, writes Sprat, and he
considers this economic advantage a demonstration of what can result from
following the Baconian program. Amsterdam as the queen of trade was at the
center of the Dutch view of th emselves. It was trade that was celebrated on
the pedimentary sculpture of the new Town Hall, begun in 1648 after the
signing of the Treaty of Munster. Ports are, of course, normally celebrated in
such terms-witness Rubens's despair about Antwerp's loss of trade in the
designs for his 1635 entry of the archduke Ferdinand . This explains the
illustrated frontispiece to Zesen's Amsterdam, which shows goods being
brought from everywhere to the city, and it explains the tide of the 1664
publication Amsterdam: World Famous Commercial Center. 71 The Dutch are
celebrated as merchants and Amsterdam as the greatest trading center in the
world. Perhaps no one put it better than Diderot in the account he wrote of
extend such his trip through Holland in 1772:
entitled "An
rand Tour: an The Dutch are human ants; they spread over all the regions of the earth,
gather up everything they find that is scarce, useful, or precious, and carry
as a result it back to their storehouses. It is to Holland that the rest of Europe goes
be reports of for everything it lacks. Holland is Europe's commercial hub. The Dutch
rimarily to art have worked to such good purpose that, through their ingenuity, they have
lness journals obtained all of life's necessiti es, in defiance of the elements. Wherever one
,ed, gathered, goes in that country, one sees art grappling with nature, and always win-
and Mieris, a ning. There, wealth is without vanity, liberty is without insolence, levies
ad fine Arab are w ithout vexation, and taxation is without misery.
112 Chapter Three

[Les Hollandais sont des hommes-fourmis, qui se repandent sur toutes les
contrees de la terre, ramassent tout ce qu'elles trouvent de rare, d'utile, de
precieux, et Ie portent dans leurs magasins. C'est en Hollande qui Ie reste
de l'Europe va chercher tout ce qui lui manque. La Hollande est la bourse
commune de l'Europe. Les Hollandais ont tant fair par leur industrie,
qu'ils en ont obtenu tout ce qu'exigent les besoins de la vie, et cela en depit
des quatre ('lemens. C'est !it qu'on voit a chacque pas l'art aux prises avec
la nature, et l'art toujours victorieux. La richesse y est sans vanite, la liberte
sans insolence, la maltote sans vexation, et l'imp6t sans misere.]"
Where does the Dutch artist fit into this? My answers to this question are
tentative ones. They are suggestions about the ways in which we might look
at Dutch painting based on the connections between the crafting of nature,
language, the trades, and images that we have been considering. The evidence
is that in most towns the Dutch painter entered the seventeenth century
institutionally bound to the other craftsmen in the craft guild of Saint Luke.
The list of crafts involved in the Delft guild in 1611 gives us a sample of such
a grouping: "all those earning their living here with the art of painting be it
with the fine brushes or otherwise in oil or water colors, glassmakers, glass
sellers, falenciers, tapestry-makers, embroiderers, engravers, sculptors,
working in wood or stone, scabbard makers, art printers, book sellers, sellers
of prints or paintings. ,, 73
The Delft guild is, it is true, one of the few to survive so long. But it is
remarkable that with the exception of the defunct scabbard-makers the group
of craftsmen in the Delft guild of Saint Luke remained unchanged from 1550
to 1750. Various arguments have been put forth showing that the painters'
identification with other craftsmen, rather than with a literate elite and a
related elevated notion of art, characterizes them as well as the nature of their
art through the seventeenth century. 74 Evidence to support this view has been
adduced from the painters' membership in craft guilds, the low price paid for
their products, their parentage, and their professional attitudes. To take the
last two: artists were frequently sons of craftsmen. Jacob Ruisdael was the son
of a frame-maker, Miereveld the son of a goldsmith, Ostade's father was a
weaver, and Dou's a glassmaker and engraver. Being an artist was clearly a
craft, not a calling in this society. Artists gave it up when better money was
to be had by other means: the portrait painter Bol was one of a number of
artists who stopped painting when he made a good marriage, and Hobbema ,
the landscape artist, stopped when he was installed as a city wine gauger.
Yet there is much evidence that the Dutch painters did distinguish them-
selves from other craftsmen in the course of the century. I have in mind th e
fact that th ey did so many self-portraits, some very elegant indeed, and that
they struggled to change th eir guilds. At present the issue is dealt with in
polarized terms: an Italian or academic notion of Dutch art coming of age in
Europe is posited against an older and persistent northern craft tradition. But
the issue is less clear-cut than this. The question would seem to be, Did th e
Dutch artists di stinguish themselves from or among oth er craftsmen, and
"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 113

:es les what pictorial form did such a distinction take? Though there is no simple,
_ _ e, de all-inclu sive answer to these questions, it seems that craft ties bind even as the
e reste artists insist on their own identity. There is , for example, a history of
- bourse separatism - artists breaking away from the other craftsmen in the guild of
Saint Luke. This happens in a group of Dutch cities around the time of the
1609 truce with Spain and again later with the formation of an association like
Picrura in the Hague. We must, however, try to understand the reasons for
such separatism. While the Pictura group seems to have had something to do
with artistic ideals, the issue at the time of the truce was protectionism rather
than th e definition of art. The artists wanted to defend their market against
the influx of foreign artists who were free to enter at the end of hostilities. The
artists, in other words, continued to hold a guild notion; but they wanted to
make themselves special in it.
century Haarlem is an interesting case in point of the persisting links of artists with
: ai nt Luke_ other craftsmen. 75 There, in 1631, certain artists pushed for innovations in the
lS4:nplle of such training of the artist that involved what have been termed "academic" as-
sumptions about art. But even while doing this these artists insisted on
remaining in the same guild with all the other craftsmen, objecting hotly when
the goldsmiths and silversmiths decided to withdraw. The reform was pushed
through by the sometime history painter Salomon de Bray, but it was at-
tended to by the landscape painter Pieter de Molyn, the portrait painter
Hendrik Pot, and still-life painter Willem Claesz. Heda, and by Pieter Saen-
redam, who helped with the remodeling of their quarters. The works of these
artists do not offer much testimony to a general reform in pictorial practice.
The articles of reform propose sessions in drawing and in anatomy, but they
also reveal concerns that are still deeply imbedded in the established traditions
that they nominally want to reform. It has been a leitmotiv of this srudy that
view has been given the conditions under which Dutch art was produced- an indigenous
price paid for pictorial tradition matched to a foreign rhetorical tradition about art and its
To take the narure- we must be careful to consider the narure of the art separately from
was the son the claims made on its behalf. A major concern in Haarlem seems to have been
father was a the precise ordering of the various craft groups within the guild. This comes
was clearly a out in the new regulations about who properly offers prayers for whom on
money was the occasion of members' funerals (complete with a schedu le of fines for
a number of failing to perform), but also in the attention to the designing (by none other
Hobbema, than De Bray himself) of new coats of arms and funerary cloths for variou s
groups. It will not do to dismiss all of this as petty in contrast to the inno-
vative proposals about artistic training, nor to ignore the evidence that the
installation of a bust of Michelangelo (a tribute to high art) is all mixed up
, and that with the arrangements for a table for the secretary and eight fine chairs (the
dealt with in low). Indeed, we read that the access to the new guild quarters in the Pand
of age in (the building housing all the guilds of Haarlem) was gained by "climbing the
·tion. But stairs of the library above the fencing school and to the east of the attic above
to be, Did the the breadweighers' room." Doctors, smiths, bakers, masons, beer trans-
and porters, and linen merchants were all housed together with the painters. We
114 Chapter Three

have a sense of the kind of company painters still felt it comfortable to keep.
If we are to understand the relationship of the Dutch. artist to the craft
tradition, we might begin by considering the sense in which, far from repudi-
ating it, the artist of the seventeenth century achieved what he did by asserting
himself as the prime craftsman of all. I would argue this despite the support
given even by Dutch texts for a more elevated art. My evidence is the kind of
accomplishment Dutch images display. This analysis fits various aspects of
the artistic scene quite well: first, there is the striking fact that painters
working at mid-century-Dou, Mieris, Metsu, Kalf, Ter Borch, Vermeer,
and even Ostade (whose peasants get neater in dress and more finely ren-
dered)-all show an increased rath er than a decreased attention to the crafted
surface of their representations. The high finish and detailed rendering asso-
ciated with the growing di stinction between the kladschilder (rough painter)
and thefijnschilder is a common feature of mid-century painting in H olland. "
Cos t was often calculated according to fini sh: time was devoted to execution,
not to invention. It is the man-hours it takes to do it (not unlike the work of
some New Realists today) that contribures to the great rise in the price of
individual paintings. In their concentration on rendering crafted stuffs-the
silks of Ter Borch, the tapestries and spinets of Dou, Metsu, Mieris, even
bread in the case of Vermeer-these artists are clearly asserting their prowess
as the supreme craftsmen of all they represent. The tapestry the weaver
weaves, th e glass th e glassblower blows, the tiles of the tile maker, even the
baker's bread-all this they can capture and reproduce in paint. The display
of virtuosity so often found in these Dutch painters is a display of represen-
tational craft.
The positive nature of the artist's relationship to the established craft
traditions and to their own traditions explains why Jan Vermeer, the greatest
Dutch artist of the second half of the century, flourished in a city that boasted
a tradition of fine craftsmanship as well as the most conservative guild struc-
ture. At mid-century, when all of this conscious crafting is going on in
pictures, there is no evid ence of any particularly new regard for the craftsman
as such in Holland. There is no body of texts like that coming out of the Royal
Society in England that praises craftsmanship and that encourages people to
engage in it. (It is, of course, a theme of this chapter that the English had such
texts, but they did not have the craftsmen. ) It was the buyer , the poss essor,
and the goods possessed , not craft or production, that were important in the
Netherlands. 77 In Delft, for example, the evidence is that craft becomes
reconfirmed in painting even as there is a weakening of resp ect or interest in
the craft traditions that we would today call the minor arts. In an indu stry like
tile-makin g, produ ction techniques were developed to cut cost, emph asizing
speed at th e expense of craft. The quality of tiles th erefore noticeably declines.
Th e painters seem more and more to mediate. It is they who now provide the
designs for the other craftsmen as th ey did not in th e previous century. " If
we want to delight in finely crafted tiles, we look at them as they are repre-
sented in a painting by Vermeer. In taking on the responsibility for craft, th e
"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 115

.
.:raft
"""di-
cnng

on In
craftsman
th e Royal
people to
had such 59. WILLEM K ALF, Still Life with a Nautilus Goblet. Th yss en - Bornemisza C oll ect ion,
Lugano.

painters also increasingly become the purv eyors of luxury goods to the rich.
They claim what are complained about at the time as outrageously hi gh prices
for their works, prices they justify on the basis of the long hours spent on
th ei r execution. Six hundred gu ilders were asked for a single work by Dou or
Vermeer, while cheap paintings were had in th e past for well under ten. One
could say that the concern with craft is thematized in the objects they choose
to depict as well as in the manner in whi ch they depict them . The objects in
stilllifes done by Kalf in Amsterdam in the 1650s and 1660s are often id enti-
fiable rarities - collectible pieces of great value (fig . 59).79
116 Chapter Three

We have strayed far from the subject of Bacon, but not far from the
problems he raises. How does one measure the relationship between the
valuing of craft and its collection? Or between the aim of gaining knowledge
and that of gaining possession? The problems raised in the texts of the Royal
Society are displayed in the collectibles of theDutch-perhaps nowhere more
poignantly than in their paintings . And to say this leads us to a final point.
There is a problematic aspect to the painter's relationship to a craft tradition
that we touched on in our discussion of Bailly. The painter does not really
weave tapestries, blow glass, work gold, or bake bread. He feigns all these
things in paint. This is a source of pride, but it is also a source of a certain
unease.
Dutch painters acknowledge this in various ways. Gerard Dou, in what is
his largest and arguably his most ambitious painting, depicts himself as a
painter, palette in hand, standing beside a quack who is hawking his false
wares to a crowd (fig. 60). It has been shown that a number of the people and
objects assembled around the quack are re-presentations of pictured proverbs
or maxims commonly found in Dutch books at the time. 80 Dou culled and
assembled a group of pictorial quotations with meanings roughly as follows:
the seal hanging from a document on the quack's table says "what is sealed
is true"; the mother wiping her child's behind, "life is but stink and shit"; and
the mother in her role as pancake-seller, "the seller's prattle is meaningless,
immoraltalk"; the child vainly trying to trap a bird parallels the vain search
for gold; and the two trees, one bare and one in bloom, the anguish of choice.
In Dou's hands, the quack's performance becomes a pictorial occasion. But
what kind of occasion and what kind of picture is this? The tone is witty and
light. The execution is crisp and clear, making everything remarkably present
to the eyes . The organization is that of an apparently casual assemblage of
individual motifs. In the face of all this, the current argument for the picture
as a doctrinal depiction of Aristotelian modes of living-the sensual quack
versus the active farmer and the contemplative artist- is unpersuasive.
Though it engages moral issues, the work is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Dou's visual attentiveness to the individual maxims is the perfect counterpart
to Beeckman's verbal attentiveness to proverbs, which we touched on earlier.
Human nature is treated as something visible. And Dou's characteristic way
of assembling instances of human behavior has a decidedly Baconian flavor ,
which we can call taxonomic. Each person does, or in the case of objects is,
his own thing without any acknowledgment of his presence or, one migh t
say, his narrative effect in the world. "People want to be deceived." As others
have done, we might well apply this motto from a contemporary Dutch
engraving of a quack to this picture. But if we do, a strange thing happens:
Are we and is the artist himself not also party to deception? It is not clear fro m
Dou's image that anyone is exempt. Leaning out his window, in the shadow
of the quack, Dou catches the viewer's eye with his own. The picture alerts
us not only to the duplicity of the quack but also to the painterly one. It is
another case of the Dutch artist absorbed into his painted world. The canvas
"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 117

-"tIl the
...... the
- wledge
we Royal
. ere more
tinal point.
tradition
not really
all these

lca,slOn. But

of

ImJe,·suasive.

alerts

The canvas 60. GERARD Dou. The Quack , 1652. Museum Boymans-van Beunin gen, Ro nerdam.
.
116 Chapter Three

We have strayed far from the subject of Bacon, but not far from th e
problems he raises. How does one measure the relationship between th e
valuing of craft and its collection? Or between the aim of gaining knowledge
and that of gaining possession? The problems raised in the texts of the Royal
Society are displayed in the collectibles of the Dutch - perhaps nowhere more
poignantly than in their paintings. And to say this leads us to a final point.
There is a problematic aspect to the painter's relationship to a craft tradition
that we touched on in our discussion of Bailly. The painter does not really
weave tapestries, blow glass, work gold, or bake bread. He feigns all these
things in paint. This is a source of pride, but it is also a source of a certai n
unease.
Dutch painters acknowledge this in various ways . Gerard Dou, in what is
his largest and arguably his most ambitious painting, depicts himself as a
painter, palette in hand, standing beside a quack who is hawking his fals e
wares to a crowd (fig. 60). It has been shown that a number of the people and
objects assembled around the quack are re-presentations of pictured proverbs
or maxims commonly found in Dutch books at the time. " Dou culled and
assembled a group of pictorial quotations with meanings roughly as follows:
the seal hanging from a document on the quack's table says "what is sealed
is true"; the mother wiping her child's behind, "life is but stink and shit"; and
the mother in her role as pancake-seller, "the seller's prattle is meaningless ,
immorarcalk"; the child vainly trying to trap a bird parallels the vain search
for gold; and the two trees, one bare and one in bloom, the anguish of choice.
In Dou's hands, the quack's performance becomes a pictorial occasion. But
what kind of occasion and what kind of picture is this? The tone is witty and
light. The execution is crisp and clear, making everything remarkably present
to the eyes. The organization is that of an apparently casual assemblage of
individual motifs. In the face of all this, the current argument for the picture
as a doctrinal depiction of Aristotelian modes of living-the sensual quack
versus the active farmer and the contemplative artist-is unpersuasive.
Though it engages moral issues, the work is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Dou's visual attentiveness to the individual maxims is the perfect counterpart
to Beeckman's verbal attentiveness to proverbs, which we touched on earlier.
Human nature is treated as something visible. And Dou's characteristic way
of assembling instances of human behavior has a decidedly Baconian flavor ,
which we can call taxonomic. Each person does, or in the case of objects is,
his own thing without any acknowledgment of his presence or, one might
say, his narrative effect in the world. "People want to be deceived." As others
have done, we might well apply this motto from a contemporary Dutch
engraving of a quack to this picture. But if we do, a strange thing happens:
Are we and is the artist himself not also party to deception? It is not clear from
Dou's image that anyone is exempt. Leaning out his window, in the shadow
of the quack, Dou catches the viewer's eye with his own. The picture alerts
us not only to the duplicity of the quack but also to the painterly one. It is
another case of the Dutch artist absorbed into his painted world. The canvas
"With a Sincere Hand and a Faithful Eye" 117

- Don

thes e
.:ertam

heristic way
Dnian flavor,
oi objects is,
r, one might
I." As others
rar y Dutch
g happens:

f t clear from
the shadow
icrure alerts
r1y one. It is
_ The canvas 60. GERARD Dou, The Quack. 1652. Mu seum Boymans-van Beunin gen , Rotterdam.
118 Chapter Three

61. JAN V ERMEER. Woman

Playing a Guitar.
Courtesy of the Greater
London Coun cil as
Trustees of the Iveagh
Bequest , Kenwood.

is a mock-up of the world. Far from disowning it, Dou, in a kind of low and
comic analogue to the high claims made by Velazquez in his Las M?ninas,
implicates himself and his making in it.
Dou does not qu estion all that we see, he rather alerts us to its circum-
stances . His dust-free su rfaces , mOst likely worked with the help of a lens and
once covered, in many cases, by a protective panel, make the claim that
begu iling surface is the stuff of whi ch art and life are both made. Later, in the
works of Kalf or Vermeer, this claim is lodged in the very handling of the
paint (fig . 59). Kalf's mature works feature the finest and most p recious
objects of both forei gn and native hands-finely wrought silver and gold, rare
carpets, splendidly wrought nau tilus shells, elegant glass of th e Venetian type,
chosen fruits, porcelain from the Orient. All of th ese objects catch beams of
li ght cast from an undisclosed source, which make them if anything more
beautiful in art than in life. Placed against a darkened background at th e edge
of a table of rare marble, the objects are in some sense creatures of light and
of paint. But fo r the light they would not be visible at all. Looking through
Kalf's lenses we see paint. The globules of paint that articulate the skin of the
lemon or th e shi mmer of a glass are plainly visible to the eye. Even while
celebrating possession, such works reveal that what we possess is crafted Out
of paint. This is not a modernist strategy that admits to and even makes a
virtue out of the handling of paint. When Vermeer makes this admission (fig.
61) in the awkward, lozenge-like brushstrokes that destroy the looks and
spoil the illu sion of his last works, it marks the end of an old kind of painting,
not the beginning of the new.
4
The Mapping Impulse
in Dutch Art

Woman h e two previous chapters have pro-

ceeded on the border line between art and its models (to put it strongly) or
art and its analogies (to put it in a weaker form). We considered those models
that seem relevant to the making, viewing, and understanding of images in
seventeenth-century Holland. In addition to the visual self-consciousness
shared with Kepler's study of the eye and the craft concerns shared with
Hooke, Bacon, and Comenius, I want to consider now what I call the
mapping impulse. Our starting place is the observation that there was perhaps
at no other time or place such a coincidence between mapping and picturing.
Given what we have found previously, it should come as no surprise that the
basis of this coincidence is a common notion of knowledge and the belief that
claim that it is to be gained and asserted through pictures. But the congruity between
pictures and maps does more than simply confirm what we have already seen.
This time our model is itself an image. Those descriptive characteristics that
precIOUS we have so far reached by indirection-through analogies- we shall now be
gold, rare able to ground directly in the nature of attitudes toward, and the language
""''''''" type, applied to a particular kind of image.
beams of
Im·thlme more I
at the edge Vermeer's Art of Painting (pI. 2), a work that illuminates the resemblance
of ligh t and between pictures and maps, is a promising place to begin. In size and theme
. through this is a unique and ambitious work that draws our attention to a splendid
skin of the representation of a map. We are looking into a painter'S studio. The artist has
started to render the leaves of the wreath on the head of a young woman, one
of Vermeer's familiar models, who here represents, so we have been told,
""en makes a Clio, the muse of history bedecked with her emblematic accoutrements as
"D','V" (fig. described by Ripa. The great map (fig. 62), hung so as to fill the back wall
e looks and before which Vermeer has situated painter and model, has not gone unnoticed
of painting, by art histori ans. It has been plumbed for its moral meanings: its presence
interpreted as an image of human vanity, a literal rendering of worldly con-

119
120 Chapter Four

62. JA N VERMEER, Th e Art of Painting, detail (map) . Kuns thistorisches Museum, Vienna.

cerns; and its depiction of the northern and southern Netherlands interpreted
as an image of a lost past when all the provinces were one country (a historical
dimension borne out perhaps by the painter'S old-fashioned dress and the
Hapsburg eagles on the chandelier). Most recently the scrupulously careful
rendering has enabled the map to be identified as a particular one preserved
today in only a single copy in Paris. Seen this way, Vermeer's map, inadver-
tently, is a source for our knowledge of cartographic history. I
But these interpretations all overlook the obvious claim that the map makes
on us as a piece of painting in its own right. There are, of course, many
pictures of th e time that remind us of the fact that the Dutch were the first
who seriously produced maps as wall-hangings-this being only a part of the
wide production, dissemination, and use of maps throughout the society. But
nowhere else does a map have such a powerful pictorial presence. When
compared with the maps in the works of other artists, Vermeer's maps might
all be said to be distinctive. While Ochtervelt, for example (fig. 63), merely
indicates that a map is on the wall, testified to by a faint outline on a tawny
ground, Vermeer always suggests the material quality of varnished paper,
paint, and something of the graphic means by which the land mass is set forth .
It is hard to believe that the same map is represented by Ochtervelt and by
Vermeer. Each of the maps in Vermeer's works can be precisely identified.
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 121

eu m, Vienna.

; interpreted
(a historical
·ess and the
usly careful
,e preserved
'p, inadver-

,map makes
IUfse , many
'ere the first
a part of the 63. JACOB OCHTERV ELT. The Musicians. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
society. But
mce. When But the map in the Art of Painting is distinctive in other ways. It is the largest
maps might map and also the most complex assemblage of any in Vermeer's works . The
63), merely Netherlands is at the edge of a ship-filled sea, framed by topographical views
on a tawny of her major cities, emblazoned with several cartouches, explained beneath by
shed paper, a text, and elegantly titled in clear letters set across its upper edge. (The
,is set forth. orientation of printed maps was not yet fixed at the time, and the west coast
,,-elt and by rather than the northern border of Holland appears at the top of the map.)
.- identified. What is more, it is a map whose original combined the four kinds of printing
122 Chapter Fou r

then available for use in maps-engraving, etching, woodcut, and moveable

type for the letters. In size, scope, and graphic ambition it is a summa of the
mapping art of the day, represented in paint by Vermeer.
And in this respect- as a representation-it is also different from other
maps in Vermeer's paintings. In every other work by Vermeer where there is
a map it is cut by th e edge of the picture. But here we are meant to see it all
because we are meant to see it in a different light. A lth ough it is skimmed by
a bit of the tapestry, and a small area is hidden by the chandelier, the entire
extent of this huge map is made fully visible on the wall. Vermeer combines
the richly painted surface of the map in his Frick painting with the weight of
the varnished paper of the map behind the Woman Reading a Letter in
Amsterdam to give this map an astonishing material presence. Oth er objects
in the studio share this crafted presence-the tapestry, for example, with
threads hanging loose from its back side. But the tapestry is located, as its
position in the painting suggests, at the edge. It leads us in to the painting
while th e map is itself presented as a painting. (The red tip of the maulstick
matches the red paint on the map-but then as if to caution us against making
too much of the fact the artist's stockings share the shade.) Verm eer irre-
vocably binds the map to his art of painting by placing his name on it. 1
Ver-Meer (fig. 106) is inscribed in pale letters at the point where the map's
inner border meets the blue cloth that stands out stiffly behind the model's
neck. In no oth er painting does Vermeer claim that the map is of his own
making. Vermeer's claim to the identity of mapmaker is powerfully con-
firmed elsewhere in his work. The only two male figures to whom he devoted
entire paintings-the Astronomer in a private collection in Paris, and the
Geographer in Frankfurt-were also by profession makers of maps and they
encompassed the heavens and the earth between them.
The Art of Painting comes late in the day for Dutch painting and late in
Vermeer's career. It stands as a kind of summary and ass essment of what has
been done. The poised yet intense relationship of man and woman, the
conjunction of crafted surfaces, the domestic space-this is the stuff of Ver-
meer's art. But here it all has a paradigmatic status due not only to its historic
title but to the formality of its presentation. If this map is presented like a
painting, to what notion of painting does it correspond? Vermeer suggests an
answer to this question in the form of th e word Descriptio (fig. 64) promi-
nently written on the upper border of the map just where it extends to the
right of the chandelier over the easel. This was one of the mOst common terms
used to designate th e mapping enterprise. Mapmakers or publishers were
referred to as "world describers" and their maps or atlases as the world
described. 2 Though the term was never, as far as I know, applied to a paint-
ing, there is good reason to do so. The aim of Dutch painters was to capture
on a surface a great range of knowledge and information about th e world.
They too employed words with their images. Like the mappers, they made
additive works that could not be taken in from a single viewing point. Theirs
was not a window on the Italian model of art but rather, like a map, a surface
on which is lai d out an assemblage of the world.
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 123

-om other
ere there is
· 0 see it all
..tUnmed by
the entire
_.,."''''" combines
;.:c.e weight of
.l Letter in

Other objects
=rople, with
AlCa ted, as its
'D th e painting
th e maulstick
· Jainst making
Vermeer irre-
name on it. 1
the map's
the model's

con-

64. JAN VERMEER , The Art of Painting. detail (map). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

suggests an
fig . 64) promi .
extends to the 65. J AN V ERMEER , View of Delft.
common terms Mauritshuis, The Hague.
publishers were
as the world But mapping is nOt only an analogue for the art of painting. It also sug-
gested certain types of images and so engaged Dutch artists in certain tasks to
was to capture be done. Vermeer confirms this kind of relationship between maps and pic-
the world. tures. Let us consider his View of Delft (fig. 65): a city is viewed as a profile,
they made laid out on a surface seen across the water from a far shore with boats at
point. Theirs anchor and small foreground figures . This was a common scheme invented
a map , a surface for engraved topographical city views (fig. 95) in the sixteenth century. The
View of Delft is an instance, the most brilliant of all, of the transformation
124 Chapter Four

from map to paint that the mapping impulse engendered in Dutch art. And
some years later in his Art of Painting Vermeer recapitulated the map-to-
painting sequence, for the small but carefully executed city views (fig. 64) that
border the map return his own View of Delft to its source. Vermeer puts the
painted city view back into the mapping context from which it had emerged
as if in acknowledgment of its nature .
Seen from our perspective, this mapping-picture relationship might seem
unusual. In the study of images we are used to treating maps as one kind of
a thing and pictures as something else. If we exclude the rare occasions when
a landscape picture (fig. 66) is used to serve the mapping of a region-as when
the u.S. Congress in the 1850's commissioned landscape lithographs of the
West in preparation for choosing a route for the continental railroad- we can
always tell maps and landscapes apart by their look. 3 Maps give us the mea-
sure of a place and the relationship between places, quantifiable data, while
landscape pictures are evocative, and aim rather to give us some quality of a
place or of the viewer's sense of it (fig. 67, 68). One is closer to science, the
other is art. This general, though casually held view- casual because it does
not normally seek out the possible philosophical grounding-is upheld pro-
fessionally. Cartographers are clearly a group separate from artists even as
students of cartography are separate from historians of art. Or at least that is
how it was until recently. We are witnessing a certain weakening of these
divisions and the attitudes that they represent. Art historians, less certain that
they can stipulate which images count as art, are willing to include more kinds
of human artifacts and makings in their field of study. A number have turned

66. John Mix Stanley, after RI CHARD H. K ERN, View of Sangre de Cristo
Pass (lithograph), in Reports of Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain
the . .. Means for a Railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean
(1853- 54 ), vol. II , opp. p. 37. Courtesy, the Bancroft Library,
Berkeley, California.
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 125

- _\nd

67. Map of th e United States. © Rand 68. ALBERT BIERSTADT, Yosemite Winter
McNall y an d Company, R.L. Scene . University Art Museum, Berkeley,
82-5-32. California. Gift of Henry D. Bacon.

69. JASP ER JOHNS, Map, 1961. Oil on ca nvas, 6'6" X 10'31fs". Coll ection, the Museum of
Modern Art. Fractional gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull.

to maps.4 Cartographers and geographers for their part, in keeping with a

related intellectual revolution of our time, are newly conscious of the struc-
ture of maps and of their cognitive basis. A distinguished geographer put the
change this way: while Once it was said "that is not geography which cannot
be mapp ed, " now it is thought that "the geography of the land is in the last
resort the geography of the mind. ,, ' Jasper Johns's Map (fig. 69) is a painter's
version of this thought. Indeed , the meeting or at leas t approaching of the
different fields is evident today in the work of a number of artists who are
making maps.
126 Chapter Four

Students of maps have never denied the artistic component of the maps
themselves. It is a commonplace of cartographic literature that maps combine
art and science, and the great age of Dutch seventeenth-century maps offers
a prime example of this. This is illustrated in the cartouche pairing two female
figures at the top left corner of the map represented in Vermeer's Art 0/
Painting (fig . 70): one figure bears a cross-staff and compasses while the other
has a palette, brush, and city view in hand. Decoration-whether in the form
of cartouches and other materials such as portraits and city views or built into
the use of a map as a domestic wall-hanging- is acknowledged and studied.
"Decorative" maps constitute a specific body of cartographic material. But
inevitably such decorative aspects or uses are considered to be secondary to
the real (scientific) aims of mapmaking. There is assumed to be an inverse
proportion between the amount of art displayed and the amount of informa-
tion conveyed. Art and science, even when combined, are in some conflict.
A recent and interesting study by a geographer of the historical links between
cartography and art had this to say:
Mapmaking as a form of decorative art belongs to the informal, pre-
scientific phase of cartography. When cartographers had neither the geo-
graphical knowledge nor the cartographic skill to make accurate maps,
fancy and artistry had free rein. 6
There is of course some truth to this, but it is stated at the expense of
understanding the prescientific cartography in its own appropriate terms, in
the spirit in which it was done. While cartographers set aside the decorative
or picturelike side of maps, art historians for their part have done the same
with the documentary aspect of art. "Mere topography" (as contrasted with
"mere decoration") is the term here . It is used by art historians to classify
those landscape pictures or views that sacrifice art (or perhaps never rise to it)
in the name of the recording of place. Cartographers and art historians have
been in essential agreement in maintaining boundaries between maps and art,
or between knowledge and decoration. They are boundaries that would have
puzzled the Dutch. For at a time when maps were considered to be a kind of
picture and when pictures challenged texts as a central way of understanding
the world, the distinction was not firm. What should be of interest to students
of maps and of pictures is not where the line was drawn between them, but
precisely the nature of their overlap, the basis of th eir resemblance. Let us
therefore consider the historical and pictorial conditions under which this
mapping-picture relationship took place.

II
A great range of people took part in the explosion that geographical illus-
tration underwent in the sixteenth century. A number of reasons can be given
for the explosion-military operations and demand for news, trade, and
water control among others. A general feature is the trust to maps as a form
of knowledge and an interest in the particular kinds of knowledge to be gained
The Mapping Imp ulse in Dutch Art 127

maps

eiorm
[ Into
died. ......rar
But )U',PmJ ""rs,rl, .. e,.J,Tlo<;ii
.... phr

"""-'-!i-
-.-
- .... 1-"J
.."
orma-
.:onflict.
1-'"
,...... ,_
_ ,_ J
! - .."'
"_fl'
_ _ ,, _ ••.•
.. _•• _ ,_
,"- ....
'ff

of
terms, In
70. Map of the Seven-
teen Provinces,
published by CLAES
j ANSZ . VI SSCHER ,
detai l. Courtesy of
the Bibliothequc
Nationale, Pa ri s .

from maps. Mapping was a common, even a casually acquired skill at the
time. Cornelis Drebbel, inventor and experimenter in natural knowledge,
mapped his hometown of Alkmaar early in his career and C omenius is re-
puted to have mad e the first map of Bohemia before being forced to leav e. 7
Each man made only a single map in a li fetim e. It seems to have been an
accepted way to pay one's respect to one's home while contributing to the
knowledge of it.
I am understandably less concerned than a cartographic hi storian might be
to distinguish between the act of surveying (which some draftsmen did them-
selves) and the act of drafting a map. For my aim is to call attention to the fact
that mapping taken in its broad sense was a common pastime. On occasion
it even offered th e possibility of displacing deep human feelings onto the act
of describing itself. So it was, for example, that early on the morning of 5
August 1676 just before, as we know from his diary, Constantijn Huygens
as a form the Younger was to start th e search for the body of his great nephew, killed
be gained the day before in battle, he settled down with pen, ink, and paper to describe
128 Chapter Four

the besieged city of Maastricht viewed across the river Meuse. ' In the splendid
drawing (fig. 71) that he made, Huygens dealt with human loss by turning to
description, though we cannot with certainty call this drawing a commemo-
ratton.
It is often said that a fondness for tOpographical views and tOpographical
details made maps more like what we think of as pictures. A horizon was not
an uncommon thing on a map. But the connection is also demonstrated by the
surprising number of northern artists who were engaged in some aspect of
mapping. Pieter Pourbus (1510- 84), who eventually rose to become deacon
of the guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp, was both a painter and a serious
mapper who worked with surveyors and himself used the most modern
surveying techniques to produce his essentially tOpographic maps.' In the
seventeenth-century Netherlands, from Pieter Saenredam early in the century
to Gaspar van Witte! tOward the end, artists were employed in executing maps
and plans of all kinds. These have tended to be included (though mostly
passed over lightly) in the monographs of art histOrians rather than in the
studies of cartOgraphers. lO An engraving after Saenredam's drawing the Siege
of Haarlem (fig. 72) was designed for the commemorative publication on the
city. And Gaspar van Wittel, later famous as Van Vitelli for his panoramic
views of Rome, went to Italy originally to assist a leading Dutch hydraulic
engineer by mapping th e course of the Tiber as part of a scheme to make it
navigable. There is a clear relationship between the format of the simple maps
for the Tiber project (fig . 73) and his later painted views (fig. 74) . Nowhere
are the professional and the pictOrial links between pictures and maps closer
than in the activites of the Visscher family. Claesz Jansz. Visscher, himself

-
responsible for a revival of interest in the tOpographical views attributed to th e
old Bruegel, also drew marvelous topographical views of his own in the first
decade of th e century. " A draftsman and engraver, Visscher became a pub-
lisher of engravings of landscapes, portraits, and maps and contributed some
of the illustrations of tOwns and local life that appear on his maps. (I t is
common knowledge that maps in the Netherlands were often sold by the
same dealers who sold other kinds of prints .) Visscher's son, Nicolas, was th e
map publisher responsible for the map represented·in Vermeer's Art of Paint-
mg.
Journeys undertaken for mapping, among other descriptive purposes (in -
cluding the study of foreign flora and fauna and costumes), were as much an
impetus to travel abroad for northern artists in the sixteenth century as the
desire to see Rome and to learn about antiquity. All attempts to ferret out
some influence of Italy on Bruegel's subsequent figurative art miss the fact
that his Italian trip was probably made for the world scene, not for Italian art.
His fa mous drawing of the Ripa Grande is close enough in format to be
considered among the type of the city views collected for Braun and Ho-
genberg's publication. A picture like his Bay of Naples (fig. 75) fits right intO
the category of tOpographical harbor views (fig. 76) which, like his painting,
sometime also record naval battles. Mapping projects such as these would
have been of interest to his friend Ortelius.
r-------------------
Th e Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 129

-di d
-g to
- ml O-

I
.:eacon
_ senous
",odem
In the
century
_:mgmaps
::.' mostly
::,an in th e
the Siege
.....:lOnon the
panoram iC 71. CONSTANTI]N HUYGENS III, A View of Maastricht across the Meuse at Smeermaes
(drawing), 1676. Tey lers Museum , Haarlem.
hydrauli c
to make it
simpl e maps
Nowhere
closer
himself
nh", ,,,rl to th e
in the first
""".me a p ub-
trilbuted some
maps. (It is
sold by th e
was th e
--trt of Paint-

rposes (in-
as much an
fn furv as the
ro ferret out
the fact

ts right into 72. A nonymous, after PIETER SA ENREDAM , The Siege of H aarlem (etch ing). Municipal
Archives, H aarl cm.
his painti ng,
would
130 Chapter Four

, ...

73 . GASPAR VAN \'V'ITTEL. View of the Tiber at Orvieto (drawin g), Meyer
Codex (MS nr. 23). Biblio[eca Corsini, Rome.

74. GASAAR VAN WITTEL, The Square and the Palace of Montecavallo.
Galleria Nazionale, Rome. Gabinetto Forografico Nazionale, Roma . Neg.
scrie E, n. 36313.
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 13 1

75. P IETER B RUEGEL, Bay of Naples. Gall eria Do ri a, Rome. G abineuo

Fotografico Nazio nale, Rorna. Neg. seri e E, n. 4 173 1.

76. F rontisp iece in W ILLEM

B ARENTSZ" Caer tboek Vande
Midlandtsche Zee (A msterdam ,
1595). Vcrcenigin g N ederlandsch
Historisch Schecpvan Museum,
Amsterda m .
132 Chapter Four

•
<"" /S-l '
·ll
. .:

-',-:,

- -----=----

77. JAN VAN GOYEN , Views of Brussels an d Ha eren , in the Dresden Sketchbook.
Sraat liche Kunstsammlungen. Dresden .

The Forschungsreisen, as Ernst Kris called such trips," should also be

invoked when we consider excursions taken closer to home by certain Dutch
artists in the seventeenth centu ry. Pieter Saenredam's sometimes extended
stays to record the churches in various Dutch towns obviously fit this map-
ping model, and so do th ose trips taken by the popular landscape artist Jan
van Goyen, during which he filled pages of his sketchbook with profile views
of various towns (fig. 77). The assimilation of these views into Van Goyen's
painting, combining as th ey sometimes do elements from different sites, raises
different questions. While the form is obviously still a mapped one, the
pictures in such cases do not record specific places but rather what one might
call possible ones. They are, however, still usefully placed under the rubric
of the mapping mode as an appli cati on and an extension of its assumptions.
They contrast, for example, with the radical changes wrought on a site com-
bined with the affective handli ng of Jacob van Ruisdael's Jewish Cemetery ,
which nears , in this regard , his imaginary representation of swamps . On the
other hand , from the point of view of the viewer they contrast with the sense
of situating oneself so as to have a particularly picture-worthy view that we
find in the nineteenth century. Pissarro reports in his letters to his son that
he looked for a room to rent fr om whose window he could make a pleasing
painting. But Dutch drafts men, by contrast, when they do annotate a drawing
(fig. 90), note with care the vantage place from which they take a vi ew,
because recording is inseparable for them from picturing. Distinguishing the
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 133

mapping impulse, as in the case of Ruisdael, is not to insist on a single mode

but to mark the beginning of an attempt to come to terms with different
Dutch modes of landscape representation.
In the case of maps it seems obviou s that the intended function of the image
had something to do with the kind of knowledge or information it conveyed
and the kind of accuracy that was desirable. According to whether it was used
to enable a ship to navigate the seas or enter ports, to enable an army to mount
a siege, or to enable a state to tax, different kinds of things were demanded.
But despite differences in kind it is important not to miss the aura of knowl-
edge possessed by maps as such regardless of the nature or degree- of their
accuracy. This aura lent a prestige and power to maps as a kind of image.
Their making involved possession of a particular kind which must not be
underestimated in considering the relationship of art to mapping. We cannot
help being amused at the claim made by Braun and Hogenberg that figures
were included in their city views to prevent the Turks - whose religion for-
bade them to use an image with human figures - from using them for their
own military ends. But there is no doubt of the jealous care with which the
Dutch trading companies guarded their sea charts against competitors. There
is a chilling account given to us by Isaac Massa- sometime Dutch contact in
Russia-of the difficulty he had in obtaining a map of Moscow. Before giving
him the map a Russian protested, "My life would be in danger if it were
known that I had made a drawing of the town of Moscow and had given it
to a foreigner. I would be killed as a traitor." lJ The fear speaks not only to
also be an age-old Russian anxiety about foreigners, but to a seventeenth-century
valuing of knowledge conveyed in map form. It puts great emphasis, in other
words, on the value of a picture. Even for the person on the spot, for the
s map- traveler in Moscow, the map allowed one to see something that was otherwise
'st Jan invisible. To put it this way is to call attention to what maps have in common
with other Dutch pictures at the time- pictures that were associated with,
and used to record, what was seen in a microscope, something that was also
otherwise invisible. Like lenses, maps were referred to as glasses to bring
objects before the eye. To an artist like Jacques de Gheyn , who on occasion
made both, the map was the obverse of the drawing of 'a fly. 14
III
The link between maps and picture-making is an old one that dates back
at least to Ptolemy'S Geography. With the discovery, translation, and illustra-
tion of his text it became part of the Renaissance verbal and pictorial tradition .
the sense Though the first sentence of the Geography defines it as a picture of the world
that we (the Greek phrase is, ''He geographia mimesis esti dia graphes tou ka-
son that teilemmenou tes ges merous holou," a Latin translation of which was, "Geo-
pleasing graphia imitatio est picturae totius partis terrae cognitae"), the point of the
drawing text that follows is to distinguish between the measuring or mathematical
[ a VIew,
concerns of geography (concerned with the entire world) and the descriptive
bing the ones of chorography (concerned with particular places). " By way of c1ari-
J34 Chapter Four

fication Ptolemy invokes the analogy of making a picture: geography is

concerned with the depiction of the entire head, chorography with individual
features such as an eye or an ear. In his Cosmographia, a sixteenth-century
adaptation of Ptolemy, the Flemish geographer and surveyor Apianus offers
illustrations of these points (fig. 78). Ptolemy connects the training and skills
of the mathematician to geography and those of the artist to chorography.
Having made such a distinction, Ptolemy - who seems a modern in this
respect-restricts his work to the first category. The maps that he produced
were mathematical projections of various kinds of large areas of the world
rather then detailed pictures of places or regions.
Ptolemy was as careful in his designation of the concerns proper to geog-
raphy as he was in his designation of the role of the artist. In the Renaissance
the situation was different. The explosion of geography in the sixteenth
century involved not only a multiplication of images but also an extension of
the field itself. One might say that the two were functions of one another.
Mercator's projected five-part Atlas - the first to bear the name-was to have
started with the C reation, and then have moved on to astronomy, geography,
genealogy, and finally chronology. Meanwhile Braun and Hogenberg sent
draftsman all over Europe to record views of cities for their Civitates Orbis
Terrarum . The Dutch were surveying their old (and newly made) land and
charting the routes overseas to lands such as the Indies and Brazil, which
were, in turn, theirs to map. Astronomy, world history, city views, cos-
tumes, flora, and fauna came to be clustered in images and words around the
center offered by the map (fi g. 79). The reach of mapping was extended along

1; 11'1 SUlJL.1T "DO.

78. "Geographia" and "Chorographia" in

PETR US APIANU5, Cosmographia
(Pari s, 1551 ). Princeton University
Library.
Th e Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 135

world

:n eog-

SIXteenth

.illother.

79. Map of Afri ca in WILLEM J ANSZ. BL AEU, World Atlas ( 1630) . Courtesy of th e
Edward E. Ayer Collection, th e Newberry Library, Chicago.

with the role of pictures, and time and again the distinctions between mea-
suring, recording, and picturing were blurred.
To what extent do we find this reflected in contemporary texts? In what
way was all of this activity proposed or accounted for? To answer this we
mu st go back to Ptolemy himself. The only Greek word avai lable to Ptolemy
in referring to a maker of pictures was graphikos. What is of particular interest
to us in the context in which Ptolemy used it is that the term (unlike the Latin
pictor ) can suggest and indeed is etymologically rel ated to the group of terms
ending in a form of grapho-geography, chorography, topography - which
in antiquity as in the later West were used to defin e his fi eld of study. The
commOn meaning of this suffix is to write, draw, or record. It is impossible
for us today, as it was for the Renaissance, to tell with what examples in mind,
thus with what particular force, Ptolemy invoked a graphikos. How th e
Renaissance took it is however clear from the translations and adaptations of
on
his work. In general th e word picture - pictura, schilderij, or the word appro-
priate for picture in th e modern language- was used. 16 We shall postpone for
the moment a consid eration of th e pictorial presence that came to be sug-
136 Chapter Four

gested by the pictorial reference to maps, the extent to which, in am os:

unlikely sense, mapped images were said to make the world visually imm edi-
ate. For now I want to consider the manner in which th e Renaissance was no:
content to invoke Ptoloemy's geographic records without also acknowl-
edging their specifi cally graphic nature. Though the word picture is intro-
duced it is inevitably modified, accompanied, or replaced by the term
description-descriptio in Latin, description in French, beschryving ir:
Dutch. 17 All of these words, of course, depend on the Latin scribo, the
equivalent of the Greek grapho.
To call a picture descriptive at the time was unusual, since description was
a term commonly applied to texts. From antiquity on the Greek term
description, ekphrasis, was the rhetorical term used to refer to a verbal evo-
cation of people, places, buildings, or works of art. 18 As a rhetorical device
ekphrasis depended specifically on the power of words. It was this verb",
power that Italian artists in the Renaissance strove to equal in paint when they
rivaled the poets. But when the word description is used by Renaissan ce
geographers, it calls attention not to the power of words, but to the sense in
which images are drawn or inscribed like something written. It calls attention,
in short, not to the persuasive power of words but to a mode of pictorial
representation. The graphic implication of the term is distin guished from th e
rhetorical one. When we look back at Ptolemy now we have to say that his
term grapho was opened up to suggest both picture and writing.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries description is used equally to
title books that teach the new surveying techniques and to title the more
general kind of knowledge includ ed in atlases or on maps such as the one in
Vermeer's Art of Painting. Similarly, the word landschap was used to refer to
both what the surveyor was to measure and the artist to render. 19 Seen from
the point of view of the later parting of the ways between maps and other
kinds of pictures, description might seem to be a hybrid term that brings
together things basically dissimilar in nature. Althou gh the only pictorial
context in which the word was involved in this later period is in the literature
of mapping and surveying, I think it suggests a view of picturing that accepted
mapping as one of its modes . By employing the term description, the geo-
graphical texts accepted the graphic basis of their field whi le at the same tim e
they related their records to a notion of image making. The graphic use of the
term descriptio is not appropriate only to maps-which do inscribe the world
on a surface-but also to northern pictures that share this interest. With th e
help of the words used about maps we can suggest that pictures in the north
were related to graphic description rather than to rhetorical persuasion, as
was the case with pictures in Italy.
Dutch art, like maps, was comfortable with its links to printing and to
writing. Not only were Dutch artists often printmakers accustomed to plac-
ing images on the surface of a printed page (often of a book), but they also
felt at home wi th inscriptions, with labels, and even with calli graphy . Artists
and geographers were related not only generally through their interest in
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 137

.::trO-
.:erm
"'g In
, the

on was
for
\o..-aI evo-
- device
,·erbal
ca they
"5sance
sense In
80. How to hold a pen, in G ERARDUS
- ictorial MERCATOR, On th e Lettering of
om the Maps (1549). Courtesy of the Joh n
M. Wing Collection, the N ewberry
. that his Library, Chicago.

to describing the world but specifically through their interest in script. Mercator
he more (fig. 80) and Hondius, among others concerned with maps, wrote handbooks
le o ne In for calligraphy as did members of the circles of Dutch artists. 20 (Indeed, the
J refer to extraordinary detail in which Mercator set forth the process of the cutting of
een from the quill, the way the hand rests on the surface, and the forming of the letters
od other analyzed in six moves reveals a graphic attention as great as we find in any
H brings draftsmen of the time.) One thing that made this possible was that, in spite
pictorial of the Renaissance revolution in painting, northern map makers and artists
persisted in conceiving of a picture as a surface on which to set forth or
accepted inscribe the world rather than as a stage for significant human actions .
the geo- We must return briefly to the issue of format, which we dealt with earlier
Ime tlme in our discussion of the Keplerian image. It is implicit in the comparison that
lSe of the I am drawing between maps and northern pictures that I am taking issue with
he world recent work on Renaissance art and geography that has argued for a deter-
\\·i th the mining link between Albertian perspective and Ptolemaic recipes for map
he n orth projections. 2 I In this view the picture in Ptolemy is understood to be like the
aslon, as Albertian picture . But despite the great interest generated by Ptolemy all over
Europe, the evidence I think goes against this. Where European Renaissance
g and to picturing is concerned, it is in th e north, not in Italy, that maps and pictures
to p lac- are reconciled, and the results are clear in the great and unprecedented pro-
hey also duction of mapped pictures, the landscapes and city views with which we will
.. Artists be concerned.
terest In As I argued earlier, Alberti's great contribution to picture-making was not
138 Chapter Four

just in binding the picture to vision but in what he chose to call a picture: it
was not a surface like a map but a p lane serving as a wi ndow that assumed a
human observer, whose eye level and distance from the pl ane were essential.
Though in his third projection Ptolemy did indeed give instructi ons for
making an image based on a projection from a single eye point, he did not
invent the Albertian picture. The qu estion of wheth er he did is academic,
since no one argues that the Renaissance ever actually took up P tolemy's
construction. To make a long and complicated story short, Ptolemy'S third
projection corresponded not to Alberti's vanishing-point perspective but to
the so-called distance point method favored in the artists' workshops of th e
north. Let us recall the diagrams provi ded for us by Vignola (figs. 27, 28).
While Alb ertian perspective posits a viewer at a certain distance looking
through a fram ed window to a putative substitute world, Ptolemy and
distance-point perspective conceived of the pi cture as a flat working surface,
unframed, on whi ch th e world is inscribed. The difference is a matter of
pictori al conception.
O ne might speak of the resulting image as being seen essentially from
within or being surveyed. It is in a certain respect much like surveying, where
the viewer's position or positions are included within the territory he has
surveyed. We recall, for example, the eye positions marked by Saenredam in
his church interiors. Surveying, however, takes us away from Ptolemy , who
was concerned with geography or the mapping of large areas of the earth .
There the issue was not that of surveying but rather how to project or, better,
transform part of the spherical globe onto a flat surface. What is called a
projection in this cartographic context is never visualized by placing a plane
between the geographer and the earth, but rather by transforming, mathe-
matically, from sphere to plane. Although th e grid that Ptolemy proposed,
and those that Mercator later imposed, share the mathematical uniformity of
the Renaissance perspective grid, they do not share the p ositioned viewer, the
fram e, and the definition of the picture as a window through which an
external viewer looks. On these accounts the Ptolemaic grid, indeed car-
tographic grids in general, must be distinguished from, not confused with, the
perspectival grid. The projection is, one might say, viewed from nowhere.
Nor is it to be looked through. It assumes a fl at working surface. Before the
intervention of mathematics its closest approximation had been the pan-
oramic views of artists - Patenir's so-called world landscapes - wh ich also
lack a positioned viewer.
All this will come as nothing new to cartographers, but it can be of
definitive importance for students of art. In discussions of mapping, dis-
tinctions are drawn between systems of projections for dealing with large
areas of the globe and the surveying of small areas. But whichever case we
take, northern painting is like the map as the Albertian picture is not. The
presence on maps of individual structures -buildings, for example-that are
"viewed in perspective" does not affect the basic nature of the image. It
offered a surface on which to inscribe the world , and this fact permitted the
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 139

"'e: It addition of views-those of cities, for example-as we have seen in the Art
-ed a of Painting. Contrary to what is assumed, such mapped images have a poten-
moal. tial flexibility in assembling different kinds of information about or knowl-
r.- for edge of the world which are not offered by the Albertian picture.
To sum up: the circumstances were propitious for northern image-makers
- . . enne, to pursue the pictorial aims that had long been implicit in geography . Their
- success in this was in turn made possible by a notion of a picture particular
-5 third to northern Europe. 22 These are factors to bear in mind as we turn to the two
< but to major types of images which I think are inherently like mapping in source and
_ of the nature: the panoramic or what I should prefer to call the mapped landscape
27, 28)_ view, and the cityscape or topographical city view.
" looking
emy and IV
:: surface, What are commonly referred to as the first "realistic" Dutch landscape
I ;'atter of images are some drawings (fig. 81) done abour 1603 by the great Dutch
draftsman Hendrick Goltzius of the dunes near Haarlem. Rather than work-
Ilially from ing from his mind or imagination, the artist goes out into nature and tries to
illg, where capture the great sweep of the flat Dutch land, farms, towns, and church
ry he has towers all marked out on this great expanse . The reason that such a descrip-
en redam in tion first appears in drawing rather than in paint, it is said, is the "after-life"
,Iemy, who aspect of pen and paper. It was a medium that, unlike brush, paint, and
f the earth . canvas, was taken outside in the seventeenth century. So, the account goes,
t or, better, Goltzius was the first to go out and draw what he saw. This realism is then
is called a contrasted with his previous imaginary or so-called "mannerist" landscapes
:ing a plane (fig. 82). But indeed surveyors and mappers and artists engaged in such tasks
ng, mathe- had gone into the landscape and viewed it for descriptive purposes before .
. proposed, Their results differ. Those that are closest to Goltzius's feel for the surface and
iformityof the outstretched land are the maps that have a high but articulated horizon-
\;ewer, the Braun and Hogenberg's Den Briel (fig. 83), or Saenredam's Siege of Haarlem
I which an (fig. 72). Goltzius's landscape does not mark the birth of realism (a slippery
indeed car- notion at best), but the transformation of a mapping mode into landscape
with, the representation . We see a new attitude toward the land . Both Goltzius's impe-
1 nowhere. tus to record landscape and his graphic mode of inscribing it on a surface are
Before the accounted for in this way. An entire genre of landscape paintings-a number
D the pan- by Van Goyen, some by Ruisdael, and almost all of Koninck's-commonly
which also known as panoramic and often considered to be the most important con-
tribution made by the Dutch painters to the image of landscape, is rooted in
can be of mapping habits .2J
pping, dis- It is no discovery, particularly after Gombrich's engaging demonstrations,
with large that even the most illusionistic art employs conventions. What is significant
;--er case we here is that the conventions are like those of some contemporary maps. The
is not. The artist acknowledges and accepts the working surface-the two-dimensional
e- that are surface of the page to be worked on. In this drawing, as in the entire tradition
, image. It of panoramic landscapes that follows, surface and extent are emphasized at
rmitted the the expense of volume and solidity . We note that lack of the usual framing
140 Chapter Four

8 1. H EI'\.T[)RICK GOLTZIUS , Dune Landscape near Haarlem (drawing), 1603. M u seu m

Boymans-van Beuni ngen. Rotterdam.

82 . HENDRI CK GOLTZlUS, Couple Viewing a Waterfall

(drawi ng). Nat ionai mu seum, Stockhol m.
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 141

83 . Map of D en Briel, in BRAUN AND H OGENBERG, Civ itates Orbis Terrarum (Colog ne,
1587- 1617), vol. II, p. 27. Courtesy of the Edward E. Ayer Collection , me
Newberry Library, Chicago.

devices familiar in landscape representations which serve to place us and lead

us in, so to speak, to the space. We look on from what is normally (and
somewhat misleadingly) referred to as a bird's-eye view-a phrase that de-
scribes not a real viewer's or artist's position but rather the manner in which
a
the surface of the earth has been transformed onto flat, two-dimensional
surface. It does not suppose a located viewer. And despite the tiny figures just
visible at the bottom edge, this landscape can virtually be said to be without
people. Goltzius's earlier drawing is, on the other hand, peopled with a
couple whose affection for each other is echoed in their joint attraction to the
torrent cascading before them. Human wonder at nature, not the recording
of the land, is the artist's concern .
"How wonderful a good map is," wrote Samuel van Hoogstraten in his
treatise on art, "in which one views the world as from another world thanks
to the art of drawing." " Hoogstraten's exclamation applies as well to what I
have called mapped (panoramic) landscapes as to the maps that they trans-
form. Goltzius does make us feel that we are situated apart from the land, but
with a privileged view. It is precisely the curious mixture of distance pre-
142 Chapter Four

served and access gained that is at the heart of Jacob van Ruisdael's best works
in this mode. Hoogstraten concludes with thanks to the art of drawing for
making maps possible. Although his words are usually quoted when maps
and Dutch art are at issue, it has not struck anyone to ask why Hoogstraten
discusses maps in a section about drawing. The answer lies in his notion of
drawing. This is the same chapter of his treatise in which Hoogstraten speaks
of drawing as a second kind of writing. It is a chapter dominated, in short,
by the spirt of descriptio - to recall the word on Vermeer's map-that in-
scribing of the world to which Goltzius was heir.
Landscapes and mapping are linked in the Netherlands of the seventeenth
century by the notion of what it is to draw. In the Italian-dominated theory
of the late sixteenth century, drawing (disegno) had been exalted to the point
where it was synonymous with the idea (idea in Italian) of art, and thus with
the act of the imagination itself. Hoogstraten, by contrast, introduces draw-
ing as linked to letters formed in writing, to planning war maneuvers, to
medicine,astronomy, natural history, and geography. Drawing is treated as a
craft with specific functions., among which are the description on a page of
different phenomena observed in the world. A beautiful sheet by Saenredam
(fig. 125; pI. 4), which juxtaposes views of Leiden and Haarlem with their
names in a fine calligraphic hand above and with the imprinted silhouettes of
two trees below to complete the page, is an example of drawing understood
in this way. It is this impetus to describe that binds the Goltzius landscape
drawing and maps. As time goes on this graphic mode is not jettisoned, but
is in a characteristic Dutch way absorbed into paint. Color already informs
the drawing by Saenredam we have just looked at. Paintings do what graphi c
media had done previously. This is one of the reasons, perhaps, why the
relationship between maps and Dutch landscape painting has been easily
missed.
In many mapped landscapes, as in small area maps, buildings, towns with
their church towers, windmills, and clumps of trees appear as landmarks,
literally marks on the land (as if to guide travelers), rather than as evocations
of particular things. The sources for these are found in maps: in those coastal
profiles that illustrate books of navigation (fig. 84) and in the notation com-
mon on maps of other kinds. Koninck (fig. 85) comes particularly close to
such landmark notations in the summary nature of his description of the
objects in his views.
Starting from mapping enables us to describe more justly the nature in
format and interest in recording place of certain landscapes. An early
seventeenth-century painting (fig. 87) by a provincial artist from Enkhu izen
(possibly the teacher of Jan van Goyen) reveals a connection to maps in most
direct ways - its extremely high horizon, the grid set forth by the polders,
and the designation of th e landmarks. The horizon alone recalls the mapping
connection of many sixteenth -century works such as those by Bruegel, who
was no stranger to the geographical activity of his day through his friendship
with Ortelius. We might also want to use mapping terms to distinguish th e
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 143

IC-- cbat 10-

"" teenth
p:.......-u th eory
th e point
thus with

,to
:reated as a
oc a page of
Saenredam
with their 84. Landmarks, in WILLEM J ANSZ. BLAEU, Le flambeau
of de La navigation (Amsterdam, 1625). Courtesy of
understood the Edward E. Ayer Collection, the Newberry
_s landscape Lib rary, Chicago.
rnsoned , but
ceady informs
I what graphic

aps, why the

is been easily

5, towns with
IS landmarks,
as evocations
I those coastal
lotatI on cam-
larly close to
'ptlOn of the

the nature In
"". An early
III Enkhuizen
maps In most
th e polders,
the mapping
Bru egel, who
friendship
::inguish the
85. PHILIPS K ONINCK, Landscape with a Hawking Party (detail of fig. 86) .
144 Chapter Four

86 . PHILIPS KONINCK . Landscape with a Hawking Party. By permission of the Trustees

of the National Gallery, London.

larger geographical ambitions of Bruegel's Season landscapes from the specific

chorographic concerns of his drawing of the Ripa Grande or the painting of
the Bay of Naples. Establishing Bruegel's engagement with mapping helps us
not only to distinguish between his works but also to understand them better.
By combining the traditional theme of the seasons with an extensive mapped
view of the earth, Bruegel gives the yearly cycle a world rather than a local
dimension. In works such as the engravings of the Vices and Virtues or the
paintings of the Proverbs and Children's Games the mapped view is also used.
Though individual proverbs had been represented in prints before as had
mapped landscapes in paintings, Bruegel's great invention was to combine the
two. The mapped view suggests an encompassing of the world, without,
however, asserting the order based on human measure that is offered by
perspective pictures. By depicting human behavior in this unlikely setting
(though the world is so mapped , people are never seen this way on maps),
Bruegel can suggest the endless repetitiveness of human behavior in an essen-
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 145

tially boundless (unframed) space. But the care he takes to distinguish be-
tween such essentially repetitious human actions is not dictated by the for-
mat. The human community seen under a mapped aspect but attended to with
such care has a particular poignancy.
This is not the direction taken in Holland, where the land, not its inhab-
itants, continues as the major interest. The mapped horizon was not sus-
tained, but was lowered first to let in more sky (the Van Goyen mono-
chromatic works of the forties) and then clouds and effects of light (as we
move on to Ruisdael in the fifties and sixties) . Philips Koninck (fig. 86) is the
artist who sustains the format of the mapped landscape the longest in the
cenmry. It is not clear to what extent he did or did not detach it from its
recording aspect . The enormous size of some of his works, which are the
largest of all Dutch painted landscapes, rivals the dimension of wall maps.
Rather than picturing a geographic world view as Bruegel did, or the choro-
graphic places of Goltzius, Van Goyen, and Ruisdael, Koninck aims at mak-
ing the pieces of Holland he is describing seem a part of the larger world. By
introducing a gentle curve to the horizon he lets the earth into what is a
mapped view of an area of his native land . While Bruegel expands his neigh-
borhood into the world, Koninck brings a world view to Holland .
Many of Jan van Goyen's views are examples of mapped landscapes. Al-
though the horizon is lowered, the panel gives the impression of being a
worked surface. The extent of the land is scattered with standard landmarks-
church towers, hayricks, trees, even cows. A city, which is never far away in
Holland and on which the country so depended, is the major landmark . This
is true also of Ruisdael's views of Haarlem (fig. 88), called Haarlempjes at the
time after the city. Ruisdael, perhaps following the example of the materials
added to maps, depicts a major product and economic support of the city-
Iustees
the bleaching of linen in the fields. In these works the mapped landscape

. specific
n ring of
helps us
1 better.
mapped
1 a local
s or the
so used.
, as had
bine the
vi th out,
ered by
- settmg
l maps),
87. A NONYMOUS DUTCH PAINTER, The Polder "Het Grootslag" near Enkhuizen.
n essen- Zuiderzeemuseum, Enkhuizen.
146 Chapter Four

88. J ACOB VAN R UISDAEL, View of Haarlem. Gemaldegalerie, Staadiche Museen

Preussischer Kuiwrb esit:£, Berlin (West).

89. AELBERT CUYP, View of Amersfoort. Von dcr Heyt-Museum, Wupperral.

The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 147

approaches the other genre obviously derived from mapping, the topo-
graphical city view.
People passing through the country, some inhabitants, some travelers pre-
sumably like the artist himself, stop sometimes to look out or, very rarely, to
draw. Nothing ever happens . Only rarely is work being done . (Ruisdael's
Haarlempjes are a signal exception.) The working of or bounty of the land is
rarely illustrated. We do not to my knowledge see figures actually engaged in
surveying. But the access to the land and the interest in it (people direct their
gazes far out, not at things close by) is related to this. There was a tradition
among mapmakers that one could turn to the natives - to the fisherman or the
peasants-for assistance. 25 Those living on the land or sea share an interest in
knowing it- that at least is the assumption. A Cuyp painting of two shep-
herds looking out and pointing toward Amersfoort (fig. 89) illustrates this.
Representative peasants or fishermen turn up on the frontispiece of an atlas
or the cartouche of a map. A fisherman with a surveyor's tool is on the
Visscher map represented in Vermeer's Art of Painting-although here the
mapmaker also intends a play on his own name .
We can, I think, distinguish a narrower and a broader use of the mapping
designation. Used narrowly, mapping refers to a combination of pictorial
format and descriptive interest that reveals a link between some landscapes
and city views and those forms of geography that describe the world in maps
and topographical views. Used broadly, mapping characterizes an impulse to
record or describe the land in pictures that was shared at the time by survey-
:en ors, artists, printers, and the general public in the Netherlands. In the face of
this I think we must supplement Gombrich's well-known solution to the
problem of how to explain the invention or institution of landscape as a
pictorial genre. 26 Gombrich refers us to a telling account from Edward Nor-
gate's Miniatura (written ca. 1648-50). An art lover returning from a trip
through the mountains, hills, and castles of the Ardennes calls on an artist
friend in Antwerp and gives an account of his trip. In the course of the
account the artist takes up his brushes and proceeds to paint: "describing his
description in a more legible and lasting Character than the other's words" are
Norgate's words . 27 Gombrich uses this anecdote to point to the idea or the
words, the rhetoric to be more precise, concerning a landscape that preceded
its invention as an image. Following this anecdote he refers us to passages
from other contemporaries who also narrated their experience of landscape.
This link to a prior human narrator stands us in a good stead for the birth of
those kinds of landscape images in which expression or tone in the rhetorical
sense is important. (Gombrich mentions the heroic and pastoral modes of
Poussin and Claude as examples.) But mapped landscape images and the
impetus for making them are not accounted for in this way . They were
founded significantly by artists who were on the road looking, artists who
were not staying at home listening to travelers' accounts. We can turn N 0[-
gate's words back on himself. These works are descriptions, but not in the
rhetorical sense, for description in these cases is not a rhetorical but a graphic
thing. It is description, not narration.
148 Chapter Four

If the great landfill and water projects on the one hand and military activin-
and news on the other contribute to the demand for detailed maps, the
features of the Netherlands - the flat, open, relatively treeless land-made i:
particularly suitable for mapping. But though its flatn ess is itself maplike , i:
was difficult to gain a vantage place from which to view it. The Dutch took
every opportunity they could to climb their many towers or coastal dunes for
this purpose. In fact these very aspects - the conditi on of its mapping-are
some of the favorite motifs in the mapped images. We have many verba;
accounts from the seventeenth century of people climbing towers in order to
take in at least a visual measure of the land. Men such as the scholar-scientis:
Isaac Beeckman and the doctor Van Beverwyck had prospects from their own
houses, but foreign visitors, like the F renchman Monconys, are regularly
taken up to get a prospect on the land. Views drawn from the vantage point
of specific towers and annotated as such (fig. 90) form a special small subgenre
of Dutch drawings .
But the mapping and related viewing of the Netherlands were surely also
conditional on social and economic factors. All mapping is in some sense.
And in the Netherlands the system of land ownership that permitted access
to much land that was politically and socially untrammeled is a relevant
consideration. The northern Netherlands were unique in the Europe of the
time in that over fifty percent of the land was peasant owned. Unlike other
countries, seigneurial power was weak to nonexistent. 28 Though I know of no
historical account of the matter, it was in practice easy to survey the land in
a situation that presented no threat to tenants or to any others. When we read
the history of surveying in England, the social dimension is striking, by whi ch
I mean that because of the nature of land ownership the project of surveying
was greeted with suspicion on the part of tenant farmers. The first leadi n
seventeenth -century English handbook on the subject, John Norden's SU T-
veior's Dialogue (1607), is presented in the form of a dialogue between the
surveyor, a bailiff, a farmer, the lord of the manor, and a purchaser. It is the
surveyor's task to allay the threat of hi gher rents that the survey presents to
the farmer, while at the same time underlining the lord of the manor's obli -
gations to his tenant . I have found nothing similar of Dutch origin. Engli sh
poetry of the time reflects the sense that a landscape inevitably involved issues
of authority and of possession. The prospect or view was itself seigneurial ir.
its assumption and assertion of power. Pride in estate was real and was related
to the order of the state. As Andrew Marvell said in a Latin poem on his
patron's estates:
See how the heights of Almscliff
And of Bilbrough mark the plain with huge boundary.
The former stands untamed with towering stones all about;
The tall ash tree circles the pleasant summit of the other.
On the former , the jutting stone stands erect in stiffened ridges:
On the latter, the soft slopes shake their green manes.
That cliff suppOrts the heavens on its Aclantean peak:
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 149

nes for
-c -are I
. verbal
I order to
r- cl entlst
own
regularly
;age point
subgenre

Jrely also
De sense.
red access
, relevant
'Pe of the
like other
lOW of no
90. CONSTANTljN HUYGENS JIJ. View of the Waal from the Town Gate at Zaltbommel
(ink, brown wash, and some color wash), 1669. Fondation Custodia (colI. Frits Lugt),
le land in Institut Neerlandais, Paris.
n we read
by which But this hill submits its Herculean shoulders.
rurveymg
5t leading
Nature joined dissimilar things under one master;
And they quake as equals under Fairfaxian sway."
len's Sur-
",-een the In the Netherlands, on the other hand, as the surveyors, travelers, and images
:. It is the testify, the land was there to be mapped and pictured with no issue over
resents to seigneurial possession. The informative views taken from Dutch towers con-
lor's obli- trast with the authority accruing to such views in English life and verse.
L English Though mapping can serve to mark ownership, it does not, by its nature,
.ed issues display pictorial marks of authority. What maps present is not land possessed
peurial in burland known in certain respects. What has been referred to as the social and
'as related political irrelevance of land ownership in the Netherlands was, then, an
m on his important enabling factor in the freedom to map as well as in the freedom to
picture the land as in a map.
It is in this social context that Rembrandt's splendid etching of 1651 known
as the Goldweigher's Field (fig . 91) becomes a particularly interesting example
of the Dutch mapping mode. The work was done, we believe, on the occasion
(or following upon the occasion from which a drawing is preserved) of
ges : Rembrandt's visit to the country house of one of his unpaid creditors just
outside of Haarlem. Christoffel Thijsx's country estate, Saxenburg, is visible
in the left middleground of the etching. Rembrandt renders a familiar type of
150 Chapter Four

91. R EMB RANDT VAN RIJ N, The Goldweigher's Field (etchin g and drypoint), 165 l.
Counesy of the Art Institu[e of Chicago.

92. P ETER P AUL RUB ENS, Landscape with Het Steen. By permission of the Tru stees of th e
National Gall ery, London.

mapped landscape, which, however, takes no parti cular notice of me estate.

True to the mode, he shows me great sweep of me land marked by me church
at Bloemendaal at the right and the huge Saint Bavo of Haarlem on me
horizon to the left. The extensive fields are peopled, as in Ruisdael's paint-
ings, by workers setting linen out to bleach, JO Rembrandt records the lay of
me land, its churches, towns, trees, and grasses and to a much lesser extent
its product- me use being made of good air to set out the linen. Thijsx's
estate is incidental to this view. Rubens's depiction of Het Steen (fig. 92)
offers a fitting contrast to all this. Though its format could lead one to call it
a mapped view, it is a view determined by and engaged in the presence of a
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 151

seigneur. In buying this estate Rubens knew that he would inherit the title
that it bore. The prospect of Flanders stretching out to the right is the view
gained from his house . It is suitably graced by a golden light. It is the
possession of such a house that gives one the authority of this prospect. The
owner and family stand before it. Meanwhile the hunter aiming for a bird and
the wagon piled with a trussed lamb on the way to market remind us of the
uses to which nature is put by human society. Rubens, as always, acknowl-
edges the conditions of our life-even its violence.
In the second half of the century more Dutch merchants wanted titles, and
some acquired them with their manors . But the Dutch country villas with
their small plots of land were not the actual seats of wealth or autllOrity as
were the English estates, nor were they seats to which such authority was
attributed, as in the case of the new Flemish nobility, who escaped to the
country to avoid the troubles of Antwerp . When Dutch merchants invested
1651.
in country pleasure-houses it is their portraits and the portraits of their
houses-the look of a good life-and not power over nature and the land that
they wanted to have represented . Dead game and food turn up in portraits and
in stilllifes. Once again these are forms of description.
There is a further social determinant evident in Rembrandt's etching,
which conveniently serves to turn our attention to a second major group of
mapped images-the topographical city view. A close look at panoramic

-=-rustees of the

of th e estate.
'Y th e church
.,.Iem on the
;dael's paint-
·ds the lay of
lesser extent
aen . Thijsx's
:een (fig . 92) 93. AELBERT C UYP, Two Young Shepherds (drawing). Fondation Custodia (colL Frits
one to call it Lugt) , Ins titut Neerlandais, Paris.
presence of a
152 Chapter Four

views will frequently be rewarded with the discovery of a city with its prom-
inent church tower on the horizon. These cities mark not only the visual fact
that one was seldom far away from an urban center even in seventeenth-
century Holland, but also an economic one. The fact that such mapped
landscap es like Rembrandt's Goldweigher's Field are in a significant respect
cityscapes testifies to th e importance of the city in the life of the society.
Dutch prospects, then, far from asserting the possession of land and property,
rather pay tribute to the cities of the land. And this leads to one further and
final point, for in paying tribute to the cities of the land, in depicting cities
seen in this way as part of the land, Dutch artists reveal that the contrast, even
the tension, between city and country that was such a traditional feature of
Western urban culture is not decisive in Holland. These pictures, like the
maps that they are close to, offer us instead images of continuity. A pair of
resting shepherds drawn by Cuyp, country dwellers like Potter's bull , are
juxtaposed before the dwarfed towers of a distant church and town (fi g. 93).
Questions of place-of city and country- are subtly joined here with those
questions of measure or scale which we spoke of in an earlier chapter. II

v
The genre of topographical city views is a classic example of the trans-
formation we find often in Dutch art from a graphic medium to the more
expensive medium of paint. And the nature of the transformation is of partic-
ular interest because Vermeer's View of Delft (fig. 94) belongs to this genre.
Art historians who, not mistakenly but certainly far too rigid ly, assume
that every work must have a source in another have been stumped by Ver-
meer's View of Delft. The only picture that can be found to resemble it at all
is a view of Zierikzee (fig. 96) by Esias van de Velde painted forty years
earlier. 32 The comparison has always seemed reductive, as almost any attempt
to compare Vermeer's unique work with another image perhaps does. But
here too we find a city spread out in profile against the sky, with boats at
anchor and figures perched on a lip of land at the left foreground. A study of
map materials, in particular topographical town views (fig. 95), makes it clear
however that, rather than this being a case of influence, both of these works
belong to a common tradition.
The interest in city views and their basic models was first presented in
Braun and Hogenberg's ambitious Civitates Orbis Terrarum, published be-
tween 1572 and 1617. Their stated purpose was to offer the pleasure of travel
to those at home. This was travel, they cautioned, without an interest in
business or gain, but purely for the sake of knowledge. 33 Figures in native
dress, flora and fauna, and inscriptions add to the information presented in
the views. In the Netherlands the general European interest in cities was
supplem ented by a civic pride in one's hometown. This is evident in prints of
individual cities that started appearing in the 1590s by Bast and others and also
in the series of books sponsored by cities in their own honor, often illustrated
by native artists. Saenredam designed a profile view of Haarlem for Amp-
153

--:rom-
• fact

=-operty,
-.her and
= g cItIes

. A pair of
bull, are
(fig. 93).
with those
.:napter. Jl

of the trans-
94. JAN VERMEER . View of D elft. Mauritshui s. The Hague.

, assume
by Ver-
Fselnble it at all

boats at
A study of
makes it clear
these works

presented in
published be-
of travel

95. Nijmegen, in BRAUN AND HOGENBERG, Civitates O rbis Terrarum (Cologne,

1587-1617), vol. II , p. 29. Courtesy of th e Edward E. Ayer Collection, the
Newberry Library, C hi cago.
154 Chapter Four

96. ESIAS VAN DE VELDE, Zierikzee. 1618. Gemaldegalerie, 5raarlichc Museen Preussischer
Ku lturbesitz, Berljn (West) .

zing's Description and Praise of the Town of Haarlem of 1628. Individual

buildings and squares were shown in formats that did not depend at all on
Braun and Hogenberg. Trade and gain , contrary to their wish, were very
much at issue. In 1606 Visscher had already borrowed Bast's profile view of
Amsterdam, expanded it in size, and added four smaller scenes of trade in the
city and a panegyric text. The 1649 publication by Blaeu of the first atlas of
Netherlandish cities, divided between north and south to commemorate the
political division confirmed in the 1648 Treaty of Munster, coincided with a
new burst of interest in cities. The Blaeu Atlas, however, consistently uses the
vertical or linear grid format for its cities - as from a picture as it can be.
Of the various formats in which cities are presented by Braun and Ho-
genberg (four were distinguished by R. A. Skelton)" a number were popu lar
in separate prints and paintings. One of these is the profile city view-in the
case of Dutch cities often seen from across a body of water as in the View of
Nijmegen or in Hendrik Vroom's 1615 view of the newly built Haarlem Gate
at Amsterdam (fig. 97). This is the format used by Esias van de Velde and later
by Vermeer. O n occasion such views were commissioned in a painted form
by the cities themselves- like Van Goyen's 1651 View of the Hague (fi g. 98),
Rembrandt's etched View of Amsterdam (fig. 99) from about 1643 was sug-
gested by this established format.
Vermeer's View of Delft, then, is dependent on a tradition of topographical
prints and is not the fi rst painted view of a Dutch town to take over this
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 155

97. HENDRIK VROOM, The Haarlem Gate, Amsterdam, 1615.

Collection Amsterdam Historical Museum, Amsterdam.

ift'n Preussischer

2 . Individual
pend at all on
sh, were very
)wfile view of
of trade in the
Ie first atlas of 98. JAN VAN GOYEN, View of the Hague, 1653. Collection Haags Gemeentemuseum, The
m emorate the H ague.
incided with a
rently uses the
ce as it can be.
rau n and Ho-
. were popular
. ,-iew-in the
in the View of
Haarlem Gate
.-e1de and later
painted form
..glle (fig. 98),
16-13 was sug-

topographical 99. REMBRANDT VAN RI]N, View of Amsterdam

take ov er this (etching). Courtesy of the Art Institute of
Chicago.
156 Chapter Four

design. In the midst of the renewed interest in many kinds of depictions of

cities at mid-century, Vermeer's seems essentially to be a traditional, even
conservative way to view his hometown.
The accuracy of Vermeer's view has often been remarked. The linear or
vertical map of Delft from Blaeu can be marked to indicate which buildings
are seen. Vermeer even noted the time- 7:10-on the tower clock. But still
it seems mistaken to call this picture a topographical view. It is of a different
order of rendering from the printed or even the other painted views. It is
endowed with an uncommonly seen and felt presence. Vermeer changes the
format by lifting the sky high Over the strip of the town, which is held to the
lower frame by the golden bank. The town so exposed turns in on itself.
Embraced by its wall, which encloses trees and crowded roofs, it suggests the
intimacy of human habitation-an intimacy preserved in the quiet talk of the
figures outside it on the bank. (Vermeer painted out the one person, a man,
who would have stood apart.) But the intimacy is internally differentiated.
The threatening but protective shadow at the left, which extends the full
length of the city wall, is played off against the brilli ant light on the right part
of the town. Each depends on the other to set it off. It is the contrast that is
made between men and women in Vermeer's other works. This is a fact in the
perception of the light, in the painter's art, but also in human experience.
Vermeer transforms into this city view and its visual values the sense of
human experience that informs all of his paintings . The two towers that reach
into the sky-one in shadow and one in full sunlight- are pictorially linked
by the small bridge, where masonry, leaves, sun, and shade all meet. In a final
confirmation of the articulated resolution that this picture offers, Vermeer
invites our eyes to dwell on the bridge as the only place where the canal and
the world beyond is able to penetrate and thus link up with the town.
The transformation from graphic to painted medium was in one respect
common in the mapping enterpri se. Painters were regularly employed as
colorists for maps. The map in Vermeer's Art of Painting is a colored one. At
a first level such colors have a symbolic value: they distinguish between
various aspects of the earth for our eye-sea is blue, land tan. Though they
signify, they need not be descriptive . Vermeer's Soldier and Laughing Girl in
the Frick Collection (fig . 14), with its pointed reversal of the actual colors of
sea (here tan) and land (here blue) clearly makes this point.
But although color conventions were not necessarily descriptive, maps
were thought of at the time as being descriptive, as were pictures. In the
writings of geographers it was a commonplace to speak of a map as putting
the world or a place in it before the viewer's eyes. Apianus calls on the image
of the mirror. Cosmography, he says, mirrors the image and appearance of p
the universal world as a mirror does one's face. In other words, he continues, celebra
one sees the picture and image of the earth. " Braun and Hogenberg say of the View q
chorographer: graphi'
engrav.
[Heldescribes each section of the world individually with its cities, villages, town a
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 157

.:; coons of islands, rivers, lakes, mountains, springs, and so on, and tells its history,
"," "" al , even
making everything so clear that the reader seems to be seeing the actual
town or place before his eyes. J6
linear or (Those copies of the Civitates in which the views were hand-colored at the
buildings time confirm this intent.) Isaac Massa returning from Russia refers to the map
But still of Moscow that he replicated for the Dutch as "done by p en with such
of a different exactitude that in truth you have the town before your eyes. ,,37 And Ortelius
views. It is in the introducti on to his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (London, 1606) writes :
changes the "those chartes being placed as it were certaine glasses before our eyes, will the
is held to the longer be kept in memory and make the deeper impression in us." We could
in on itself. multiply such statements, which occur in almost every geographical text. The
suggests the terms "mirror," "before the eyes," and "glasses" were applied equally to
talk of the maps and to pictures at the time. N orgate, for example, continues his passage
on the inv enti on of landscap e painting with the following characterization:
Lanscape is noth ing but Deceptive visions, a kind of cousning or cheating
your owne Eyes, by our owne consent and assitance, and by a plot of your
the right part ..
owne contnving .
38

pnrraS{ that is
a fact in the To sp eak of maps in this way, however casually, is to assume more similarity
expenence. between them and pictures than we have yet noted. Not only description but
the sense of mirroring presence is held in common. It is not irrelevant that the word
graphic, encompassing both the meaning " drawn with a pencil or pen" and
that reach
linked the meaning "vividly descriptive or lifelike" is first in use at just this time. 39
And as I suggested earlier, it was also at this time that pictorial aims long
implicit in geography were taken up by northern image-makers. But for all
the implicit cl aims about the mirroring presence of a map, how can a map
bring something to the eyes in th e way a picture can?
We mUSt pause a minute to appreciate the peculiarity of this claim. And th e
best way to do so is to look at a map - or is it a picture? - by th e little known
Dutch painter Jan Micker (fig. 100; pI. 3). Basing himself on the famous
sixteenth-century painting (or perhaps even the woodcut) of Cornelis An-
thonisz., Micker literally painted the mapped Amsterdam . In this idio-
syncrati c work he tries to bind the graphic nature of th e map to the mirroring
qualiti es of a painting: th e list labeling landmarks at the lower right casts a
shadow OntO the sea, but, even more striking, the city is softly colored and
maps grazed by scattered light and shade cast by unseen clouds. Micker reveals an
fLU" In the
t::>.
ambiti on but poses a pictorial problem. In his Haarlempjes (fig . 88), Ruisdael
as puttmg provides a resolution that Micker could not find. 40 He lowers the horizon,
on the image and extends the sky to include the clouds, which leave their mark but have no
presence in Micker's painted map. Haarlem is made the object of a pictorial
I"I'IKd, ."ce of
continues, celebration of a sort that no map or topographical view could offer. Verm eer's
say of the View of Delft is the consummate solution to the problem of placing a topo-.
graphical view before the viewer's eyes. It cleaves close to th e design of an
engraved city view but it is hard to retrace the steps back to this design. The
villages, town of Delft is smaller in relati on to the large, almost squ are canvas , but it
158 Chapter Four

100. JAN CHRISTA ENSZ. MI CKER , View of Amsterdam. C ollecti on Amsterdam Hi stor ical
Mu seum, Amsterdam.

commands more: sky, water, light, and shade appear summoned to grace it.
To recall our earlier analysis of the language used of maps: the epideictic
eloqu ence of descriptio is transformed from a rhetorical fi gure to be given a
uniquely pictorial form . In Vermeer's View of Delft mapping itself becomes
a mode of praise.
A central element in the transformation from print to painting is the
additi on of color. Obviously color was not only used symbolically. Though
maps were produced as prints, the appli cation of color often made them hard,
it is said, to distinguish from something originally executed in watercolor.
Lines in painted maps were taken over by color. Watercolor itself had long
been a favored drawing technique in northern Europe. " Durer used it for his
Great Piece of Turf, the Rabbit, and for landscapes . In seventeenth-century
Holland many of De G heyn 's drawings of animals or flowers are also exe-
cuted in watercolor (fig. 3). (If one looks at Dutch drawings rather than at
reproductions of them it is surprising how many employ color.) Watercolor
is a medium that effaces the distinction between drawing and painting, and it
was primarily employed in the interest of immediacy of rendering. One might
say, conversely, that it is a medium that allows drawings to display at once
two normally contradictory aspects: drawing as inscription (the recording on
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 159

a surface) and drawing as picture (the evocation of something seen). Ver-

meer's View of Delft, though not executed in watercolor, is this kind of work.
Whether or not it was painted with the assistance of a camera obscura, it
inscribes the world directly in color as did that popular device. It took
Vermeer to realize in paint what the geographers say they had in mind.

VI
In 1663 Blaeu presented his new twelve-vOlume atlas of the world to Louis
XIV accompanied with some words of introduction and explanation:
Geography [is] the eye and tbe light of history . . . maps enable us to
contemplate at horne and right before our eyes things tbat are fartbest
away. -I2

We have seen that the notion of description was instrumental in tying geog-
raphy to pictures and in tbe development of new modes of images. Geog-
raphy's relationship to history gave it a special autbority and encouraged its
enlarged scope. Blaeu's remark is an appropriate introduction to an atlas of
images recording wide travel and exploration. He wishes to make distant,
unseeable things visible. He welcomes and encourages description and vali -
dates it as knowledge. The presentation of geography as the eye of history was
a commonplace by this time. Apianus, a hundred years earlier, had recom-
mended geography to tbose interested in the acts and lives of princes. "
Mercator had imbedded history and chronology in his ambitious plans for the
His torical first atlas and his heirs Hondius and Janssonius (Amsterdam, 1636) quite
casually introduce their atlas by writing of their concern with actions such as
war and exploration, which are "described by Geographie and knowne to be
o grace It. true by Historie." History had long lent status to geography. But in the
epideictic seventeentb century tbe balance between tbe pair (Castor and Pollux, as
be given a Mercator called them) was subtly changed. As in the realm of natural knowl-
. becomes edge, tbe new testimony of the eye challenged tbe traditional autbority of
history . This happened in geography too. A traveler in Holland confirmed
tbat even tbe houses of shoemakers and tailors displayed wall-maps of Dutch
seafarers from which, he commented, tbey know the Indies and its history. H
One kind of map informed the pilot at sea but another informed tbe tailor at
home. In such a view history is largely based on visual evidence. It suggests
tbe unprecedented ways in which images at the time were tbought to con-
tribute to knowledge.
The relation of images and history was hardly new to European cu lture,
but it was not established in tbese terms. The highest form of art was history
painting, by which was meant not current or even recent events as such but
painting that dealt witb significant human actions as they were narrated by the
Bible, myth, the historians, and the poets. The great narrative works in the .
Renaissance tradition are history paintings in this sense. Nothing could be
furtber from the idea of placing strange or distant things immediately before
th e eyes. The emphasis was on the mediation of tradition. The understanding
160 Chapter Four

10 1. CLAES ] ANSZ. VISSCHER, The Siege of Breda (engraving), 1624. By courtesy of the
Rijksmu seu m-Sti chting, Amsterdam.

of the min d, not immedi acy to the eye, was the aim .
The record of history that we find on maps and in atlas es of the seventeenth
century is different in nature. First of all, places, not actions or events, are its
basis, and space, not time, is what must be bridged. It is in this sense-if we
limit ourselves to questions of historical representation-that Visscher's sim-
ple news map of the siege of Breda (fig. 101) can be usefu lly put beside th e
great painting by Velazquez (fig. 102). The power of th e history painter'S
representation is partly derived from its relationship to a previous inter-
pretation of a meeting. Th e su rrender between gentlemen, whi ch is surprising
by its intimacy in the midst of a public occasion , was culled by Velazquez
fr om Rubens's Meeting ofJacob and Esau. The ges tures of greeting and also
th e famous lances reveal this. Despite the mapped background (Velazqu ez's
art contained mu ch of what I am considering as the northern mod e), Ve-
1azquez presents a human relationship steeped in artistic tradition , which he
fu rther stages on the basis of the account of Breda given in a contemporary
play . Vissch er's map with accompanying text records the placing of Breda and
the lineup of the army, and indi cates relevant towns, church es, rivers, and
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 161

forests. He numbers with a verbal key below the places of interest. To record
history in maps and their related illustrations is to emphasize certain aspects
rather than others: history is pictured by putting before our eyes an enriched
description of place rather than the drama of human events.
The belief that the historical enterprise should be terse, factual, and non-
interpretive, in short descriptive in the way in which we have been using the
term throughout this book, is not unlike Bacon's notion of natural history.
But while Bacon clearly reserved this notion for what he called the "deeds and
works of nature," the Dutch mapped history extends it also to the deeds and
works of man. In the Netherlands of the time the humanist and rhetorical
mode of historical narration was under assault from revisionists who wanted
history to have a firm factual basis. References are made to the blind super-
stitions of the past: the Catholic Church and monastic chronicles with their
miracles were particularly suspect. Kampinga in his fine study of sixteenth -
and seventeenth-century Dutch historiography offers numerous examples of
this phenomenon. " As early as Dousa's Hollandtsche Riim-Kroniik of 1591
the plea is made for eyewitness reports or writings. In the preface to his Short
Description of Leyden (1672) Van Leeuwen calls on historians to cast off old
prejudices and to look with what he calls "antenna eyes" at the naked truth

of the

102. DIEGO VELA ZQUEZ, The Su rrender at Breda. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
162 Chapter Four

that

103. Map of Brazil by GEOR G MARKGRAF, published by Johann es Blaeu ( 1647), Klencke
Atlas , pI. 38. By permission of th e British Librar y.

seen in the clear and bright sun, 46 His words are interesting, for it is the same And
tone and visual imagery that was invoked by Constantijn Huygens in his sadly.
Daghwerck, Huygens, as we saw in chapter 1, also pu shed aside the historians of Brazil
of the world in the interest instead of binding knowledge to the vivid appear- tion of d
ance of things seen. To the Dutch way of thinking, pictures, maps, history, adapted
and natural history had common means and ends. devoted
This kind of descriptive, mapped history has two notable characteristics mode of
(fig. 103). First, it presents a surface on which a great variety of information with
can be coJJ ected: a map of the Netherlands features her cities at the side and on the fre
their coats of arms beneath with natives displaying their special regional dress to have t
arranged above; Brazil is depicted with her settlements surrounding the land Parts of d
on either side and views of natives at work that seem to extend into the paper. by the A
SmaJJ items line up around the edges . Portraits appear on sheets layered onto described
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 163

the original surface. Words and images mingle. The profile view of a harbor
town, in a typical format, abuts the coastal land (of which it is part) viewed
from above so that the page holds two contradictory views. Considered as
images these maps are inventive and even playful and as such are conscious of
their craft. It is a playfulness that is not unique. It is in fact almost a feature
of Dutch art. The peep-box, for example, was a construction that also offered
various views adding up to make a single world, as do the frequent mirrors
or mirroring surfaces ; stilllifes obsessively topple containers and peel lemons,
or cut pi es or open watches to expose multiple aspects to view. One could go
on. No single view dominates in the interest of this additive way of piecing
together the world. There is in Dutch painting a pleasure taken in description
that is akin to what we find in the world of maps .
Second, the mapped history can offer a detached or perhaps even a cul-
turally unbiased view of what is to be known in the world. The Dutch record
of their short-lived colony in Brazil is an extraordinary case in point. It is the
pictorial, not the verbal records of the Dutch in Brazil that are memorable.
They constitute "the most extensive and varied collection of its kind that was
formed until the voyages of Captain Cook," as a recent writer pointed out. +7
The unprecedented team of observ ers or describers (if we may call them that)
that Prince Maurits assembled included men trained in natural knowledge and
mapping and also in draftsmanship and painting. The skills predictably over-
lapped and have not yet been sorted out to our satisfaction. They assembled
a unique pictorial record of the Brazilian land, its inhabitants, the flora and
fauna. Th e basic mod e was portraiture of previously unknown or unprece-
dented things. Albert Eckhout produced the first fu ll-length paintings of
native Brazilians (fig. 104). They are unusual not only by virtue of th eir scale
but also because of the care with which he records their bodily proportions,
skin color, dress, accoutrements, and social and natural setting. An Eckhout
portrait constitutes an ethnography or a human map, as a commentator has
put it, and with good reason. Such an interest in description must be set
against the fabulous accounts of the New World that were still in vogue. It
was these, not the Dutch descriptions, that continu ed to fascinate Europe.
And therefore the story of Prince Maurits's descriptive enterprise ends
sadly. Aside from Markgraf and Pies's basic handbook on the natural history
of Brazil illustrated by new woodcu ts, there was no dissemination or absorp-
tion of these materials . Maurits himself upon returning home quickly re-
adapted to the international court world in which h e had been raised. He
devoted himself to building houses and designing gardens largely in the court
mode of the day using his collection-both of images and objects - as gifts
with which to enhance his social position. He did put some Brazilian natives
on the frescoed walls of his new hou se in the Hague, but the assemblage seems
to have been part of the indigenous and lofty European theme of the Four
Parts of the World. Eckhout's portraits turn up in a painting entitled America
by the Antwerp court painter Jan van Kessel (fig. 105) . What Eckhout had
described with such discretion, with such a sense of its difference from what
164 Chapter Four

104. ALB ERT ECKH OUT, Tarairiu

Man , 1641. D epartment of
Ethnograph y, National
Mu seum of D en mark,
Copenhagen.

he knew, is here possessed, triply so, by European culture: the interest in

mapping the native is absorbed into the allegorical theme of the Four Parts of
the World of which America is one-the world, in other words, as structured
by European thought: the Brazilian Indian (a noble savage?) is reshaped in the
image of the David of Michelangelo. All this in turn is presented in the form
of the collectibl es of a court because the room Van Kessel depicts is a Kunst-
kammer.
There is much more to be said about Maurits's pictorial records of Brazil.
But even a brief look at their nature and their fate helps us isolate some of the
impulses that went in to the making of images in Holland-impulses which
I think have deeply to do with mapping as a basic mode of Dutch picturing.
The images and explanations that crowded the surface of individual maps
poured over onto further sheets, the sheets multiplied to fill the volumes of
an atlas (which in the case of a wealthy private patron like Van der Hem could
grow to as many as forty-eight volumes), and they finally extended so far that
they could no longer be bound and so they constituted separate collections. 48
There is truly no end to such an encyclopedic gathering of knowledge. We to enter'
The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art 165

105. JAN VAN KESSEL, America, 1666. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

find atlases catalogued under a number of headings in book inv entories at the
time-as mathematics, geography, art, or history. Though a careful study
might suggest a historical sequence, the sum suggests that their nature made
their designation at once flexible and uncertain. The historical atlas, as Fred-
erick Muller (who collected a great one himself) remarked, is a Dutch inven-
tion. 49 No other culture assembled knowledge through images as did the
Dutch. Even today the Muller collection in Amsterdam or the Atlas van Stolk
in Rotterdam are uniqu e sou rces for our knowledge of Dutch history and art.
But the historians who so often go to Rotterdam to find illustrations for their
texts have not stopped to ask why such useful illustrations are available in the
Netherlands.
VII
We can now return with fuller understanding to the splendid wall-map to
which Vermeer gave a central place in his Art of Painting (fig. 62; pI. 2).
Blaeu's praise for the map that brings knowledge of history into the hou se is
realized here before our eyes. This map, which we recognized before to be
like a painting, is also a version of history. Vermeer confirms this for us in the
female figure he placed just before it, th e figure whose image he is beginning
to enter on his canvas as the object of his art. Draped, wreathed with bay,
/66

106. J AN VERMEER ,
The Art of
Painting) detail
(model's head).
Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna .

bearing a trumpet and book, the young woman is decked out as the figure of
History according to a recipe provided by Ripa. She serves as an emblematic
label placed diagonally across the map from the word "Descriptio" : together
these two signs, the woman and the word, set forth the nature of the mapped
Image.
We do not think of Vermeer as a history painter. After his first works he
turned away from the tradition of narrative subjects. The argument that this
depiction of history's Muse shows that, despite his own art, he still honored
the noblest art in the traditional sense is unpersuasive. His concentration on
the domestic world of women attended by men excludes th e public stage on
which history in this sense takes place. The map in the Art of Painting
confirms this domesticity. Far from threatening the domestic world, this
pictured map takes history in to inform it. It is as if History raises her tru mpet
to praise such descriptive painting.
But to conclude with the map alone is not to do full justice to its place in
Vermeer's Art of Painting, of which it is only a part , albeit a central one.
Consi der how Vermeer not only relates but also compares C lio and the map.
He has juxtaposed two different kinds of pictorial images-one, the figure of
a young woman as Clio, an image replete with meaning calling for inter-
pretation; th e other the map, an image that functions as a kind of description.
How does an image comprehend the world, Verm eer makes us ask, through
an association of meanings Cart as emblem) or throu gh descripti on Cart as
mapping)? As we step back from what is before th e painter-the woman and
167
eEOC 'i'1I1 .-t. E r r s S I .VI I-ITVD".

..A. .€.!: I D.

&
Ijll.t.dttm loc;tftorfom &,4bfoIIlTr eli-
((mjid("l'tlt,
ddjimJlirtm,& Itd1'ni" rrfom rdiur'f 4mbifllm
rOm!Jdr;l"Dllr.Omni4jiljuidtrll d.cjrri mjnim4 In rif CDnunt4trdit &
profe<Juitwr. Vclut faITUS, ....iUItJ,popu{oJ.riHlllru·um 1j"lX/ut d«liIrfos,&
(1"«llfUjJlulid ill,rjimri".., )r lit, ctiift04 ,annUIJ,turrtl,malli;l,&c.
FilllJ "tni riu[dm. miffiglt1!Jd.p.rrriitullorj fi/Olttirud"" (Qnfomma-
blrur;"tfJlri ji piaor 1t/"1"11 ,fUl'(m t,!Iltum auf oell/Jlm difignlfr(t de -

li:. IV :; SIMI I. ITV })O.

107. "Geographia" and

"Chorograph ia" in P ETRUS
APIANUS, Cosmographia
(Paris, 15S 1). Prin ceton
University Library.

the map - to view the artist and the world of which he is part, we too are
suspended between seeking meanings and savoring lifelike descriptions. so
The emblematic figure, Vermeer acknowledges, is but one of his familiar
models dressed up to represent History. She poses, taking on a role. On the
table the fabrics, books, and the mask-whatever they might be said to
mean - are the very materials out of which an emblematic identity is
posed . They are discarded or perhaps waiting to be assumed. Vermeer
poses the face of th e woman with the map (fig. 106). Her eyes, nose, mouth,
In-anon On her curls are placed beside the bridges, tower, and buildings of one of the
small town views, while behind her head lies the Netherlands. The mapping
of town and of country are compared to the delineation of a human visage.
This may be th e most extraordinary painterly transformation of all. For it
recalls those simple woodcuts (fig. 107) with which Apianus illustrated
emy's analogy between describing the world and picturing a face. But
meer disclaims any identity. In contrast to Ptolemy and Apianus, Vermeer
distinguishes the human presence from map or city. He shows instead that
inscription and craft, like emblematic accoutrements, give way before the
flesh of a human presence.
But that is not final, for craft is richly present in this painting. A crafted
world surrounds both artist and model, who are introduced by a tapestry,
backed by a map, crowned by a splendid chandelier, and richly robed. Craft
subtly transforms and shapes observation. Observation is in fact revealed to
be inseparable from craft. The leaves resting on the model's head are both
168 Chapter Four

reconstituted by the painter's brush and transformed in threads high on the

foreground tapestry. There too they grace a female figure, though one woven
in cloth-the only legible human form in the tapestry. The golden band on
the woven woman's dark skirt recalls, though in reverse, the pattern and
colors of the skirt of the artist's Muse. A woman too is subject to fabrication
(fig. 108).
Vermeer signed the map and paints the woman. The eroticism of his earlier
works- where men wait attentively upon women-is absorbed here into the
pleasure of representation itself, which is displayed throughout the painting.
Vermeer withdraws to celebrate the world seen . Like a surveyor, the painter
is within the very world he represents. He disappears into his task, depicting
himself as an anonymous, faceless figure, back turned to the viewer, his head
topped by the black hole of his hat at the center of a world saturated with
color and filled with light. We cannot tell where his attention is directed at this
moment: is it to the model or to his canvas? Observation is not distinguished
from the notation of what is observed. That is the grand illusion that the
picture also creates. It represents anArt of Painting that contains within itself
the impulse to map.

108. JAN VERMEER, Th e Art of Painting , detail (figure of woman

in tapestry). Kun sthi stori sches Mu seu m, Vi enna.
_-on the

and On
5
and
ncatlOn
Looking at Words:
ills earlier
into the
The Representation of Texts
in Dutch Art

paintings, surprisingly for

such realisti c images, are at ease with inscribed words . There are inscriptions
in painted books whose pages are often quite legible, on papers, on maps,
woven into cloth, on boards or tablets, on virginals, on walls (figs. 109, 111,
113, 116, 132). The words can have been previously inscribed on a surface
that is depicted-as inbooks or virginals-or they may be presented as added
labels, or frankly inscribed by the artist with his signature. But in each case
a continuity is demonstrated between rendering the visible world and reading
words. These inscribed texts, rather than existing prior to the work as motives
for picturing-a story to be evoked, a theme to be presented-are themselves
made part of the picture. Vermeer's A rt of Painting, at which we hav e just
been looking, is the supreme example of a commOn phenomenon.
I called this surprising because, with the exception of the painter's signa-
ture, we do not normally expect words to intrude on the picture itself.'
Western art since the Renaissance differs in thi s from other major tradition s,
such as the art of China and Japan. A clear distinction is made between visual
representation and verbal sign. It is nOt that texts are unimportant in Renais-
sance art, but they exist prior to and outside of th e confines of the image itself.
Images serve as a kind of mnemonic device. 2 A painting so conceived recalls
a significant text and makes its substance-but not its surface- present to the
eyes. Texts in this tradition are invoked by a picture, but words are not
represented in it.
It has been a major th eme of this study that the Dutch art of describing
stood apart from this kind of verbal grounding. The appeal to the eye, to
knowledge, and to craft suggests alternatives to a textual basis for th e inven-
tion of and tru st in images. Like so many aspects of Dutch art this phenom-
enon of looking at words has a mod ern ring ab out it. It is a recognized mark
of the art of our own century that it disrupts the traditional Western dis-
tinction between text and image. Picasso's Ma Jolie, Klee's Einst dem Grau
der Nacht, Magritte's Ceci n'estpas unepipe, and theAlphabet of Jasper Johns

169
170 Chapter Five

109. P IETER DE H OOCH.

The Courtyard of a
House in Delft. 1658.
By permiss ion of the
Trustees of the
ati onal Gallery,
London.

11 0. PI ETER DE H OOCH.
derail of fig. 109
(rabler wirh
inscripti o n) .
Looking at Words 171

111. BARTHOLOMEUS VAN 'j

DER H ELST, The Four

Archers of the St.
Sebastian Guards,
1653. By courtesy of
the Rijksl11u seum-
Stichting, Amster-
dam.

11 2. BARTHOLOMEUS VAl!!
DER HELST. detai l jp£'
fi g. 111 (blackboard
with inscription).
172 Chapter Five

all call attention to the common representational status of word and image.
What are we to make of this similarity? Its recognition, first of all, serves as
a kind of warning. It can perhaps help to save us from the commonest and
most misleading claim made by students of modernism, to the effect that there
is a dear before and after: that art or texts as we know them now date from
the nineteenth century. Yet on the other hand it will not do to claim the Dutch
art of describing for modernism. In the modernist mode the inclusion of
words with images has the function of celebrating the new and unprecedented
making that is a picture, while at the same time, and often in the same work,
acknowledging the ineluctable absence of what can only be present in signs.
It is an ironic and deconstructive pictorial mode. Dutch art, on the other hand,
comes out of a tradition that had long permitted words and images to join and
jostle each other on the surface of an illuminated manuscript and then a
printed page. Far from mistrusting or deconstructing the making of pictures,
the Dutch in the seventeenth century grant them a privileged place. Images are
at the center of human making and constitute an attainment of true knowl-
edge. The moral, then, is that we must be careful to make distinctions.
The question I want to address in this chapter is what happens to words and
texts given the Dutch notion of a picture. I have divided the answer- which
leads in unexpected directions - into three parts: inscriptions; the represen-
tation of texts as letters; and the captions implicit in narrative works.
I
A central figure in the use of inscriptions is Pieter Saenredam. His finely
observed and meticulou sly rendered portraits of Dutch churches are richly
and variously inscribed. He depicts the late Gothic church of Saint Odulphus
at Assendelft, for example (fig. 113), stripped of its ecclesiastical art, not
animated by human events, its white walls reflecting the daylight let in by
windows of clear, uncolored glass. It is laid out before our eyes on the panel
as an architectural panorama. We might contrast this portrait mode with
Rubens's altarpiece of Saint Ignatius Loyola (fig. 115), in which the church
instead becomes the setting for a miraculous theater. Except for the preacher
JUSt visible in the distance and the mourning tablets to the right, almost the
only articulation is some inscriptions. On the choir pew at the left Saenredam,
in the manner of his study drawings, notes the name of the church and the
date of the painting. This documentation is nOt part of the depicted world but
rather added, as on the surface of a drawing, though contained by the edges
of the pew. To the right on a great stone structure an inscription in Gothic
script identifies the tombs of the lords of Assendelft. Though styled to fit the
Gothic church it also is clearly added by the artist. Finally, at the bottom of
the panel, reversed to our view, a tombstone set into the pavement of the
church reads "JOHANN IS SAENREDAM SCULPTORIS CELEBERRIMI ... " (fig.
114). This is the tomb of the artist's father, an engraver who had died in 1607
when Pieter was only ten. The representation of the inscribed stone of the
.tomb in the church is Saenredam's curiously self-effacing manner of com-
Image .

. 13 . PI ETER SAENREDAM. Interior of the Church of St. Odulphus in Assendelft. 1649. By

courtesy of the Rijksmuseum-Stichting, Amsterdam.

V(IUlpnus

<. PIETER SAENREDAM, detail of fig. 113

(tom b inscriptions).

j. PETER PAUL R UBENS, The Miracles of

St. Ignatius Loyola. Kuns(historisches
:\1useum . Vienna.
174 Chapter Five

memorating his dead father. The inscribed tomb commemorates by visibly

naming. It does not attempt to recreate narratively or to present allegorically
the events and concerns of a life lived or the relationship of the son to them.
We find a similar use of inscribed words to commemorate the dead in Pieter
Steenwyck's Allegory on the Death of Admiral Tromp (fig. 116). The late
admiral's portrait and the title page of his funeral oration represent the life
whose achievements are nOt rendered. In contrast we can look at Tromp's
tomb itself in the Old Church in Delft (fig. 117). The recumbent Tromp is
surrounded with images including sea deities and festoons of trophies. But we
also find the sculptured relief of a naval battle that narrates a triumph of his
life at sea. The still-life painting is clearly part of a vanitas tradition. The
snuffed-out candle, books, sword, globe, and laurel wreath are all con-
ventional references to the passing nature of achievements and possessions of
this earth. But the normally anonymous theme is turned into a form of
documentation by fixing the name and face of the hero in the company of
transient things. In both commemorative inscriptions, that of the tomb and
that of the title page, the pictured world instead of inviting further inter-
pretation is inscribed with a meaning that is visible on the surface.
Saenredam is acutely aware of the status and role of the inscriptions within

116. PIETER STEENWYC K, Allegory on

the Death of Admiral Tromp.
5redelijk Mu seum "de Lakenhal,"
Leiden.

117. The tomb of Admiral Tromp,

O ud e Kerk, Delft. Dutch State
Servi ce for the Preservation of
Monuments.
175

visi bly
.wegorically
n ro them.
_""d in Pieter
_b . The late
. . - .... ent the life
at Tromp's
Tromp is
But we
::iumph of his
:radition. The
are all con-
possessions of
into a form of
e company of
the tomb and
further inter-

11 8. PIETER SAEN REDAM, Interior of

the Church of St. Bavo in
Haarlem, 1636, detai l (inscripti on
on organ ). By courtesy of the
Rijksmuseum-Stichting,
Amsterdam.

119. PETER P AU L R UBENS,St. Cecilia.

Gemaldegalerie. Staadiche
Museen Preuss ischer
Kulturbesitz, Berlin (West) .

his work. He calls attention ro them by providing lookers. We recall the small
figure of a man standing in a painting of Saint Bavo and raising his eyes ro the
organ above. His eyes direct ours ro the image of the resurrected Christ on
the shu tter and ro the golden words inscribed below (fig. 118) which invoke
the music of the hymns: "nde zangen en geestelycke li edekens" is part of a
longer biblical passage reading, "teach and admonish one another in psalms
and hymns and spiritual songs. " By means of his extraordinary passion for
crafted description (the golden letters are fashioned out of gold leaf) Saenre-
dam introduces the image and the organ music that the Protestant church had
excluded from its worship in the form of a representation. J The worship of
God through music is given a singularly nonnarrative and even, one might
say, a disembodi ed form here. This point is brought home if we compare
Saenredam's praise of hymns here to Rubens, who in rich colors and glowing
flesh-rones presents an ecstatic Saint Cecilia playing the virginal with her eyes
raised toward heaven (fig. 119).
176 Cha pter Five

of the
, Interior of the Mariake rk in Utrecht, 1641. By courtesy
120. PIETER SAENREDAM
hrin g, Amsterdam.
Rijksmu seum-Stic

ner in which Saerendam identifies and

We find som eth ing similar in the man anc es
his signature. The re are several inst
places himself in his works through date of his pai ntin g's
, his name, and the
in which his naming of the chu rch a pain ting of the
on a church wall. In
execution are inscribed as graffiti thre e
), the inscription is grouped with
Mariakerk, Utr ech t (figs. 120, 121 e ink Or
the foreground pill ar in the sam
small figures tha t are scrawled on ors -
lk. Lik e the figu res to whi ch it is bou nd, it is executed in three col
cha
Looking at Words 177

12 1. PI ETER SAENREDAM , detai l of fi g. 120 (in scription on

pilJar, righ t foreg round).

ochre, black, and white- and in three hands that divide it in such a way as
to suggest a series of graffiti done over time :
Dit is de St Mariae kerck binnen uijttrecht [ochre]
Pieter Saenredam ghemaeckt [black]
ende voleijndicht den 20 Januarij int Jaer 1641 [white]
The effect of the different hands, th e colors, and the division is to bind
Saenredam's writing of the inscription to drawings of the least tutored kind.
There is an anecdote told by Va sari that Michelangelo once demonstrated his
superior skill by being able to mimic the art of a child. ' Saenredam's intent
is quite the opposite. Far from claiming special knowledge for himself, the
Dutchman instead exhibits the relatedness of all kinds of drawing- trained
and untrained, image and script. The form and position of the graffiti-
inscription also characterize or place the artist in another way. By locating
and himself within the church as th e one who has marked the wall with graffi ti,
• Instances
Saenredam subtly undercuts his priority as the creator of the p icture. Thi s
painting's device is related to the designation of eye points and the positioning of
ing of the "lookers" in the picture, which we discussed in chapter 2. Saenredam's aim
with three in diminishing his role as creator is to give priority to the documentation of
m e ink or th e church seen and thus to present th e picture itself as a document of a
e colors - particular kind.
178

123 . JA '

art In
norther
bears w
claim t<
is ackne
reflect"
too far
Suffice
at his eo
Van de.
122. JAN VAN EYCK, The Arnolfini Wedding, 1434. By perm ission of the Trustees of the Ghent ;
National Gallery, London. seventel
ffilrr ore
The artist's use of the inscribed signature to establish his presence within devotee
the work and to turn the portrayal into a document is not Saenredam's illusion
invention . It dates back in northern art at least to Van Eyck's Arnolfini nny pal
portrait (fig. 122). Van Eyck wrote " Johannes de eyck fuit hic" on the wall the pre
in a fine calligraphic hand to testify that he was there, a witness to the couple's mscnpt
marriage. This famous picture is unique as a marriage document. But with the that is 1
help of Saenredam in particular and our sense of seventeenth-century Dutch human
179

123. JAN VAN EYCK, detaiJ of fig. 122 (inscribed name and reflected image of the artist).

art in general, we see that it is also paradigmatic of the nature of much

northern picturing. For like the painters oflandscapes and stilllifes, Van Eyck
bears witness to or documents a world that is prior to him rather than laying
claim to be the creator of a new or second one. In Van Eyck's painting this
is acknowledged not only by the inscription but also by the image of the artist
reflected in the mirror on the wall just below it (fig. 123) . It would take us
too far afield from Saenredam and inscriptions to deal fully with this device.
Suffice it to say that it too has an extensive history in ·the north. (The artist
at his easel occurs as a reflection in the armor of Saint George in Van Eyck's
Van der Paele altarpiece (fig. 11), in a jewel of God the F ather's crown in his
Ghent alterpiece, and in the surface of objects in a number of stilllifes in the
Trustees of the
seventeenth century [figs . 9, 10].) But the juxtaposition by Van Eyck of
mirrored image and inscribed name deserves some comment in a chapter
resence within devoted to the word in northern images . The mirror is a tour de force of
< Saenredam's illusionism that r eveals the Arnolfini couple seen from behind greeted by the
e " s Arnolfini tiny painter and his companion at the door to their chamber. It also doubles
e" on the wall the presence of the artist as an internal witness: he is present in word (the
o th e couple's inscription) and in image (the mirror). Considered as self-presentations (for
r. But with the that is what they are) , neither reveals anything to us about the nature of the
cen tury Du tch human maker. The artist's presence as a witness to the world described is
180 Chapter Five

more important to the picrure than his own narure. But the juxtaposition of
these twO signs of the artist's presence calls attention to the common function
of a verbal and a visual sign. It returns us to the remarkable and confident
equivalence between word and image that is our subject. 5
The referential or symbolic force of inscribed words is somewhat spent as
they take their place in the seen surface of the iconic image. This trans-
formation has the effect of emphasizing the iconic or representational status
of the picture. In this sense the look of an inscription is an important part of
its role in a Dutch picrure. In a number of paintings the pleasure of the look
of the texts and the distinction between them is emphasized by juxtapostion
much as it is in the various typefaces displayed in the printed emblem books
of the time. A vanitas still life by Anthony Leemans, for example (fig. 124),
plays off a printed frontispiece against a broadsheet and a handwritten poem
against a paper displaying a stave of musical notes and an even more infor-
mally inscribed paper enclosing some tobacco. To all of this the artist added
his signarure on a piece of paper tacked below. Here, as in Steenwyck's
painting, the heroic exploits of Admiral Tromp are given an inscribed pres-
ence in the broadsheet. The diversity of rendered texts vies with the diversity
of accumulated objects. And any question of the painter's performance is held
off, as it were, by the prominently inscribed tale of Apelles and the shoe-
maker, whose motto " Let a shoemaker stick to his last" (and not criticize the
art of Apelles, which he does not understand) makes a modest but firm stand
for art.
The Saenredam drawing with profile views of Leiden and Haarlem (fig.
125; pI. 4) juxtaposes them with the description provided by his calligraphic
inscription at the top of the page. Our attentiveness to the look of the
words-in particular the flourish above Haarlem at the left- is drawn out in
the delicate outlines of the tree trunks that spread to fill the lower portion of
the page. As background to all this lettering, we must remember the popu -
larity enjoyed by calligraphy in Holland at this time.' A calligraphic tribute
to one Nicholas Verburch suspends letters, which are set among flowering
branches and fashioned out of mother of pearl, on the borderline between
naming and picturing (fig. 126). A unique example of such play is the odd
genre known as penschilderij or pen-painting (fig. 127). A board prepared as
if for a painting is worked in pen and ink so that the world is rendered as a
kind of written picture. We considered this earlier as an instance of the lack
of a clear boundary between drawing and painting, to which we can now add
writing. Penschilderij was usually employed in a documentary capacity.
Willem van de Velde used it to record sea battles. This medium actually
permits the writing of what is drawn, so that the entire world might be seen
as if it were rendered as an inscription. Matham's description of the brewery
and country house of the burgomaster Van Loo of Haarlem, with its lengthy
inscription beneath, does just that. 7
Objects come with their own verbal documentation. They make them-
selves visible in image and in word and the picture documents them by visibly
naming the object. A good number of Dutch images document narural won-
r
181

status
-. ortant part of
"""'" rp of the look

124. ANTHONY L EEMANS.

Srill Life, 1655. By
in Steenwyck's courtesy of the
inscribed pres- Rijksmuseum-
the diversity Stichting,
frl,o rnlance is held Amsterdam.

and th e shoe-

Haarlem (fig.
his calligraphic
the look of the
. drawn ou t in
lower porti on of
the popu-
tribute
flowering
r
between
play is the odd
prepared as
is rendered as a
Istance of the lack
we can now add
capacIty.
medium actually
might be seen
of the brewery
\\ith its lengthy
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ •_ _ _ 1
make them-
them by visibly 125 . P JETER SA ENREDAM, Profile Views of Leiden and Haarlem and Two Trees (pen,
natural won- wash , and watercolor), 1617 and 1625. Kupfersrichkabinett. Staatliche Musecn
Preu ssisch er Kultu rbes itz, Berlin ( West).
126. D IRCK VAN RIjSWICK,
Tribute to Nicholas
Verburch. By courtesy
of the Rijksmu seum -
Stichting, Amster-
dam.

00=
;>faJ ec
comb -

not dug •
eaten.
\Xlm -
127. J ACOB MATHAM, The Brewery and the Country H ouse of
Jan Claesz. Loa (pen on panel), 1627, detail. Frans qrg.na!
H alsmu seum, Haarlem . Gabriel _
msrrumem
of music n
ro include
Looking at Words 183

128. A NOI\l)' M OUS, Northern Neth erlandish

School, Ra dish, 1626 , detai l (in script ion).
By cou rtesy of (h e Rijksmu seum -Sti cht ing,
Am sterd am.

ders o r what Bacon wo uld have called aberrations. One records a giant radish
found in Fredrickstaat (fi g. 128). It was grown there and weighed over seven
and a half ponds, as th e inscripti o n tells us. An oth er records twO record-size
ki dney stones wh ose date of remova l is dul y noted. A caprured Engli sh ship
is p ort rayed with its history in battl e set forth on a bit of paper illu sionistically
sruck into its frame (fig. 129, 130). T h ough not a natural" wonder, it is an
object worth special note. A herring is set forth for our del ectatio n and
p raised in an accompanying p oem (fi g. 131 ). In each instance word and image
com bine to docum ent th e claim th e ob ject has o n our attenti on with out any
recourse to narrative entan glements : because of th e inscription th e radish is
not dug up befo re our eyes , th e sh ip is not embattled, the tasty herring is not
eaten.
Within thi s ph enomenon of inscripti ons we can also include th e inscrib ed
vi rginals frequ entl y found in th e mid -century paintings of arti sts su ch as
Gabri el Metsu, Jan Steen, and Jan Vermeer (figs. 132, 133, 134). Even
instrum ents in H olland make th emselv es visible in words. It is a curi ous fact
of mu sic history that it was parti cularl y in th e Netherlands (and I mea n h ere
to include Antwerp) that instrum en ts bore verbal inscriptions alo ng with th e
184 Chapter Five

129. jERONlMUS VAN DIEST, The Seiwre of 'he English Flagship " Royal Charles." By
courtesy of the Rijksmuseum-Stichting, Amsterdam.

D O. j ERONIMUS VAN DIEST, detail of fig. 129 (insc ri bed document).

Looking at Words 185

131. JOSEPH DE BRAY, In Praise of Herring, 1657 . Stadisches Suermont- Luclwig Museum,
Aachen . Photo Ann Munchow,
186 Chapter Five

132. GABRIEL METSU,

Woman at th e
Virginal. Mu seum
Boy mans-van
Beuningen,
Rotterdam.

normal decoration of scrolls and pastoral scenes .' They are represented in
Dutch paintings as are other objects - maps, organ stalls, books-with their
own verbal documentation. The range of inscriptions is limited. They either
praise music as soothing or quote the psalmist's injunction to praise God with
every breath. These suggest rather different attitudes toward music per-
formed in the home, but they are used quite interchangeably. Metsu casually
represents a virginal bearing the psalmist'S words both in a work that seems
to have no erotic overtones as well as in two that most obviously do (figs.
132, 133). The inscription, in other words, does nOt seem to be providing an
interpretive key to the painting. This goes against the iconographers' assump-
tion, but it shou ld come as no surprise after what we have seen of the
proliferation of words in Dutch images. In the fine Metsu in London (fig . 133)
the young woman at her music lesson has turned to offer some music to the
young man, who in turn offers her a drink. Does she want it? Should she?
Should he offer it? The painting hardly seems to consider these questions. The
relationship of the two is as unstated as is our relationship to the work. The
inscription - "Praise God with every breath " -is placed just under the dimly
visible picture, whose curtain drops in subtly to overlap and cast a shadow
near the words . The picture on the wall, identified as an early work of Metsu's
own rendered in reverse, depicts the Twelfth Night feast. Poised above the
proffered drink we find a representation of the Bean King, who drinks rau-
cously but with the sanction of a religious feast. The inscrib ed words to praise
God with every breath seem to take their place not as an injunction but as Iris
one representation among others: the couple at their flirtatious play, the who
picture of the raucous feast, the landscape painting on the wall. They are cuno
Looking at Words 187

presented in
- with their
They either
e God with
m USIC per-
mu casually
. that seems
I,· do (figs.
)roviding an 133. GABRIEL METSU, Duet. By permission of the Trustees of the
National Gallery, London.
ers' assump-
seen of the
Ion (fig. 133) interlocked, even overlapping, but without any clear hierarchy or ordering.
music to the They add up to a world, but as we have seen in other cases of Dutch paintings
hould she? they do not presume to order the world.
esti ons. The I have been at some pains in the course of this brief survey to suggest the
e work. The conditions under which texts are given what we might call separate but equal
ler th e dimly place in Dutch pictorial representations . Rather than supplying underlying
1St a shadow meanings, they give us more to look at. They extend without deepening the
.. of Metsu's reference of the works. Again and again the words stand for, or to put it
,.j above the
precisely, represent what would in another art and another culture be pic-
I dri nks rau-
tured as dramatic enactments of self or society. Saenredam's devotion to his
.-ds to praise father or the heroic escapades of Admiral Tromp are described, not narrated .
ruon but as It is the artists themselves, and most particularly Vermeer and Rembrandt,
play, the who are acutely aware of the insistence of this kind of visual presence and its
. Th ey are curious lack of meaningful depth .
188 Chapter Five

Vermeer confronts the limitations of the art and learns to accept them. The
circumscribed nature of any representation, the partiality of what we are
given to see in an inscription, a face, a picture, or mirror is basic for him. In
his Music Lesson, now in Buckingham Palace (fig. 134), a man is attendant on
a woman, his pupil, who is standing at the virginal. A mirror beyond her on
the wall reflects part of the room and the woman's face turned slightly,
however, toward the man. On the wall to the right we see a piece of a picture,
which depicts th e scene known as the Roman Charity: a bound male prisoner,
Cimon, leans forward to suck for sustenance at the breast of a charitable
woman, his daughter Pero. This man, like the attendant teacher, is dependent
on a woman. The inscription on the virginal reads "Music is the companion
of joy, the medicine of sadness." The inscription is one of four ways of
representing- but also one of four versions of-the relationship between the
man and the woman at the virginal (fig. 135). Each one is presented as partial,
not just in respect to the others but because each is cut off from total view:
the "real" woman is visible only from the back; her face, held in a different
position, is reflected in the mirror; the picture on the wall is severely cut by
the frame; the words inscribed on the virginal are hard to make out (compared
to the clarity of the Metsu) and are further interrupted by the figure of the
woman. The words are hard to see because this painting creates distance,
admits light and even paint. Representation here does not add up to and
confirm a world, as did Metsu's picture. It rather renders the appearance of
the world as ungraspable. Vermeer repeatedly thematized this truth in his
works as the ungraspable presence a woman offers a man.
Vermeer presents the image as all we have. Rembrandt, deeply the icono-
clast, rejects the very conditions of such knowledge. Books, for example,
appear often in Rembrandt's painting and they are painted with loving care,
as in the portrait of the preacher Anslo and his wife (figs. 136, 137). The
books glow in a golden light with thick bindings and opened pages suggesting
the riches contained within. We do not, however, see any inscribed words or
pictures. We might contrast in this respect a pair of portraits, probably of
Rembrandt's mother. Rembrandt and his pupil Gerrit Dou each depicted an
old woman engaged in reading a book (figs. 138, 139). Dou 's woman peers
intently at the illustrated page of what has been identified as a Dutch
perikopenbuch - a Catholic lectionary containing excerpts from the Gospels
and Epistles. We are invited to look with her at what is clearly inscribed as
Luke, chapter 19, intended for reading on the day of the consecration of the
church (fig. 138). 9 The reader and the surface of the page are clearly and
steadily lit. To see the text is to know it. And looking at the text is like looking
at the image that illustrates it. In Rembrandt's version the emphasis is quite
different. The text is not legible except for perhaps two letters, just enough
to reveal the writing to be in Hebrew, the language of God (fig. 139). There
are no illustrations and the reader, cast in shadow, seems to relate to the book
more by the touch of her hand than with her eyes. To generalize the differ-
ences: while other Dutch artists offer us visible texts, Rembrandt insists that

135. JA'
189

The
: w e are
him. In
dant on
pd her on
I slightly,

pnsoner,
aritable
ep endent
ompanlon
r ways of
the
partial,
tal view:
different
cut by
f ompared
re of the

rdistance,
p toand
brance of

134. JAN VERMEER, The Music Lesson. Buckingham Palace. By permission of Her
Majesty the Queen .

an peers
a Dutch
Gospels
cribed as
on of the
rly and
e looking
IS qUIte
enough
There
the book •
e differ-
ists that

135. JAN VERt-lEER, detail of fi g. 134 (inscription, mirrored image, and picture).
190 Chapter Five

137

136. REMBRANDT VAN R1J N, Anslo and His Wife, 1641.

Gemaldegalcrie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulrurbesitz,
Berlin (West) .
137. REMBRANDT VAN R1JN, detail of fig. 136 (books).
138. GERARD Dou, Rembrandt's Mother. By courtesy of the
Rijksmuseum -Stichting, Amsterdam.
139. REMB RANDT VAN R1J N, An Old Woman (perh aps
Rembrandt's mother as th e prophetess H an na). By cour tesy
of the Rijksmuseum -Sti chting , Amsterdam.
Looking at Words 191

139
192 Chapter Five

it is the Word within and not the surface of the texts that must be valu ed.
Therefore, with the exception of the design for one uncompleted allegorical
work, The Concord of the State (Rotterdam), and the superscription in
Hebrew, Latin, and Greek placed above an early crucified Christ, the on ly
words Rembrandt inscribed in a painting are the Hebrew words transmitted
by God on the tables of the law held aloft in the Moses (Berlin), and the
Hebrew characters written by the hand from heaven that appear in Bel-
shazzar's Feast (London). His art shows a determination to define and deal
with what texts, as conceived in Dutch painting, normally leave out.
II
O ur initial question, we recall, was what happens to texts in Dutch pic-
tures. Our second group of examples concerns one of the most unusual and
popular kinds of painted texts in Holland-the letter. There is something
strange and unpromising about paintings of people reading, writing, and
receiving letters. The painter would seem to be invading the writer's territory
with little hope of competing. And there is also something fugitive about
considering letter paintings as the representation of texts, since the viewer of
the painting is not permitted to read any of the words. But it is just this
fugitive quality that makes them of interest. They place visual attention and
absence of deeper meaning in a special light and can therefore profitably be
seen as a special case of the inscriptions we have just looked at. The letters are
commonly the object of attention within the painting, but we do not see the
cOntents and those who do do not reflect it in their demeanor. For all the
visual attentiveness required, an essential content remains inaccessible, en-
closed in the privacy of the reader's or writer's absorption in the letter. As we
shall see, this interpretation actually corresponds to the lore, the use, and the of waJ
(entul
fascination with letters as we know it from a variety of sources at the time.
Letters had, of course, occurred as a motif in painting before. They were effect
love,
commonly delivered to or held by male sitters in portraits. We can take
Thomas de Keyser's Constantijn Huygens of about 1627 (fig. 1) as an exam- !lon a\
ple. In Holland, in particular, a few letter paintings like Dirck Hals's 1631 bled iJ
Lady Tearing a Letter (fig. 140) " have been' connected to a specific em- his de!
blematic tradition concerning the joys and sorrows of love. But we are con- of lo\'
jealo
cerned here with a burst of interest in letter writers and readers of Gerard ter
iashiQ
Borch, Metsu, and Vermeer. A man, or for the first time frequently a woman ,
often alone in an interior or with an accessory figure of the postman, a la Sen
1664 ,
servant, or friend, writes, reads, or receives a letter. Starting as a social event,
like that in Ter Borch's Postman Delivering a Letter in Leningrad, the works metho
enteeu
move to concentrate on the writing or reading of the letter. Ter Borch's single
female writing figure dates from 1655 (fig. 141), a reader from perhaps 1662
(fig. 142). The theme culminates in the well-known letter readers by Vermeer comp.
of the late 1650s and 1660s. in H oi
Although we do nOt see their texts, it has convincingly been argued th at under
wealth
their subject is love. What were considered entertaining anecdotes by
of lett,
Looking at Words 193

'alued.

In
me only

plC-
and

140. DIR CK HALS, Lady Tearing a Letter, 1631. Mittelrheini schcs

Land esmuseum, Mainz.

nineteenth-century writers on art tend to be interpreted by scholars today as

cautionary tales. In the case of works like the Dirck Hals paintings, which are
connected with emblematic material, it has been suggested that they are
warnings against love. Several overlapping explanations have been offered of
th e vogue for this love-letter theme. They bear on these images in a variety
of ways. A love emblem of Otto van Veen dating from the first decade of the
century shows cupid as a postman with an accompanying inscription to the
effect that he brings joy from an absent lover. 1 1 This connects letters with
love, although the image in no way looks like a Dutch painting. An illustra-
tion accompanying a printed play by Krul-one of a melange of texts assem-
bled ·in his Paper World of 1644 - comes closer in this respect: a man sits at
his desk to write a letter and is torn, so the text explains, between the urging
of love to write (Cupid is standing by) and the restraints brought on him by
jealousy. 12 The letter paintin gs also coincide almost exactly in date with a
a
fashion for epistolary manuals like La Secretaire la Mode of Jean Puget de
la Serre, which was printed nineteen times in Amsterdam between 1643 and
1664 and was also translated into Dutch. 13 The manuals had originated as a
method of teaching children to write through epistolary models. In the sev-
enteenth century they evolved into a kind of courtesy book for adults in
which the lov e letter was among the accepted categories. Training in the
composition of such letters was reinforced by the great interest in penmanship
in Holland. Both skills, the composing and the penning of letters, were often
under the direction of th e ubiquitous French schools, frequent teachers of the
wealthier Dutch. The literary fad had a real-life counterpart in the popularity
of letter-wri ting itself. There is indeed a question as to whether the pictures
194

141. GERARD TER BORCH, A Lady Writing a Letter. Mauritshuis, The Hague. 1(<.,;;

document social behavior-the activities of a society actually engaged in th e

writing and reading of letters -or illu strate the li terary fictions created in the
manuals. Th ere is perhaps no simpl e answer. In Dutch pi cture-making, cer-
Ii tain themes tend to assume prominence when actual social rituals coincide
with established fictional or artistic forms ."
Love, then, is in the air in these letter pictures. Or to be more precise, it
is inscribed in the letters that are the center of attention. There is much th at
remains to be learned about the li terary and social circumstances of such love
playas this in Holland . But the particular qu estion we want to address has to
do with the pictures: How do they represent th e letters? The answer to this
qu estion is not without its own social implications.
195

5 142. GERARD T ER BORCH, A Lady Reading a Letter. Reproduced by permis- , r

sion of the Trustees, the Wallace Collect ion, London.

A man 's letter on the subject of abs ence reads:

I lead such a sad life since you departed .... So I must tell you , that after
losing app etite and peace of mind, I pass whole days without eating and
nights without sleeping.
Ue meine une si triste vie depuis Ie jour de vostre depart .... Je vous dirai
done, qu'apres avoir perdu I'app etit & Ie repos, je passe egalement les jours
entiers sans manger & les nuits sans dormir.]
To which a lady might reply .
If it were in my power to console you with my presence, for th e ills my
absence is making you suffer, you would see me now instead of this letter.
196 Chapter Five

But as I am constrained by a father and mother who do not give me so

much as the liberty to write you, it is all that I can do to take that liberty
in order to console you with the expectation of my return. Please believe
that I wish for it ardently.

lSi j'avois Ie pouvoir de vous consoler par rna presence, des maux que man
absence vous fait souffrir, vous me verriez main tenant au lieu de cette
lettre. Mais estant sous la servitude d'un pere at d'une mere, qui ne me
donnent pas seulement la liberte de vous ecrire, c'est tout ce que je puis
faire que de la prendre pour vous consoler de I'esperance de man retour,
vous pouvey bien croire que je Ie souhaite avec passion ... .]I'
Reading conventional such as these of lovers' situations and feel-
ings, one is struck by the absence of expression in the pictures. Ter Barch's
women (and men) are calm, poised figures who look at their letters with no
suggestion of inner unrest. While recognizing the link between these pictures
and the epistolary manuals it is also necessary to distinguish the pictorial
tradition from the textual one. The letters in the manuals provide the frame-
work for narrative and inititate the literary tradition of the early epistolary
form of the novel. The letters expand and eventually break through their
epistolary frames to permit the progress of love to become the subject of
extended narrative texts. The pictures depict the form that social intercourse
took, but serve as a device that permits the Dutch artist to avoid its narrative
dimensions. We know the subject is love only by the attention to the epi-
stolary surface. Both representations - the letters in the manuals and the
painted ones-define a private human space. But while the novel makes the
world of private passions accessible, the Dutch painters depict women ab-
sorbed in the perusal of a correspondence that is closed to us. It is clearly
represented as an isolating affair.
What is suggested in the pictures is not the content of the letters, the lovers'
feelings, their plans to meet, or the practice and the experience of love, but
rather the letter as an object of visual attention, a surface to be looked at . The
attention that Ter Barch's woman directs at the letter's surface replicates the
way in which we as viewers of the picture are invited to attend to various
surfaces displayed: the pearl at her ear and its blue bow; the curls of hair; the sr
fringe of the carpet; the pillow in the corner. The attention to all of this (a s..
consistent concern as we have seen of the "fine" painters of the mid-century), a<
is restated by the woman herself. This is another version of the visual atten- of
tiveness we have already seen bound to notions of education and leading to of
knowledge of the world. But here, since what is being attended to is a letter, co
or someone looking at a letter, there is a vacuum at the center. The letter se:
stands in for or represents events and feelings that are not visible. Letters, as It
Otto van Veen put it neatly (quoting Seneca), are traces of love." b)
In his Beit Woman Reading a Letter (fig. 144), Metsu frankly acknowl- ex
edges and plays with the representational character of the letter by placing it th
among other representational surfaces. There is something of the air of a cu
Looking at Words 197

.. :ne so demonstration piece about this painting. Any anecdotal interests the artist
iberty might have had are overwhelmed. The work is concerned with visual atten-
:Jelieve tion. It juxtaposes different ways of making present things that are absent: the
letter, a picture on th e wall, and a mirror. Metsu devises ways of emphasizing
the act of looking. The lady turns her attention from th e working of the
\:;'ue mon embroidered su rface on her lap to the letter. Her abs orption is marked by her
de cette thimble, which has tumbled to the floor. She tilts th e letter toward the li gh t
ne me of th e window to try to see it better; the maid lifts the curtain to get a look
Je pUIS
at the painting and is herself looked at by the little dog. The mirror, so-
retour,
lipsisti cally , is enfolded into itself, reflecting only the grid of the adjacent
window panes. The partial nature of what presents itself to view-the picture
and feel- half-curtained , the letter turned to the light, the mirror reflecting its mir-
Borch's roring capacity- increases our attentiveness but seems in no way to call
with no looking itself into question. Seeing is specifically related to representations of
what is beyond this interior. It is related to the world from which the letter
has come. Indeed, the envelope is still in the hand of th e maid who delivered
it. But Metsu resolutely concentrates on present surfaces. The letter is a <'i:::
surface looked at and it leaves the woman unmoved. This is in contrast to
works such as the letter picture by Dirck Hals done earlier in th e century (fig.
140). The stormy sea in the painting on the wall refers to the storms of love,
which are in turn reflected in the behavior of the woman who is tearing up
her letter. In Hals's handling of the letter theme, as in the painting itself,
which displays none of Metsu's fine workmanship, surface is not what
counts.
It is only outside the Beit Woman R eading a Letter, in its pendant de-
picting a man writing a letter to the woman (fig. 143), that Metsu admits to
the problem of what is absent. This invention of the p endant is his. No other
painter does it at the time. In his common-sense way, Metsu reminds us of
the social circumstances, the parted correspondents, upon wh ich th e letter
representation depends. Separated by th eir frames, in their separate rooms,
these lovers can forever attend to the representation of love rath er than engage
in love itself.
This analysis of th e treatment of the painted letters might seem idio-
syncratic at best, and at worst perhaps simply unconvincing. But it finds
surprising confirmation in the equally idiosyncratic percep tion of the letter as
a cultural and even a technological phenomenon at the time. Th e prominence
of the painted letters in Holland can of course be attributed pardy to the level
of literacy (Holland's was the highest in Europe), to the Dutch need to
communicate with their far-flung trading posts, and to the improved postal
service of the ti me. " Today, in the waning days of the public postal service,
as it is once again possible to imagine a time when th e ability to communicate
by letter was considered a notabl e accomplishment. But perhaps not to the
ackno wl- extent or in th e manner of the seventeenth century. Comenius, the Protestant
placing it theologian and educator whom we already used as an informant in our dis-
air of a cussion of seeing and knowing in chapter 2, went so far as to list th e letter
198

143 . GABRIEL MFrSU , Man Writing a Letter. Reproduced by permission of Sir Alfred
Beit, Bart.

alongside the invention of printing, gunpowder, and Columbus's voyage as ste1

previously unimaginable European accomplishments (needless to say, his aim m al
in making this claim was to find the proper rank for his own discoveries in len
education): dec
Nor could the American Indians comprehend how one man is able to me1
communicate his thought to another without the use of speech, without a
messenger, but by simply sending a piece of paper. Yet with us a man of des
the meanest intelligence can understand this. I. ishl
th e
The event that Comenius might well have had in mind refines the point: tIOl
Garcilosa de la Vega reported that two Indians were sent by a nobleman's ru a
199

144. GABRIEL METSU, Woman Reading a Letter. Reproduced by permission of Sir Alfred
Bcir, Bart.

steward from the country to deliver ten melons accompanied by a letter to his
master in Lima. The Indians were warned that if they ate any on the way the
letter would tell on them. Imagining the letter to have eyes, th e Indians
decided to hide it beh ind a wall so that it would not see th em as they ate two
melons. They were of course astounded at the end of the journey when they
delivered the remaining melons with the letter and the nobleman knew,
despite their caution, that two melons were missing. The Indians' aston-
ishment at the Spaniards' ability to communicate by letter is bound up with
their astonishment at the letter's abi li ty to communi cate a secret. This fascina-
tion with letters as both a secret way of communicating and a way of commu-
nicating secrets obtains also in seventeenth-century Europe. "
200 Chapter Five

The distance between a letter sent in South America and Dutch pictures is
clos ed for us by Karel van Mander. It seems at first rather curious that in his
1604 handbook for the young artist Van Mander introduces a similar story.
In the section of hi s instructi onal poem devoted to color , Van Mander turns
to the different glories of writing in black and white. It is in this context that
he praises the letter:
Indeed, though they be far apart, people speak to each other via silent
messengers.

[Jae, al zijn de Menschen wijdt van een ghevloden/Sy spreken maleander

door stomme boden.]"
We have already found evidence in our study of maps of a continuity between
writing and drawing . What is notable here is that the form of writing that Van
Mander specifically invokes is the letter. The letter for him bears on the
making of an image. The evidence he offers, in much the same vein as
Comenius was to do some years later, is the Indians' astonishment at how
Spaniards communicated with each other by letter. Van Mander introduces
the letter because of its ability to close distances, to make something present,
to communicate secretly- all of which confirms what we have seen of the
painted letter in Dutch paintings.
Second, and related to this, the letter was treated at the time as a prime
object of vision. What was communicated was intended for the eyes alone. In
our earlier discussion of the knowledge to be gained through attentive looking
and its connection to the Dutch still life, we considered at some length
Comenius's recipe for how to look at an object. We did not note there that
having analyzed how to look, the first object that Comeniu s looks at is no
other than a letter. Here is Comenius's description of how to look at a letter ,
or, in our terms, how to look at words: to
mea
If anyone wish to read a letter that has been sent him by a friend, it is hou
necessary: ( 1) that it be presented to the eyes (for if it be not seen, how can
OP f1
it be read?); (2) that it be placed at a suitable distance from the eyes (for if
on Ii
it be too far off, th e words cannot be distinguished) ; (3) that it be directly
in front of the eyes (for if it be on one side, it will be confusedly seen); (4) fo11t
In5tj
that it be turned th e right way up (for if a letter or a book be presented to
the eyes upside down or on its sid e, it cannot be read); (5) the general a mi
characteristics of the letter, such as the address, the writer, and the date to d
must be seen first (for unless thes e facts be known, the particular items of so I
the letter cannOt be properly understood); (6) then the remainder of the wi t!
letter must be read, that nothing be omitted (otherwise the contents will lem
not all be known , and perhaps the most important point will be missed); pea.
(7) it mu st be read in th e right order (if one sentence be read here and mm
another there, the sense will be confused); (8) each sentence must be th ei
mastered before the next is commenced (tor if the whole be read hurriedly, reve;
some useful point may easily escape the mind); (9) finally, when the whole
has been carefully p erused, the reader may proceed to distinguish between 1001
those points that are necessary and those that are superfluous. 21 wh<
Looking at Words 201

.::tI res IS
We might compare this sens e of a lerrer with rhe lerrers in rhe episrolary
=t in his manuals. While the lerrers in rhe manuals provide examples of the rherorical
srory. shaping of feelings, Comenius offers a lerrer as an object of sight. This
extraordinary concentration on rhe act of reading as close looking reveals a
mind bound up with visual representation in the manner of rhe Dutch pic-
tures.
Borh of the facrors rhat we have just rouched on-letters as ob jects of sight
v ia silent and letters as conveyors of secret messenges-are combin ed in a techni cal
context at the tim e. I was originally led ro look at sixteenrh- and seventeenth-
cen tury treatises on natural knowledge to find experimental analogies for the
interest Dutch artists had in attentive looking . We already consi dered this in ""
chap ter 4.It was with ( realized the frequ ency with which
letters appear in reports of experiments done wirh the newly popular lenses
and mirrors.
on rhe And lovers that are far asunder may so hold commerce wirh one another.
This passage from G. B. della Porta's Natural Magick does not describe
letters but rather " merry sports" possible wirh an optical device-a set of
mirrors by which words are cast Onto a distant wall - that serves a function
similar ro that of a letter between lovers. Lenses or mirrors are like letters in
rhat rhey also allow a man, as della Porta says, ro "secretly see and wirh out
suspition what is done far off & in orher places ." "
Della Porta notes the secrecy involved in being enabled ro see something
in this manner. The viewer sees what he otherwise could not and is himself
not seen. The lens in such studies not only functi ons as a letter does in sending
messages, but is itself directed ro seeing orher people's messages. Secreted
letters seem ro have been on many minds. The English exp erimenter Thomas
D igges, for example, prides hims elf on setting up an instrument enabling him
ro survey everything around him, from large ro small. He specifies what he
means: everyrhin g from the lay of the land of a whole region ro the inside of
hou ses where "you shall discerne any trifle or reade any letter lying there
open .,,2) And Robert Hooke in his 1665 Micrographia, the first English book
on microscop y, does not choose living matter but a point, rh e tip of a needle,
followed by the dot made by a pen, as th e first things ro view through his
instrument. Hooke models himself on rhe comm on strategy of starting wirh
a marhematical point, but proceeds ro take the pen-point literally and goes on
ro discuss a miniaturized text. Wirh a microscope at hand this small writing,
items of so Hooke argues, "might be of very good use ro convey secret Intelligence
"m,opr of rhe without any danger of Discav ery . ,, 14 In this complex overlap of lenses and
ron, ten ts will letters, of obj ects ro improve sight with objects of sight, experimenters re-
be missed); peatedly testify ro the situati on of being unseen seers, eyes fixed ro lenses or
here and mirrors, catching sight of something otherwise unseeable that is unaware of
must be rh ei r gaze. Th e fascination wirh a letter or message as rh e object in view
hu rriedly,
reveals the guilt that was part of thei r adventure. They felt rheir attentive
rhe whole
looking ro be a kind of prying. And they experienced rhe unease of viewers
who feel th emselves ro be voyeurs.
202 Chapter Five

145. GABRIEL
METSU, The
Letter Writer
Surprised.
Reproduced by
permisssi on of
the Tr ustees,
the \'7allace
Collection,
London.

As in th e pursu it of knowledge, so in th e pictures of the time. The outsider

looking in at the letter is also a th eme in Dutch painting. In at least one
instance Metsu makes li ght of th e situati on of seeing as spying. H is so-called
Letter Writer Surprised (fig. 145) is really a letter-writer spied on. The woman
with the letter does not realize that a gentleman is p eering over her shoulder.
But it is Vermeer who perceives that the artist's own eye looking into his work
plays this very role. Vermeer in effect turns the relationship between the
Metsu couple ninety degrees and puts himself in th e position of th e man.
Vermeer discovers th at the artist is a voyeur with a woman as his object in
view. " In his Woman Reading a Letter (fig. 146), the painting now in Dres-
den, Vermeer represents the absence of th e letter's content as an elusiveness.
146.
And unlike Ter Borch or Metsu , Vermeer draws our attention particularly to
the elusiveness of the woman. She seems less to be looking at the letter, as Ter It co
Borch's wom en do, than to be abs orbed in it even as she is absorbed in herself. Ina Ci
We note the distin ctive angle of her head and her slightly parted lips. Her mee
elusiveness is further played out by Vermeer in the invention of the reflection latio
of her face, which is mirrored in the surface of the open wi ndow. This is a the
conflation of surfaces that Metsu would carefully disti nguish. The window Ven
we expect to be able to look through instead reflects back. (In Metsu's mal.
painting of a man writing a letter [fig. 143] we look through th e open win dow Ir
to catch sight of the world itself in the form of a globe.) Another surface of (fig .
the woman's face is made visible without offering us any furth er insight into The
her. The carefully constructed foreground - a curtain partially drawn back, now
the barrier of rug, the table with its offering of fruit-bars our entry even as amp
203

object in
in Dres-
146. JAN VERMEER, Woman Reading a Lett er. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden .
!'-u,.,. y to
it confirms our presence. The relationship between surface presence and inner
inaccessibility so characteristic of the letter picrures is acknowledged by Ver-
meer in these pictorial tensions and it is thematized in the viewer's re-
lationship to the woman . While Metsu used pendants to classify the male and
the female with a distinct space for each and the letter as the go-between,
Vermeer deals instead with complex and uncertain relati onship between a
male observer and a female observed.
In the great Woman Reading a Letter (or Woman in Blue) in Amsterdam
(fig. 147), a later work, Vermeer resolves the tensions of his Dresden picture.
The monumental figure of the woman poised in her absorption in the letter
now dominates. She assembles the world of the picture around her. Her
ample figure reveals, by comparison, the slightness of the Dresden woman,
204 Chapter Five

H;. J
L.
Il
H.1l
B.
L.

149. J.
co

148
205

149

147. JAN VERMEER, Woman Reading a

Letter. By courtesy of the
Rijksmuseum -Stichting, Amsterdam.

148. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN,

Bathsheba, 1654. Musee du
Louvre. Cliche des Musees
Nac ionaux, Paris.

149. J AN STEEN, Bathsheba. Private

collection .
206 Chapter Five

whose small figure was pressed in by objects from all sides. No longer a lies
product of the tension between viewer and woman viewed, the woman's rec«
elusiveness is now simply granted her as her own. It is a sign of self- £les
possession. In this resolution of his art, Vermeer still remains true to the aslJ
presence of the letter as a text that absorbs attention while remaining inacces- is h
sible.
mal
I began with the admission that there was something fugitive about consid-
ering letters as texts. The seriousness with which Dutch painting took this
issue can be measured by the reactions of the two greatest talents. While
Vermeer meditates and pursues the implications posited in the letters as plCl
representation, Rembrandt objects. The power and nature of Rembrandt's texl
critique is stated in his Bathsheba in the Louvre (fig. 148). The work was amI
painted in 1654 at the peak of the popularity of the epistolary manuals and just be s
when Ter Barch was engaged in his paintings of the subject. I would not lnre
di spute the Italian connections that have been claimed for this picture. 26 The of r
great, monumental female nude clearly reveals Rembrandt's ambition to rival sud
the Italians by engaging in a central image of their art. But it should also be of a
seen among the familiar women with letters of the north . This is, however, be I
a letter painting with a difference. It is precisely the implications of the letter's que
contents that are at issue for Rembrandt. Bathsheba has read the letter in did
which David declares his love for her. It rests in hand as she turns from it, lost PICI
in her thoughts, ignoring both maid and viewer. What does she feel, graced 1
by a beauty that has already ma"e her beloved of a king who will send her p:ur
husband off to death in battle? The letter is presented not as visible evidence
of a social transaction, nor as the representation of feelings that are absent. Its bral
contents are the object of Bathsheba's meditation and, by extension, of ours. of I
It cannor be argued that this manner of depicting is given in the choice of the nan
theme. Jan Steen, after all, produced a Bathsheba that easily accommodated firsl
the scene to the Dutch letter works that we have been looking at (fig. 149). to I
If it were not for the words "Most beautiful Bathsheba-because" ("Alder- noV
schonte Barsai:le-omdat") inscribed on the letter, we would take this for sen!
another "genre" scene. It is important evidence for the way we perceive dra'
Rembrandt's Bathsheba with the letter. The painting by Steen proves that lnst
Rembrandt was not alone at the time in seeing a connection between the p:ur
popular letter theme and Bathsheba. rea(
Rembrandt's picture is not only a Dutch letter painting with a difference, and
it is also Italian painting with a difference. There were essentially two pictorial fan
traditions connected with Bathsheba, neither of which Rembrandt draws on $lX{!
here. 27 One depicted her with her maid at her bath before David's letter sidl
arrived on the scene. This is the subject of Rembrandt's painting in New hu
York. It was made in 1643 before the letter fad began. The oth er depicted in l
David's letter being delivered. The bath scene enabled the artist to emphasize 151
Bathsheba's beauty, while the letter scene added narrative interest to this. 152
Rembrandt instead presents Bathsheba as a letter-reader. But he rejects the It
epistolary surface valued by the other letter painters for a characteristic em- this
phasis on interiority. The setting is somber. Is it a bedspread or a robe that off
Looking at Words 207

lies beside her? Where is she, inside or out? Details of appearance are not
recorded. The woman's body is exposed to our view. The firmly modeled
flesh of the solid limbs and fine face is worked not to make appearance visible,
as in other Dutch paintings , but to suggest thoughts and feelings. Interiority
is here bound to Rembrandt's insistence on the contents of the letter. It is one
more example of his disaffection from the Dutch way of looking at words.
III
We have been considering the problem of what happens to words in a
pictorial world that privileges sight. In Dutch pictures we frequently find
texts assumed into pictures as inscriptions or as letters. They take their place
among other objects represented in the pictorial world and like them are to
be seen as representations rather than as objects for interpretation. Instead of
interpretive depth we are offered a great and expansive attention to specificity
of representation . An obvious question remains, however : What happens in
such an art when it actually does present narratives? Must we not then speak
of a prior text that is evoked in a picture and conversely of a picture that must
be interpreted or read with reference to a prior text? The answer to this
question is not an unqualified yes. To an extraordinary extent the Dutch artist
did not evoke his text but believed he could carry it along with him in the
picture. He often did this by means of a device that I call captioning.
The works we shall look at are by the best-known group of narrative
painters, the so-called Amsierdam history painters. They are, somewhat
awkwardly to my mind, alsb known as the pre-Rembrandtists, since Rem-
brandt studied with at least one of them and bas ed individual works and much
of the basic project of his early work on theirs. These artists painted small ...v
narrative works for the horne, mostly biblical in subject matter, during the
first three decades or so of the seventeenth century. " One of the first things
to note about these works is the obscurity of their subject matter. It is
notoriously hard in a number of cases to figure out what has been repre-
sented. This is true also of Rembrandt's works-most particularly his biblical
drawings- and for similar reasons. The apparent obscurity results in both
instances from th e fact that it is not the canonical scenes of Catholic Church
painting but rather the myriad printed illustrations accompanying Protestant
readings of the Bible that lie behind them. The tendency to present unusual 'It
and therefore hard-to-identify subjects from the Old Testament as well as the
format of individual scenes has been traced back to its roots in an illustrative
sixteenth-century tradition. As examples of this kind of unu sual scene con-
sider the following works by Lastman and Venant: David giving Bathsh eba's
husband, Uriah, the letter to his commander in the field ordering his death
in battle (fig. 150); the angel addressi;'g Tobit and Tobias in departure (fig. </
151); an angel conversing with Abraham about Sarah before their tent (fig.
152); David and Jonathan discussing Saul's attitude toward David (fig. 153).
It is curious how many works by these artists present conversations. Once
this feature is called to our attention, it is hard not to be aware of the number
of figures in any image with heads bent, mouths open, hands flung out. The
208 Chapter Five

150 . P IETER L ASTMAN, David Giving the Letter to Uriah, 1619. Dienst Verspreid e
Ri jkscollektie, Th e H ague.

153. FRA'
The Angel Addressing the Family of Tobias in Departure. Statens
151. P IETER LASTMAN, Instr
Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.
Looking at Words 209

152. PIETER L ASTMAN, Abraham and the A ngels, 16 16. Pri vate collection.

153. FRANC:;OIS VENA NT, David an d Jonathan. Fondation Custodia (col1. Frits Lu gt).
beTf'. Statens Institut Neerlandais , Paris.
210 Chapter Five

154. P IETER LASTMAN, Susanna and the Elders, 1614. Gemaldegalerie, Staadiche Museen
Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (West).

155. P ETER P AUL R UBENS, Susanna and the Elders. A lee P inakOthek, Munich. to
Looking at Words 211

W 6 L,
WE D6l-EN t-J6Et0€E,
E !!i tV ;:>qq R K LRPOctV un we. ZluI'V
StV . .. OND6\ZHRrvD€
we:
1'£Kl e:R5£t>J0 cc"
\)cQ-
GIBRc;lV .

156. Frames from Asterix en de Belgen (1979, p. 33). © DARGAUD 1982 by Goscinny and
Udcrzo.

figures are not, in the accepted Italian manner, acting out inner feelings
through their gestures. With arms characteristically and awkwardly flayed
Out they are busy gesturing in accompaniment to spoken words. A particu-
larly striking example of this phenomenon is Lastman's Susanna and the
Elders (fig. 154). Rather than sneaking up and leaping out at her with lust
straining and tensing every limb, th ese elders stop to talk. We might compare
th;s painting with a work by Rubens, whose Italianate bent can serve as a
useful foil to the Dutch (fig. 155). In contrast to Lastman's conversing figures,
a leap over the garden wall and a face thrust between the branches of the
nearest tree dramatize the desires of the elders and the urgency of their
demands. Susanna, for her part, rather than seeking to make a reply, cowers
in fear. Rubens expects the viewer to interpret bodily gestures as signs of
invisible feelings. Lastman, on the other hand, expects the viewer instead to
supply the missing words, to imagine a caption or a visible text.
Behold the garden doors are shut, that no man can s"f us and we are in love
with thee;. therefore consent unto us and lie with ul. If thou wilt not, we
will bear witness against thee, that a young man was with thee; and there-
fore thou didst send away thy maids with thee. Then Susanna sighed and
said, I am straightened on every side: for if I do this thing it is death to
me ....

The words spoken by the elders and Susanna in the biblical text implicitly
exist as if in balloons over the heads in Lastman's picture. In its relating
of word and image the painting is akin to that most familiar instance of
inscribed words, the cartoon (fig. 156). Indeed, it is in comic strips such as
Asterix that to this day we find gestures similar to those employed by Lastman
to accompany speech .'"
212 Chapter Five

In making this comparison between Lastman and Rubens I chose a scene

that is canonical. It should be remembered, however, that the majority of the
scenes painted by these Dutch artists are not familiar through repeated, inde-
pendent representations. They suppose a different relationship to the text on
which they are based than would a canonical scene. Rather than serving as a
mnemonic device to recall well-known texts, they come out of an illustrative
tradition that assumes that a text in some form will accompany them on the
page. The notion of what is representable is thus different. While in the Italian
tradition artists assume that there are certain significant moments that call for
representation, th e northern artist assumes that the number of possible illus-
, trations for any text is infinite. Bathsh eba's bath exists in the midst of the rest
of the things that happen in the Book of Samuel: David giving the letter to
Uriah, the prophet Nathan admonishing King David over Uriah's death
(drawn at least four times by Rembrandt [fig. 157]), and much else. The aim
is to make the entire surface of the text visible. It is essentially an additive or
serial notion that seeks to describe (or illustrate) everything that goes on
rather than trying to narrate in depth a few significant events.
To make clear what I mean by the difference between descriptive surfaces
and narrated depth let us contrast the Dutch illustrations with the Italian
Renaissance recipe for pictorial narrations: through the visible actions of the
body, through gesture and facial expression, the artist can present and the
viewer can see the invisible feelings or passions of the soul. This notion of
pictorial narration had its roots in the art of antiquity and drew in time on an
established vocabulary of bodily movements and gestures familiar to artist
and viewer. The massacre of the innocents was considered a showpiece for
this kind of pictorial narrating. It gave the artist the opportunity to display
the heightened feelings of multitudes: cruel soldiers, despairing mothers, and
dying children. In his Massacre of the Innocents (fig. 158) Rubens calls on
established figures - types such as the dying Laocoon (in the put-upon soldier
at the left) - to assist him in the articulation of the passions . To "read" such
a picture is to imagine the passions suggested by it. The use of expressive
figure typ es, but more basically the very notion of the expression of invisible
feelings, does not obtain in the north. It is important to recognize this factor
when attempting to explain the frequent awkwardness displayed by fi gures in
northern works. We should try to explain them not by an appeal from
art to nature, as is commonly done, but by an appeal to ",different notion of
art. Their awkwardness is not due to a naturalistic bent, or to the personal
view of the artist (through this may playa part), but to a different notion of
a picture and of its relationship to a text. 31
As it happens, Rubens himself offers most interesting testimony to this. So
far in this chapter, I have invoked Rubens as offering an alternative to the
northern tradition . But his artistic strengths came as much from the traditions
to which he was h eir by birth as from the southern ones that he ambitiously 158. F
took on. In works such as his Ovidian designs for a hunting lodge of Philip
IV of Spain, he employs this northern illustrative mode. J2 If one comes to
Looking at Words 213

.l scene

:v of the
-ed, inde- I ,

the text on
servIng as a
illustrative
them on the
in the Italian
that call for
"ble ill us-

II
,
surfaces f
the Italian
,erions of the
and the
"-
157. REMBRANDT VAN RIJ N , Na than
- -- ---
Admonishing David (drawing). Kupferscichkabinett. 5taatli che
Museen Preussischer Ku lturbesitz, Berlin (West).

to artist
for
to display
jnoith er"S, and
calls on
soldier
such
e.xpreSSIve
of invisible
this factor
by fi gures in
appeal from
notion of
personal
notion of

to the
traditions
ambitiously 158 . P ETER PAUL RU BENS, The Massacre of the Innocents . Alte Pinakothek. Munich.
of Philip
comes to
214 Chapter Five

Rubens's Torre de la Parada sketches fresh from viewing the Dutch works it
becomes clear that a number fit into our category of captioned conversations:
Apollo answering Cupid's verbal challenge (fig. 159); M-inerva chatting with
Cadmus; or most surprising, given th e precedent of Titian, Bacchus talking
to Ariadne on the shore. The representation of such speaking figures intro-
duces a particular tension into these works. Rubens's accustomed use of
established fi gural motives is visibly disrupted. We see the graceful Apollo
Belvedere, poised as he rel eases his arrow, appearing awkward as he turns to
argue with Cupid. Developing my previous interpretation of these works
furth er, I would now say that the comic (Ovidian) view of the gods in this
series is achieved by combining a southern cast of characters with the illustra-
tive mode of the north. If we ask why Rubens took up the northern mode on
this occasion, the answer must surely lie in the demonstrable relationship
between these works and the tradition of illustrated printed editions of Ovid.
Though destined to hang in a hunting lodge, they were designed on the model
of works made to accompany a printed text. These works by Rubens offer
confirmation of the illustrative intent of the captioned narrative mode.
The idiosyncracies of the pre-Rembrandtists have not gone unnoticed. But
their tendency to cleave to the surface of the text and their interest in con-
versation have until now been interpreted in other terms. It is, first of all, to
religious rather than pictorial values that these phenomena have been related. 159.
I have no disagreement with the supposition that their attention to the surface
of the text was reinforced by the sixteenth-century commitment-apparently actual
shared by both Protestant and Catholics-to the literal interpretation of the
Bible. " There are, however, many interpretive strategies toward texts that do
not have a pictorial counterpart. The humanists, for example, were profes- that
sional interpreters who were dead set against pictorial illustrations, since to stage ?
them illustration was achieved in (and in fact meant) verbal rather than picto- Rembr.
rial comentary. H The possibility of representing a text literally depends on a th eater
basic assu mpti on about the nature of images and their relationship to texts. other
The fact that such pictorial handling extended to texts other than the Bible, should
to mythological themes for example, would seem to confirm this. I am less made n
convinced by th e argument that scenes of conversation are the result of a text.
theol ogical interest in gripping scenes of discourse and recognition. I find The]
little that is gripping about the Lastman and Venant that we have looked at, the nex
and I think that here the atti tud e toward the pictorial representation of such as
narrative is the cause. gomaSti
Another promin ent context in which the work of the Amsterdam history Fabriti!
painters has been understood is the theater. These works, so it is argued, are will n01
essentially painted plays that share themes, talk, tableaux, and sometimes Leper's
settings with the contemporary theater. There is something attractive about Naam.,
this point. Artists had long taken part in the theatrical and literary doings of another
Chambers of Rhetoric, and a certain amount of information has been gath- monstn
ered that relates particular artists among the pre-Rembrandtists to authors the cur>
writing for the stage and to the Amsterdam theater itself. A few paintings have III maJo
been identified as representations of characters in plays or as illustrations of depict a
Looking at Words 215

159 . P ETER P AUL RUBENS, Apollo and the Py thon (o il sketch ). Mu seo del Prado, Madrid.

actual performances. J5 But what does this relationship alert us to about the
painting or about th e plays? And what does it say about precedent in this
matter? Does illustrating a play mean making a theatrical image in the sense
that we mean that word when we casually invoke the dramatic action on the
stage? Our analysis of the essentially undramatic works of the pre-
Rembrandtists suggests that this is not true. Did painters learn from the
theater or, as has in fact been recently suggested, did th e influ ence work the
other way? " The appeal to the th eater, li ke the appeal to matters of faith,
should also take into account the strong and historic descriptive bias that
,,-made northern painters assume that there was a certain way to represent a
text.
The penchant for what I have called captioned conversations continues in
the next generation's painters, in particular among srudents of Rembrandt
such as Ferdinand Bo!. A sketch that Bol made for the work in the bur-
gomaster's room in the Amsterdam Town Hall represents the Roman consul
Fabritius gesturing in conversation as he tells King Pyrrhus that his elephant
will not scare him into surrendering (fig. 160). And in a painting for, th e
Leper's H ouse in Amsterdam, Bol presents Elisha at the door explaining to
Naaman that he canhot accep t his gift (fig. 161). J7 A painting could , and in
another tradition wou ld, show Fabritius standing fast as h e confronted the
monstrous elephant , or Elisha (in the next scene) punishing his servant with
the curse of leprosy because he had accepted Naaman's forbidden gift. Even
in major works designed for public view such as these, the opportunity to
depi ct a dramatic scene is not taken up. Instead, Bol has recourse once again
216 Chapter Five

160. FERDINAND BOL , Tbe Intrepidity of Fabritius in

the Camp of King Pyrrhus (oi l sketch). Collecti on 162. '
Amsterdam Histori cal Mu seum. Amsterdam. (

to de
abser
capt!,
Th
begal
nonl
a con
sou l
straH
feren
It ,
tICse
whic
has n
capt!
embl
spok
161. F£RDINAl\,IQ BOL , Elisha Refuses Naaman's Gifts, 166 1. Collection Amsterdam mott
Histo ri cal Mu seum, Amsterdam. 162).
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l)le fonder witte \'e{w. def menfchen hertc "lngt'n;
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Let ny op u gdl el, u luyr en gamfeh gd.let,
Let vry hOI: Uhct oogh, en a1 het fi.1cr,
gecf. u met lUeen urn uwen douck te fdllCkrn,
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500

162. HEick spiegelt hem selven," in JACOB CATS, Spiegel van den Ouden en Nieuwen Tyt
(Th e Hague , 1632), pp. 12- 13. Courtesy of th e Royal Lib rary, Th e Hague.

to depicted conversation, to a form of narration that does not dramatize an

absent text but rather seeks to carry its word into the work in implied
captions, much as a cartoon does.
The practice of captioning assumes a parity between image and text. We
began this chapter by setting this notion of a visible text against the assump-
tion that a text invokes depths beneath the surface offered by the image. It was
a commonplace at the time to speak of th e picture as the body, the text as the
soul of an invention. This anatomy of an emblem was in effect a hermeneutic
strategy for interpreting all images. But in Holland emblems also were dif-
ferent.
--It has been noted that Dutch emblems differ-not the least in th eir domes-
tic settings-from the tradition in other countries. But the particular way in
which some of them depart from the assumed relationship of word to image
has not been noted. It provides an appropriate coda to our discussion of the
captioned picture. As far as I can discover, Cats is alone among European
emblematists in presenting the text accompanying the image as if it were
spoken by one of the figures in the image. Let us take the emblem with the
motto "Elck spiegelt hem selven," meaning each one mirrors himself (fig.
162).38 A woman is picrured seated in her room at a dressing table, her face
218 Chapter Five

reflected in the mirror, with an old man standing at her side. The motto is
above the image. Underneath, extending onto the next page, is a lengthy text
explicating the meaning. But the text underneath is introduced in the margin
by the words "De O ude Man spreeckt." And if we look back at the image we
see that the man is indeed represented in the now familiar stance of one
speaking. The words of the explanatory text are being spoken by the man
represented in the image. In other words, the picture within the emblem is
also captioned. It is not a unique case in Cats's book. The implications of this
for the parity assumed between a text and an image are no different from what
we found in the biblical paintings. However, it does make a difference that
this parity is inserted into an emblem, because emblems served as a model for
the relationship of word and image. Rather than treating the text as the soul
of the emblem, implying that the text contributes a deeper level of meaning
than the superficial image, Cats treats the text as a caption to the image. Even
\ in the case of emblems, the text and image are treated as equals.
We are far from accounting for the nature of all Dutch history painting in
this discussion of those paintings I have called captioned. There were, how-
ever, enough such pictures assembled in the recent international exhibition of
Dutch history paintings to make the staff of the sponsoring museum stage a
witty (and appropriate) contest to see who could provide the best caption for
each painting. J9 The penchant for captioned words engages a number of
further issues, including not only the relationship of word and image but also
the notion of depicted gesture or actions. Rather than being expressive of
inner feelings-affetti, as the Italians called them-many northern figures
tend to be what I would call performative. By this I mean that a figure is
described in terms of an action performed , be it speaking, dancing, playing,
or whatever. This tradition dates back at least to the old Pieter Bruegel. This
ease with described figures, with what indeed is a particular view of human
nature, is basic to the northern fascination with depicted proverbs. This also
dates back at least to Bruegel. By their nature proverbs define people in
performative terms-he who hits his head against the waIf, he who wears a
blue cloak, and so forth. And proverbs bring us back again to word and
image. For proverb paintings assume and, as in the case of a number of works
by Jan Steen (figs. 163,164), can display captions. It is a category into which
many of the Dutch emblems also fit.
I would like to let Rembrandt have the last word, or perhaps better, the last
picture. Rembrandt was a student and follower of the Amsterdam history
painters. But he disputed their trust in visibility, their trust that the world and
its texts were known by the eye. Julius Held has argued in a powerful essay
that Rembrandt introduced a new way to represent the spoken word in art. 40
Common,..ractice had been to show either two people speaking at once or a
subsequent action taking place even as words were spoken. Rembrandt char-
acteristically represents someone speaking and being listened to. Held's prime
example among many is Rembrandt's etching Abraham and Isaac, which
shows them stopping on their journey to the mountain (fig. 165). Isaac has
164. JAN
Looking at Words 219

163. JAN STEEN, " Easy Come, Easy Go," 1661. Museu m Beuningen,
Rotterdam .

--
164. J AN STEEN, detail of fi g. 163 (inscription).
220 Chapter Five

asked his father a question and is listening attentively, unmoving, as his

father, with his hand raised in address, speaks to him. Held is surely right that
Rembrandt is trying to represent an actual conversation. What is at stake for
him is his deep respect for the power of words and the privilege that he gives
to the sense of hearing. Rembrandt shows the spoken word to be a prime way
of bringing or binding people together.
In view of what we have seen of the captioned conversations of Rem-
brandt's predecessors and followers, we could put this in slightly different
terms. Rembrandt's interest in represented conversations follows from the
works of his teacher Lastman. But Rembrandt in effect takes our eyes off the
captions. He effectively does away with them. He dwells on the human
relationship before us by suggesting words that cannot be seen. Rather than
depicting gestures used in accompaniment of speech, "speaking people" who
"\ focus our attention on what is being said, Rembrandt in the Abraham and
Isaac etching focuses our attention on the relationship between speaker and
listener. 41 This interplay between speaker and listener is studied in an extraor-
dinary number of his works. Even when the subject of the conversation
remains unidentifiable (Rembrandt also followed his teachers in this), we can
make out the intricacy and complexity of a human exchange. Indeed, one can
measure Rembrandt's distance from the captioned conversations of the other
artists by looking at those scenes of instruction or preaching in which it is the
aura of the word rather than any particular wisdom imported that Rembrandt
represents. We shall never know what is being said by Anslo to his wife in the
portrait in Berlin (fig. 136), nor what is being said by Christ to the small circle
of assembled listeners in the etching known (for want of a specific occasion)
as Christ Preaching (fig. 166). These preaching figures, with their hands in
motion and their heads turned to attendant listeners, speak out of the fullness
of a knowledge that we must trust without its being visible. Rembrandt
accepts neither the high Catholic miracle of the Word made flesh nor the low
Dutch trust to the look of the world. His obsession with the nature of the
invisible Word that related God to man plays a major role in his under-
standing of both the nature of faith and the nature of pictures. In keeping with
his dismissal of inscribed words and epistolary surface, it represents a rejec-
tion of the Dutch trust to looking at words."

166. R H
Rijl
Looking at Words 221

IDll mleway

of Rem-
different
from the
off the

165. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN , Abraham and Isaa c

(etching), 1645. Teylers Museu m, Haarl em.

166. REMBRANDT VAN R IJN, Christ Prea ching (etchi ng) . By courtesy of the
Rijksmuseum-Stichti ng, Amsterdam.
Epilogue:
Vermeer and Rembrandt

M y account of Dutch art in the sev-

enteenth century has concentrated on defining the distinctive system of con-
ventions, governing metaphors, intellectual assumptions, and cultural prac-
tices in which that art was grounded. Though I have not attempted to deal
with all th e 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
confirmati on of the interpretation. Rembrandt and Vermeer are p olar op-
posites in this resp ect: 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 critiqu e of the art of describing from without, the art of Vermeer
takes its measure from within.
I shall do no more here by way of an epilogu e 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 conclud e with , is the manner in which Vermeer refined and defined this
sense of image-making and of knowledge.
Let me introduce this p oint 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 th e Netherlands, which is claimed by Vermeer to be of his own making,
presents and makes central a mapping mode of picturing. And Vermeer
furth er confirms the relationship between picture-maker and maker of maps
in his two pai ntings of professional men, the Astronomer and the Geographer.
However, while it is like a map, it would be wrong to conclude that Vermeer
natUl

\ 222
Epilogue: Vermeer and Rembrandt 223

sh ows 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 map maker's concerns. Ver-
meer 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 abou t 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 th e
theme is singular. The total absence of children in his works , for examp le, 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.
To show what I mean, let us look once more at the passage attributed by
Francisco de Hollanda to Michelangelo and give special attention to its
reference to women:
the sev-
F lemish painting ... wi ll ... please the devout better than any painting
of Italy. It will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very
you ng, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no
sense of true harmony. In Flanders th ey 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 stuffs 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 p ersons, 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 turn to a fifteenth -century Italian handbook
on painting written by Cennin o Cenillni:
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 . .2
To sayan art is for women is to reiterate that it displays not measure or order,
bu t rather a flood of observed, unmediated details dra wn 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 Hollanda is its analogue in a particular
ermeer
mode of art-an art that is not like ideal, beautiful women, but like ordinary
of maps
immeasurable ones.
It is fitting, given such a view, that Vermeer presents the ungraspable
ermeer
nature of the world seen and poses the basic problem of a descriptive art in

\
224 Epilogue: Vermeer and Rembrandt

me form of repeated images of women. How do we relate to the presence of

me prior world seen? In his depiction of women, Vermeer mematizes 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.
In a mature work such as the Amsterdam Woman Reading a Letter (fig. 147),
the quality of the paint and the quality of the rendering engage human
implications that are rare in Dutch art. Vermeer recognizes me world present
in these women as something that is omer man himself and wim a kind of
passionate detachment he lets it, through them, be.
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. What-
ever bold show his eye may make of subduing and devouring, me 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 mose claims (fig. 19). 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 (fig. 61 ).
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 me first chapter while discussing the camera obscura and the portrait
historie, Rembrandt's art does not fit this model. As we have seen in the wo
juxtaposition of his Bathsheba with the letter paintings of the other Dutch, or me
in his representation of conversation, our attention to this dominant pictorial br.l
mode can help us to see Rembrandt's works precisely by suggesting' the depth p
of his estrangement from it. The idiosyncratic appearance and curious power is
of his images are, I mink, 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 rec
not a representative Dutch artist, but ramer how or in what respects was he of
such? With the rise in interest in Dutch history painting , the current fashion R<;
is to see Rembrandt as fitting comfortably into the native scene. In many ways wo
I, on the contrary, tend to agree with Kenneth Clark's remark about the paJ
surprising nature of Rembrandt's power given the arti stic world into which 16!
\ he was born. But I think that Lord Clark's Italian solution to the problem- me
his suggestion that it was the deep affection for Italian art mat proved the or
making of Rembrandt-is at best a partial truth. Fully as important as his ma
attraction for Italy was his engagement with, and to my mind his deep bal
Epilogue: Vermeer and Rembrandt 225

ambivalence toward, his own traditi on. Rembrandt's idiosyncracy is that he

not only turned away from art of describing, but also from the il
Itaban notIon of narratIve pamtIng. .
We might start with the characteristic technique, the handling of paint in 1
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 theJewish Bride (fig.
S), the Prodigal Son, or the Oath of Julius Civilis (fi g. 167) 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 to soak up the ink, obscure linear definition in a striving for tonal
effects. 5
It is not commonly noted that in choosing to associate himself with mem- I
bers of the group of artists known today as the Amsterdam history painters, Ii
Rembrandt chose as his models precisely those Dutch artists who were least I
concerned with the craft of representation. Far from aiming to fool and thus
win the eye of the observer, Lastman leaves his surfaces rough, undescriptive
and , by comparison with other Dutch artists, even ugly. For him it is the tale
that counts. In choosing to work in this illustrative tradition with its signifi -
cant themes, Rembrandt also rejected the crafted surfaces of a De G heyn or
a Saenredam. 6
Notwithstanding the traditional representational skills that Rembrandt
does display in a number of works (his portraits of the 1630s, for example,
and his landscape drawings), over his career as a whole he was true to his
chosen path. But the scumbled paint and worked surfaces of the mature
works make something totally unexpected out of the awkward laying on of
the paint and the denial of craft common in the work of his teachers. Rem-
brandt shows, by transforming, what can be done with a facture that is not
primarily descriptive in intent. His engagement with the working of the paint
is an alternative to the crafting of descriptive surfaces.
Rembrandt shared the Dutch artist's avid taste for fin ery: every viewer can
recall the glimmer of his helmets and swords, the glow of jewels, the density
of robes woven, it would seem, with threads of gold. In his art, as in his life,
Rembrandt was a proud possessor. But though this taste continues in hi s later
works, Rembrandt gives us to understand it differently. If we compare his
painted garments to the silks of Ter Borch, or his goblet to those of Kalf (fig.
168), it appears that Rembrandt has forsaken that competition among crafts-
men which was so enabling to other artists. There is no confusing his stuffs
or his crystal with crafted objects seen. Rembrandt, instead, settles for the
materiality of his medium itself. His paint is something worked as with the
bare hands-a material to grasp, perhaps, as much as to see. It, not the world
226 Epilogue: Vermeer and Rembrandt

167. R EMBRANDT VAN R iJ N, The Oath of Juliu s Civ ilis, 1661, Nationalmu seum,
StOckholm.

Innumen
blindin g
they am
non to t
palnnngs
scribe: ar
168. REMBRANDT VAN RIJ N,
d etai l of fig. 167
though i
(gob let). (or the 'V
169 . R EM BRANDT VAN RIJN, Remb
derail of fig. 167 (sword tlme pas
and blinded eye) . for him
227

170 . R EMBRA NDT VAN

RIJ N, Homer
Dictating, 1663.
Mauritshuis, The
H ague.

seen, becomes his frame of reference. In the Jewish Bride, Prodigal Son, or
Julius Civilis, paint is acknowledged as that common matter, like the very
earth itself in the biblical phrase, out of which the figures emerge and to which
they are bound to return. 7
In turning away from the craft of representation, Rembrandt also turns
away from the certainty and knowledge attributed by Dutch culture and its I
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 art of the time. We find
innumerable renderings of the apocryphal story of Tobit and some even of th e
blinding of Argus. But Rembrandt's images are memorable in the authority
they attribute to those who lack sight. One thinks in particular of hi s atten-
tion to the blind Homer in the fragment that remains of one of hi s late
paintings (fig. 170). The aged Homer is represented dictating to a young
scribe: an unseeing speaker speaking words that remain unseen. Paradoxical n
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.
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
228 Epilogue: Vermeer and Rembrandt

beside the instantanous 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 Rem-
brandt'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 ofJulius 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 Nether-
lands against Spain. Rembrandt represented the ancestors of the Dutch en-
gaged 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
(fig. 169). 8 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. For a leading contemporary painter like Caesar van
Everdingen , the historical is that which the artist can put illusionistically
before our eyes (fig. 171). (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 theDutch insistence
on accommodating the past to what is present to the eyes.

catch l
that n
As
misle:3
are
17 1. CAESA R VAN E VERDI NG EN,Duke Willem /I Granting mearu
Privileges to the High Office of the Dike-Reeve of
Rijnland in 1255, 1655. Copyright Stichtin g the C"l
Lichtbeeldenin stitut, Amsrerdam.
and
- of
ern-
f"\'en
what
and Appendix:
On the Emblematic Interpretation
of Dutch Art

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 repeat-
edly 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. De Jongh
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
formu la (surprising in view of the look of the art) that Dutch art is a realized
abstraction.
Rejecting the radically reductiv e view that Dutch art is a mirror of reality,
De Jongh 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 De Jongh '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 ou t by the viewer of the image with the help of
the caption or motto (usually above) and the epigram or commentary (below)

229
230 Appendix

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. 2 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. 3
There are several important respects in which Dutch emblems in general do
not fit the principles on which the Italians meant them to stand. Though the
tradition is rich, it is not misleading to focus on Jacob Cats as being the most
prominent author of emblem books and the one most prominently connected
toDutch painting. The great majority of Cats's emblems are illustrated prov-
erbs with commentary attached. They are by their very nature common-
places, examples of shared rather than of arcane wisdom. Far from being
totally unintelligible without an exercise of wit, the images are easily grasped,
couched as they are in the actions, dress, and domestic settings of Dutch
society. Though Cats's prefaces refer to the delights of uncovering veiled
meanings, he actually offers his reader or viewer little to puzzle over. Indeed,
in his rambling prefatory remarks the formula of uncovering hidden meanings
is only one of a number of explanations that Cats offers for proverbial
emblems.' His appeal to proverbs as offering knowledge of the behavior and
even displaying the dress of different peoples is borne Out in the examples of
Dutch mores that illustrate his books. Far from being a world of hieroglyphs,
alchemy, and other such assertions of unexpected correspondances, this is
more like an early ethnography. And though he did not go on to picture the
proverbs of other peoples, Cats in his later editions multiplied equivalent
sayings in Spanish, French, Italian, and other languages across the bottom of
his pages as evidence of the persistence of a common wisdom among different
peoples. Though the proverbs individually constitute moral wisdom and offer
moral guidance, their assemblage in a Cats volume presents us with a cata-
logue of human behavior that is a successor in this respect to a painting like
Pieter Bruegel's Proverbs. The total effect, it might be argued, is more de-
scriptive than prescriptive, as much taxonomic as didactic.
It will certainly be countered that this way of putting it ignores the fact that
Cats, like the other Dutch, took his moral views very seriously indeed. It
would be foolhardy to deny this. But I wish to draw attention to the effect
that the Dutch mode of emblematic presentation has on the way one takes
these views. It cannot be argued that Dutch emblems or the paintings related
to them are curious and inventive in respect to their consideration of our
moral existence. What they are curious and inventive about is representation.
My emphasis on this does not question the moral concerns of the culture as
much as it draws attention to the particular way in which those concerns were
expressed.
ver$I O ]
De Jongh has explained the distinctive look of Dutch emblems with
reference to the Dutch preference for realism. He assumes that this preference He wa
Appendix 231

E'rope. does not affect the nature or function of the emblem. Mario Praz, however,
"","'" m to pointed out long ago that while the Italians strove to outdo themselves in
pedantic definitions of the emblem, in other countries the word took on vague
meanings. Far from conforming to certain precepts, an emblem was almost
synonymous with an illustration, or with an illustration accompanied by
words. 5
Rather than appealing to the tradi tion of the image as the body and the
textual meaning as the soul of an emblem, which De Jongh in effect does, I
think we should try to give a more ample account of the nature of Dutch
emblems. 6 On the basis of Cats's books alone, I want to offer a few pre-
liminary suggestions in this direction. First of all, they can be said to display
the same easy relationship between word and image that we have already
found in Dutch paintings. Rather than posing a puzzle to be solved, motto I
and image are unproblematic. Verbal and pictorial sign are equated in a '
manner similar to the way Comenius related word and image in his Orbis
Pictus. We have in short something more like a picture language than like
hidden meanings. ' Furthermore, as we have just seen in the course of our
discussion of captioning, Cats is unique in often presenting the legend below
as spoken by a figure within the image. Meaning is not to be sought beneath
or behind the surface of the page but is made visible on it. This view of the
relationship between meaning and the surface of the page is literally built into
the extraordinary plan of his earliest emblem book. Cats's Silenus Alcibiades
of 1618 is the only example I know in the whole of Europe of an emblem book
in which the three traditional levels of meaning-amorous, moral, and
religious- are represented through the device of replicating the entire set of
illustrations three times over with different mottos and legends each time
(figs. 172, 173, 174).
Other problems with the emblematic interpretation arise when we turn to
the paintings themselves. The devotion to the crafting of the painted surface
a cata- can only serve, in the current view, to lead us to a hidden, textual meaning,
timing like usually a moral injunction. This represents too simple a view of what seems
to have been a Dutch obsession with behavior or possessions that they both
loved and feared, celebrated and condemned. 8 It effectively insists on a gap
between the surface and the meaning of works. Further, in those cases in
which a textual meaning cannot be found, as in a recent study of The Sentry
by Fabritius or some late works by De Hooch, scholars find themselves in the
awkward position of claiming that powerful and accomplished pictures
probably had no intended meaning. '
By adjusting what we think a Dutch emblem is like and how it means, we
can profitably see Dutch paintings as being like painted emblems even as De
Jongh's work suggests. In the painted form, the working surface gains a new
kind of articulation through the display of the painter's craft. The great effort
that Dou, for example, put into making his brushless, clear surfaces is one
with version of the painterly transformation of attention to the surface of the page.
He was wont, on occasion, to use the triptych format to differentiate between
232 Appendix

J ""'''''."' .i.1 Ar.

/. ,,,,, .. r;
,A.. ."
.. .In....

172. J ACOB CATS, Sitenus

Alcibiades (Middelburg,
1618), book I, pp. j\
24- 25. Courtesy of the A.
,. ()

Roya l Library, The 11.'

Hague.

" ,\1 L \ . \ \ ' 0 ".

'"

A u!.• , lptlr j" li d!. " ,,,J""UII-

175.

173 . JACOB CATS, Silenus ,",

Alcibiades (Middelburg, - >-

161 8), book II , pp. L

l><bNi<<<I_". .u .......'. ..\ use
26- 27. C ourtesy of the ,
.,.'...··4 I
Royal Library, The
Hague. and the
the ac
,
r , " , '
"
\ \ ',',: • "I
1,.,'....
,,,-,,I,
I ,,, ,,,.. 01,
l' •
I . ...... 1>.
,-

174. J ACOB CATS, Silenus

Alcibiades (M iddelburg,
16 18), book III, pp.
26- 27. Courtesy of the
Royal Li brary, The
Hague.
yes, the n
Appendix 2]]

175. ANONYMOUS. Northern Netherlandish School, Couple with Child. By

courtesy of the Rijksmus eum -Stichting, Amsterdam.

meanings that Cats articulated in the three reprintings of his emblems. The
use of this pictorial language the meaning of which is visible can lead to very
,- . idiosyncratic images indeed: the scattering of objects on a Steen floor or table
and the pointed yet disconnected gestures of the people gathered in his inns;
the accumulation of human motifs in the street before Dou's quack; or the
p lacing of a married couple and their child beside the ocean from which
protrude twO most unlikely rocks (figs. 60, 175). It is not a notion of hidden
meanings that produces such works, but rather the notion of a world that is
understood in terms of an assemblage of visibly accessible meanings . Steen's
display of the pleasures and dangers of festivity, Dou 's catalogue of human
behavior, or the description of a sturdy marriage as a rock are presented under
the aspect of describing the world even though they contradict the look of
actual situations in the world.
To return to a theme of this book: if there is any veil between image and
meaning, if there is any indirection in these works, it is, as acknowledged by
Dou in his Quack, in the deceptiveness of the representation itself. This is
more the work of a skilled hand addressing an attentive eye than the work of
a learned mind. Approached in this spirit, a study of the deployment of the
emblematic mode has much to tell us about the order and presentation and,
yes, the meaning of Dutch images.
5

subci '"
ness Oi: --
between ...
sevemee:.-
in Reali <
of lirera..-.
modes \\1:::
nature of
Roland B.,
susp ensIon
often consi
Notes

Jntroduction
I. Joshua Reynolds, The Works . . . containing his Discourses . .. [and]A Journey
to Flanders and Holland . .. , 4th ed., 3 vols. (London, 1809),2:359,360; 361 - 62;
363- 64.
2. Ibid., p. 369.
3 . Eugene Fromentin, The Masters of Past Time, trans . Andrew Boyle, ed. Horst
Gerson (London and New York: Phaidon, 1948), p . 97.
4. Ibid., p . 115 .
5. Ibid., p. 10 I.
6. Ibid., p. 103.
7. Ibid., p. 128 .
8. For an extended discussion of this point, see Svetlana Alpers, "Style is What
You Make It: The Visual Arts O nce Again, " in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), pp. 95-117.
9. See Alois Riegl , Stilfragen (Berlin , 1893), Spiitromische Kunstindustrie (Vi-
enna, 1901 ), Das holliindische Grupp enp ortriit (Vienna, 193 1; originally published in
1902), and Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom (Vienna, 1908), published
posthumously; Otto Pacht, Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis: Ausgewiihlte
Schriften (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1977); Laurence Gowing, Vermeer (London:
Faber and Faber, 1952); Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance
Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980); Michael Fried, A bS01ption and
Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the .ige of Diderot (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: U niversity of California Press, 1980).
10. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 2 vols . (Cambridge : Harvard
University Press, 1953), 1:182.
11. «We still operate very much within the Aristotelian concept of action , wh ich
suggests that description be viewed as secondary, and purely functional, or merel y
decorative." This introductory sentence to a recent issue of Yale French Studies,
subtitled "Towards a Theory of Description" (1981, no. 61), reveals a general aware-
ness of the problem. I argued at greater length for the importance of the distinction
between description and narration to Renaissance painting in general and to
seventeenth-century pain ting in particular in my "Describe or Narrate?: A Problem
in Realistic Represenration," New Literary History 8 (1 976-77) :15-41. In the stud y
of li terary texts recent work has distinguished between narrative and descriptive
modes with the suggestion that the interplay between the two is built into the very
nature of (our) culture. Be it termed utopian by Louis Marin, or " I'effet de reel " by
Roland Barthes, or displaced violence by Leo Bersani, the pleasurable effect of the
suspension of narrative action in the name of delight in representational presence is
often considered to be essential to the nature of images. The nature and status of

235
236 Notesto Pages xxii-xxiv

images is, however, somewhat more complicated man thi s view implies, as a circum-
stantial study of seventeenth -century Dutch art will show. First, because a similar
distinction between description and narrativ e can be made within the tradition of
Western images, and second, because far from being th e id eal suspension of a restless
narrative mode , descriptive images, in the seventeenth century at least, were central
to th e society'S active comprehension of th e world.
12 . J. Q. va n Regrcren Altena, "The Drawings by Pieter Saenredam," in Cata-
logue Raisonne of the Works of Pieter Jansz . Saenredam (Utrecht: Centraal Mu-
seum, 1961) p. 18. Though the reference to Sunday might be owed to Hegel, Van
Regteren Altena's short essay contains some of the most original and acute writing
ever done on the nature of Dutch art. For th e "Su nday of life" characterization in
Hegel , see G. W. F. Hegel, A esthetics: Lectures on Fin e Art, trans. T. M. Knox
(Oxford: Clarendon Press , 1975), 1:887.
13. The standard work is G . ]. Hoogewerff, De Bentvueghels (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), and some additional representations of rbeir satiric goings-
on are given by Th omas Kren, HChi non vuol Baccho: Roeland van Laer's Burlesque 1.
Painting abou t Dutch Artists in Rome," Simiolus 11 (1980) :63-80.
14. Francisco de Hollanda ,Four Dialogues on Painting, trans. Aubrey F. G . Bell
(London: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 15-16. eeuw,'"
15. The fam ous epitaph written by Abraham O rtelius for his friend Pieter Bruegel
refers to "works [ used to speak [of] as hardly works of art, but as of works of no. 22
Nature" ("picturas ego minime artificiosas , at naturales appelJare soleam") . See
Wolfgang Stechow, ed., Northern Renaissance Art 1400-1600, Sources and Docu-
ments in the Hi stOry of Art (Englewood Cliffs , N.}.: Prentice Hall , 1966) , p. 37.
16. The pioneering work demonstrating the relationship between D utch images
and contemporary emblems has been done by E. de Jongh. See his "Realisme en
schijnrealism e in de hollandse schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw," in Rem-
brandt en zijn tijd (Brussels: Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, 1971 ), pp. 143- 94, for a Colie , C

succint statement of this interpretive stance. The catalogue and De Jon gh's essay are For H U1
also available in a F rench edition. Huygen
17. What I am questioning is the basic art-historical notion of meaning. Its corn er-
stone is iconograph y- so named by Erwin Panofsky, who was its founding farber in 1962). B
our time. Its great achievement was to demonstrate that rep resentational pictures are
not intended solely for perception, but can be read as having a secondary o r deeper son, Cll
level of meaning. What rben do we make of the pictorial surface itself? In his seminal Sevenree
essay on iconography and iconology Panofsky clearly rbis qu estion. He and Zeit
introduces his subject w ith th e simple example of meeting a friend on th e street who gens's
lifts his hat in greeting. The blur of shapes and colors identifi ed as a man and the sense Worp, 8
rbat he is in a certain humor are called by Panofsky rbe primary or natural meaning, Huygem
but the understanding that to raise the hat is a greeting is a secondary, conventional, 3. Th
or iconographic meaning. So far we are dealing only with li fe. Panofsky's strategy is 163 1,is l
then simply to recommend transferring rbe results of this analysis from everyda y life J. A. 'J
to a work of art. So now we have a picture of a man lifting his hat. What Panofsky Bijdrage
chooses to ignore is that th e man is not present but is represented in th e pi cture. In (1897):1.
what manner, und er what conditions is th e man represented in paint on the surface was first
of th e canvas? What is needed, and what art historians lack, is a notion of represent- Constan.
ati on. For Ri chard Wol1heim , see his trenchant review of A nthony Blunt's major 4. Fa
study of Poussin in The Listener 80 , no. 2056,22 August 1968, pp. 246- 47; Erwin Autobiol
Pan ofsky, "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renais- 1969).
Notes to Pagesxxiv-2 237

sance Art," in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N .Y.: Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1955), pp. 26- 30; for an earlier attempt of my own to deal with this issue see
my "Seeing as Knowing : A Dutch Connection," Humanities in Society 1
(1978): 14 7-73.
18. See particularly Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random
House, Vintage Books, 1973).
19. E. Jane C"nnell, "The Romanization of the Gothic Arch in Some Paintings
by Pieter Saenredam: Catholic and Protestant Implications, " The Rutgers Art Re-
view 1 (1980):17- 35. The fact that it was artists of the Catholic faith (the so-called
pre-Rembrandtists) who established what is considered to be a Protestant kind of
narrative biblical painting is another example of the fluidity of boundaries and the
difficulty of sustaining confessional categori es in the interpretation of Dutch art.

Chapter One
1. For a solid and detailed study of the words used to refer to painters and their
paintings in Netherlandish handbooks and inventories of the time, see Lydia de
Pauw-de Veen, "De begrippen 'schilder', 'schilderij' en 'schilderen' in de zeventiende
eeuw," Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wet-
enschappen, Letteren en Schon e Kunsten van Belgie, Klasse der Schone Kunsten 31.
no. 22 (1969). The researches of the economist J. M. Montias into the production and
consumption of art in Holland are adding much to our understanding of the oper-
ation of the art market. But students of art must still consider how the function of
images as commoditi es affected their appearance and the way they were regarded at
the time. See J. M. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury: A Socio-Economic Analysis (Princeton University Press, 1982).
2. The most intelligent general study of Constantijn Huygens is still Rosalie L.
Colie, 'Some Thankfulnesse to Constantine' (The Hague: Martinus N ijhoff, 1956).
For Huygens's early days in England, see A. G. H. Bachrach, Sir Constantine
Huygens and Britain: 1596-1687: A Pattern of Cultural Exchange, vol. 1,
1596- 1619 (Leiden : at the University Press , 1962; London: Oxford University Press,
1962). Bachrach has continued to work on Huygens and a foretaste of his forth-
pJcrures are coming book is included in the publication of the recent symposium on Huygens's
or deeper son, Christian. See A. G. H. Bachrach, "The Role of the Huygens Family in
his seminal Seventeenth- Century Dutch Culture," Studies on Christiaan Huygens (Lisse: Swets
",esoem. He and Zeitlinger B. V., 1980), pp. 27-52. For modern editions of Constantijn Huy-
gens's poems and letters, see De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens, ed. J . A.
Worp, 8 vols. (Groningen: Wolters, 1892-98) and De briefwisseling van Constantijn
Huygens, ed. J. A. Worp, 6 vols . (The Hagu e: Martinus Nijhoff, 1911-18) .
3. The Latin manuscript, which was written between 11 May 1629 and April,
1631 , is now in the Royal Library, The Hague. The complete text was published by
J. A. Worp, "Fragment eener Autobiographie van Constantijn Huygens," in
Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het historisch Genootschap (Utrecht) 18
(1897):1- 122. My references will be to this transcription. For a Dutch translation that
was first published in 1946 and recently reissued, see A. H. Kan, De Jeugd van
Constantijn Huygens door hemzelf beschreven (Rotterdam: Ad. Donker, 1971).
4. For the nature of autobiographical writings at the time, see Paul Delany, British
Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1969).
238 NotestoPages 2-11

5. "Fragment eener Autobiographie," p. 63ff. (Assen:

6. The excerpted section on art was first published by J. A. Worp, "Constantijn number
Huygens over de schilders van zijn tijd," Oud Holland 9 (1891):106- 36. A. J. Kan, 18. l
DeJeugd van Constantijn Huygens , pp . 141-47, includes an essay by G. Kamphuis, 19. I
UConstantijn Huygens als kunstcriticus." For a considered commentary on this 20. I
section of Huygens's text, see Seymour S. Slive, Rembrandt and his Critics (The
Hague: Martinus NijhoH, 1953), pp. 9-26. use of d
7. Worp, "Fragment eener Autobiographie," p. 112. secrecy
8. On Drebbel, see Gerrit Tierie, Cornelis Drebbel (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 21. 1
1932) and L. E. Harris, The Two Netherlanders: Humphrey Bradley and Cornelis fulnesse
Drebbel (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961). 22. 1
9. Charles Ruelens and Max Rooses, Correspondance de Rubens et documents "Studiel
epistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres, 6 vols. (A ntwerp, 1887-1909), 5:153. 1967). S
The letter appears in translation in Ruth Magurn, trans. and ed . , The Letters of Peter Seven tel
Paul Rubens (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 322-23. Berkele)
10. Worp, "Fragment eener Autobiographie," p. 120. 23. (
11. Clifford Geertz, "Art as a Cultural System," Modern Language Notes 91 of re;,
(1976):1475-76 .
12. Warp, "Fragment eener Autobiographie," p. 120.
13. Ibid., p. 113.
14. For Huygens's digression on eyeglasses, see Worp, "Fragment eener Auto-
biographie," p. 100H. On the problem of who actually invented eyeglasses, see the
exhaustive study by Edward Rosen, "The Invention of Eyeglasses," Journal of the
History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 11 (1956): 13-306. The argument thadenses,
although known, were previously mistrusted has been made by Vasco Ronchi in a
number of his many publications. See, for example, his New Optics (Florence: Leo
S. Olschki, 1971), p. 25H.
15. The ruling group in Amsterdam was unusual in Europe at the time for its
interest in the natural sciences. For a brief but informative account of its interest in
novelty, which the author acutely dubs an "entrepreneurial virtue," see Peter Burke,
Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth Century Elites (London: Temple 29.
Smith, 1974), pp. 76-78. It has been suggested that even Christian Huygens shared
the practical leanings of his countrymen. In his summary of the recent international
conference, A . R. Hall made the point that "of the major figures in seventeenth-
century physica l science, Galileo, Gassendi, Pascal, D escartes, Huygens, Leibniz and
Newton, the Netherlander is the only one who is nOt markedly a philosopher. To
apply to him such a term as 'positivist' would of course be anachronistic, so that I
will simply say that his mind seems to have preferred what was concrete and factual
and to have avoided metaphysics and broad speculations." A. R. Hall in Studies on
Christiaan Huygens (Lisse: Swets and Zeitlinger B.V., 1980), p. 304.
16. A. G. H. Bachrach, Sir Constantine Huygens and Britain: 1596-1687 (Lei-
den: at the University Press, 1962; London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 7. In
his more recent work, Bachrach seems to have significantly developed his under-
34.
35 .
l'
standing of Huygens to include also his attraction toward Bacon and Drebbel. How- 36. L
ever, in his emphasis on the emblematic, theatrical, and philosophical play of these 37.
men's minds, Bachrach once again, I think, mistakes the basis of Huygens's attraction th ey, ''1
to them. See his contribution to Studies on Christiaan Huygens, pp. 46-48. Huygen
17. A. J. Worp's publication of this poem in De gedichten has been superseded (Amsten
by a new annotated edition, Dagh -werck van Constantijn Huygens, ed. F. L. Zwaan 38. f1
Notes to Pages 12-24 239

(Assen: Van Gorcum and Camp. B.V., 1973). My references will be to the line
numbers and related Huygens commentary that are common to both editions.
18. Daghwerck, Huygens's prose commentary on lines 550-58 .
:lI S, 19. Ibid., II. 562- 65.
:his 20. Huygens, De briefwisseling 1 :94. This praise for the device is not con-
Th e tradicted, as it is sometimes said, by Hu ygens's length y and infamous criticism of the
use of the camera obscura by the Dutch artist Torrentius. Huygens objects to the
secrecy of the operation, not to the use of the device itself.
21. The passage is qu oted , in translation, by Rosalie L. Colie, 'Some Thank -
fulnesse to Constantine' (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), p. 97.
22. The first modern study devoted to this kind of work is R. Wishnevsky,
"Stodien zurn 'portrai t historie' in den Niederlanden," (Ph.D . dissertation, Munich,
• ;:153 . 1967). See also Alison McNeil Kettering, " The Batavian Arcadia: Pastoral Themes in
o Peter Seventeenth Century Dutch Art" (ph.D . dissertation, University of California,
Berkeley, 1974).
23. Christian Tumpel has argued that the painting is Rembrandt's particular way
.votes 91 of representing the biblical scene of Isaac and Rebecca by making a selection ("Her-
auslosung") of central figures from the narrative. R. H. Fuchs, arguing from a formal
or rhetorical (what he terms a "voordracht") instead of an iconographic point of
view, proposes that Rembrandt allows the biblical story to heighten what is in fact
a portrait. See C hristian Tumpel, "Studien zue Ikonographi e dec Historicn Rem-
brandts: D eutung und Interpretation der Bildinhalte," Nederlands Kunsthistorisch
Jaarboek 20 (1969) : 107-98, R. H. Fuchs, "Het zogenaamde Joodse bruitje en het
probleem van de 'voordracht' in Rembrandts werk," Tijdsch rift voor Geschiedenis 82
tna (1969) :482-93 .
Leo 24. Daghwerck, n. 250-53.
25. Ibid., commentary to II. 1140- 57.
26 . Ibid., commentary to II. 1192-95.
27. Huygens, De gedichten 2:236.
28. Ibid.
29. Worp, "Fragment eener Autobi ographie, " p. 120. Colie further substantiates
Huygcns's rationalist attitudes in her short study of his attack on the omens read in to
the appearance of the Great Comet of 1681. See Rosalie L. Colie, "Constantijn
Huygens and the Rationalist Revolution," Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal en
Letterkunde 73 (1955): 193- 209.
30. Daghwerck, commentary to II. 11 98- 200.
31. F rancisco de Hollanda,Four Dialogues on Painting, trans. Au brey F. G . Bell
(London: Oxford U niversity Press, 1928), p. 16.
32. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture, ed. and trans. Cecil Gray-
son (London: Phaidon Press, 1972), p. 53.
33. Ibid.
34. Worp, "Fragment eener Autobiographia," p. 75.
35. Tacitus, Annals 4.58.3 .
36. Daghwerck, II. 560ff.
37 . For a discussion of Huygens's interest in natural knowledge, see Ignaz Mat-
they, ''De Betekenis van de N atuur en de Natuurwetenschap pen voor Constantijn
Huygens," in Constantijn Huygens: Zijn Plaats in Geleerd Europa, ed. Hans Bots
superseded (Amsterdam: University Press, 1973), pp. 334-459.
. L. Zwaan 38 . Artists today who make maps, photographic records, and earth-works chal-
240 Notes to Pages 24-32

lenge this distinction and force the issue of art and its nature in ways unimaginable
in the seventeenth century.
39. Thomas S. Kuhn, "Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the De-
velopment of Physical Science," in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Sci-
entific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp.
31 - 65. For the Merton thesis, see R. K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in
Seventeenth Century England (Bruges: St. Catherine Press, 1938).
40. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press , 1953), 1:182.

Chapter Two
1. Henry James, "In Holland," in Transatlantic Sketches, 4th ed. (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1868), pp. 382-83.
2. Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art, new ed. (New York: Harper and Row,
1976), p. 65.
3. Samuel van Hoogstraten, "Een recht natuerlijke Schildery," Inleyding tot de
Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst: Anders de Zichtbaere Werelt (Rotterdam, 1678),
p.263.
4 . In general, studies on the camera obscura and Dutch art have considered th e
device as a technical aid for making pictures and as a model for the desired "look"
of pictures . Arthur Wh eelock, Jr., for example, writes: "For Dutch artists, intent
upon exploring the world about them, the camera obscura offered a uniqu e means for
judging what a truly natural painting should look like." "Constantijn Huygens and
Early Attitudes towards the Camera Obscura," in History of Photography I, no. 2
(1977):101. But why did such a mod el of the " natural" pictu re prevail in the first
place? And what is its nature?
5. Joshua Reynolds, The Works . .. containing his Discourses . .. [and lAJourney
to Flanders and Holland . .. ,4th ed., 3 vols. (London 1809), 2:360.
6. Eugene Fromentin, The Masters of Past Time, trans. Andrew Boyle and ed.
Horst Gerson (London and New York: Phaidon, 1948), p. 142.
7. Ibid ., p. 141.
8. Ibid ., p. 128.
9. Ibid., p. 131.
10. Claudel and Pennell are quoted in the article by Heinrich Schwarz, itself
prompted by an earlier study by Charles Seymour, which was the first major attempt
to put together an argumen t for Vermeer's use of the camera obscura. See Heinrich
S. Schwarz, " Vermeer and the Camera Obscura," Pantheon 24 (1966):170,171 and
Charles Seymour, "Dark Chamber and Light-Filled Room: Vermeer and the Camera 23.
Obscura," The Art Bulletin 46 (1964):323 -31. van H.,.""",:::I
11. Daniel Fink, "Vermeer's Use of the Camera Obscura-A Comparative Zich,b.;r-,
Study," The Art Bulletin 53 (1971):493- 505, made the most comprehensive claims leyding
for the visible effect of copying after th e device in Vermeer's art. The most careful to us oc
critique of Fink is by Arthur Wheelock, Jr., Perspective, Optics, and Delft Artists
Around 1650, Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts (New York and London:
Garland Publishing, 1977), pp. 185-95.
12. Whatever view one might hold in the debate about the nature of linear per-
spective (whether it is the only exact representation of th e uniocular field of vision
or one convention for representing such a view) the contrast implicit in such state-
Notes to Pages 33-38 241

ments between culture and nature, or art and vision, effectively puts Dutch images
beyond the reach of art. For the two quotations, as well as for a useful bibliography
De- of the current literature on li near perspective, see Walter A. Liedtke's review of
Sci- Wheelock, Perspective, Optics and Delft Artists in The Art Bulletin 51 (1979) :494,
n.15; 492.
13. On the pinhole camera, see David C. Lindberg, "The Theory of Pinhole
Images from Antiquity to th e Thirteenth Century," Archive for History of Exact
Sciences 6 (1970); 299-325. I have found the most helpful study of Kepler to be
Stephen M. Straker, " Kepler's Optics: A Study in the Development of Seventeenth-
Century Natural Philosophy" (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1970). Fol-
lowing the lead of earlier work by Vasco Ronchi and Alistair C. Crombie, Straker
views Kepler as a revolutionary figure who transformed the very nature of visual
theory. See the imaginative Vasco Ronchi, Optics, The Science of Vision, trans.
Edward Rosen (New York: New York University Press, 1957) and The Nature of
Light: An Historical Survey, trans. V. Barocas (London: Heinemann, 1970); or the
more careful Alistair C. Crombie, "The Mechanistic Hypothesis and the Scientific
Study of Vision: Some Optical Ideas as a Background to the Invention of the Micro-
scope," in Historical Aspects of Microscopy, ed. S. Bradbury and G. L. E. Turner
(Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons Ltd ., 1967), pp. 3-112. For a different view that
places Kepler squarely in the tradition of thought coming out of Allhazen in the
eleventh century, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from AI-Kindi to Kepler
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
14. Johannes Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, quibus astronomiae pars
optica traditur, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Walther van Dyck and Max Caspar, 18
vols. (Muni ch : C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1937-),2:153 (hereafter cited
as G. W.). I have used the English translation with commentary "Kepler: De Modo
Visionis: A Translation from the Latin of Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena, V, 2, and
related passages on the formati on of the retinal image," Alistair C. Crombie in
Melanges Alexander Koyr', vol. 1 (Paris: H ermann , 1964), pp. 135-72.
15. Kepler, Ad Vitellionem, G. W. 2, p . 143. The translation is by Straker, p. 415.
16. Ibid., p. 151. The translation is by Crombie, pp. 147-48.
17. Ibid., p. 153. The translation is by Crombie, p. 150.
18 . Ibid., p . 186.
19. David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision, p. 202. In this matter there is no
disagreement between the medievalists' and the modernists' understanding of Kepler.
20. Laurence Gowing, Vermeer (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p. 19.
21. Kepler, Dioptrice, G. W., 4, p. 368 .
22. Ibid., p. 372.
23. "Datmen zich gewenne de dingen, eeven alsze zijn, nae te bootsen." Samuel
van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst: Anders de
Zichtbaere Werelt (Rotterdam, 1678), p. 36 (hereafter cited as H oogstraten, In-
leyding). A word is in order here about the nature of the contemporary texts available
to us on Dutch art. We have seen how, in unexpected ways, the writings of Con-
stantijn Huygens can begin to make up for the absence of other texts. This is also true
of a small number of handbooks on art from Van Mander's compendium of 1604 to
Van Hoogstraten in 1678. Though these works accept the rhetoric and most of the
categories first established by the Italian writers, a careful and attentive reading
reveals a constant interplay between Italian assumptions about the nature of arts and
northern practice. Samuel van Hoogstraten, to whom we shall return more than
242 Notes to Pages 39-41

once, is a major source of Dutch notions of art in just this way. And the passage on
drawing reveals the complex interplay between Italian assump ti ons and Dutch prac-
tice to which I just referred. For a detailed and comprehensive consideration of
Samuel van Hoogstraten's writings on art and their relationship to his works and
those by other Dutch artists, we shall have to await the completion of the current
research of Celeste Brusaci.
24. Fromentin, The Masters of Past Time, p. 128.
25. "Sullen wy het soo maecken dat yder een kan sien om dat het op sodanige
maniere gemaect is, dar her van die, of die Meester zy? neen geensins." ("Should we
do it in such a way that every one can see that a work is done in a certain manner, that
it is done by this or that Master? no, by no means") Philips Angels, Lof der Schilder-
Canst (Leid en, 1642), p. 53. Angels's praise of painting was delivered as an address
to the artists in Leiden, where in 1642 they were still denied their own guild . It reveals
much the same interplay between southern ideals and northern practices that we find
in Hoogstraten. This point seems to me suggested, though not in these terms, by the
commentary on Angels's text offered by Hessel Miedema in the December 1973 issue
of Proef, a small mimeographed publication of work in progress at the University of
Amsterdam.
26. I think it can fairly be said that the notions about the nature of the invention
of images that Panofsky assembled under the term "idea" were never central to
thinking about or making art in the north. See Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in
Art Theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (New York : Harper and Row, Icon Editions,
1958).
27. "Een dito [boeckiel vol Statu en van Rembrant nae't leven geteckent." C.
Hofstede de Groot, Die Urkunden uber Rembrandt (1575-1721) (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1906), p. 204, no. 261.
28. "Goltzius comende uyt Italien, hadde de fraey Italische schilderijen als in
eenen spieghel soo vast in zijn ghedacht ghedruckt, dat hyse waer hy was noch altijts
ghestadich sagh ." Karel van Mander, H et Schilder-Boeck . .. (Haarlem, 1604), fo1.
285' . E. K. J. Reznicek was misleading when, in a brief but influential essay, he
translated the word "geest" as meaning "imagination" and then distinguished be-
tween working "uit den geest" and "naer het leven" as two paths in Dutch art around
1600, one manneristic, the other realistic. It is th e combi nation of the two sources of
visual perception that is consistently praised by Dutch writers on art. Van Mander
says De G heyn found it necessary to work "vee! nae en met eenen uyt de
gheest te doen, am also alle redenen der Canst te leeren verstaen" (Schilder-Boeck,
fo1. 294 '). Indeed, far from distinguishing clearly between twO different ways of
working or two different kinds of art, the Dutch tend to blur and combine them as
the means to one representational end. This is similar to the blurring (from the Italian
point of view) inherent in Van Hoogstraen's use of the w·ord "teykenkunst."
29. Like his art, Goltzius's life as set forth by Van Mander is a model of this
curious sense of self as self-effacement and absorption into one's art. Goltzius is not
only complemented for being a Pro teus or Vertumnus in his works in the Durer today.
manner, but during his trip to Italy he actually delights in traveling incognito by
exhanging roles with his servant and even assumes the clothes, name, and id entity of
a German peasant (Schilder-Boeck, fols. 285; 282 ' , 283). Vermeer's representation of th ere are
the anonymous artist absorbed in his craft in the Art of Painting culminates this Scruton)'
notion of self and of image-making. side, one
30. See Karel van Mander, Den Grandt der edel-vry schilderconst, ed. and trans . and the c
NotestoPages41 -44 243

Hessel Miedema, 2 vols. (U trecht: Haentkjens Dekker and Gumbert, 1973), 2:

437-38 for a commentary on the phrase uit zijn selven doen. Though Miedema
relates this Dutch notion of memory to the Italian maniera, we must not thereby
draw the conclusion that the Dutch and th e Italians were in essential agreement with
each other either in their verbal usage or in their art. (See Hessel Miedema, "On
Mannerism and maniera, " Simiolus 10 [1978-79]:19-45.) The premise of Mie-
dema's important commentary on Van Mander, which is to ground Dutch rhetoric
on art in the tradition of writing coming out of Italy, seems to me misleading. An
alternative reading of Van Mander will be for thcoming from the research currently
1"_=:«, that being done on his writings and on his art by Walter Melion. Again and again the
evidence is that though the Dutch do borrow terms from the Italians, they use them
>:: address in quite different ways. To cite a relevant example, the Dutch characteristically lack
It reveals a strong sense of the fantasy that shapes memory. Hence the extraordinary image of
--, we find Pieter Bruegel spitting the mountains up onto his canvas invoked by Van Mander.
by the 31. On this important point I differ with the literature on Kepler. Whether they
:973 issue are of what one might call the modernist (Straker) or medievalist (Lindberg) persua-
sion, students of Kepler stress the continuities between Kepler's model of the eye and
Albertian perspective. Some even attribute Kepler's invocation of the metaphor of the
mvenuon picture to this connection. In my analysis, the question is not a matter of geometry-
central to where a similarity does indeed exist-but rather of the nature of the picture where
Concept in it does not.
Editions, 32. Johan van Beverwyck, Schat der Ongesontheyt, p. 87 in Wercken der
Genees-Konste (Amsterdam, 1664) .
!ec",em." C. 33. G. B. della Porta, Natural Magick, trans . (London, 1658), p. 364.
34. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture, ed. and trans. Cecil Gray-
son (London: Phaidon Press, 1972), p. 67. I chose Durer's woodcut to contrast with
the illustration to Van Beverwyck because it illustrates the framed intersection of the
visual pyramid and, tellingly, a female nude as the object in view (of which more
later). However, admittedly, this woodcut does not illustrate perspective practice as
such because the net or grid insures correctness by mechanical rather than by math-
ematical means.
35. Ibid., p. 55.
36. James Ackerman, "Alberti's Light," in Studies in Late Medieval Painting in
Honor of Millard Meiss, eds. Irving Lavin and John Plummer, 2 vols. (New York:
New York University Press, 1977), 1:19.
37. The similiarity of the photograph to the Dutch descriptive mode that we have
been analyzing- a similarity that Kenneth Clark voiced when he wrote that the View
of Delft was like a colored photograph -has a bearing on current thinking about the
nature and status of photography. To state my conclusion at the Start: photography,
I shall argue, is properly seen as being part of this descriptive mode, rather than as
the logical culmination of the Albertian tradition of picture-making.
The question of whether photography is or is not an art seems quite out of date
today. But the issues it raises continue to be posed by the medium. While most
writers on photography take the affirmative position, a few still insist on the negative
and these two positions subdivide further in interesting ways. On the negative side
there are two voices : one says photography is not art in order to condemn it (Sontag,
th is Scruton); the other says it is not in order to celebrate it (Krauss). On the affirmative
side, one group says that photography is not different from other pictures (Snyder)
and trans. and the other position refines this to say that not only is photography like other

,
244 Notes to Pages 44-45

pictures, but it is indeed dependent upon them, a creature really of the history of
painting (Varnedoe, Galassi). What all the debaters without exception have in com-
mon is the notion that by art is meant the Albertian picture: it is this that the
photograph is meant to be, or not to be, like.
In this situation it is, ironically , those denying photography the status of art, those
who agree with Krauss that "the photograph is generically different from painting,
or sculpture or drawing" who come closest to the mark. The next step is to recognize
that the difference from art means a difference from the Albertian picture. It is a
difference, in other words, that allies the photograph to what we can, I think,
establish as an alternative mode of art, to the descriptive mode that we have found
inDutch works. Indeed, the much heralded thesis of Galassi's catalogue essay for the
recent MOMA exhibition entitled "Before Photography" makes just this pictorial
point without knowing it. Peter Galassi has proposed that the invention of the
photographic image is properly seen as part of the history of art. In the name of this
he exhibited a host of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century studies of
paintings done "after nature" that are characterized by their fragmentary, unframed,
uncomposed recording of the world seen. He backed up these works by illustrating
works by Durer, Ruisdael, Saenredam, and Van Wittel in his catalogue essay . Galassi
is correct in the materials that he is relating but incorrect in the terms on which he
relates them. His claim, that these works are a branch or offshoot of the linear
perspective picture, seems wrong. For as this assemblage of backup works reveals,
the ultimate origins of photography do not lie in the fifteenth-century invention of
perspective (Galassi, p. 12), but rather in the alternative mode of the north. Seen this
way, one might say that the photographic image, the Dutch art of describing and
(pace, Varnedoe) Impressionist painting are all examples of a constant artistic option
in the art of the West. It is an option or a pictorial mode that has been taken up at
different times for different reasons and it remains unclear to what extent it should
be considered to constitute, in and of itself, a historical development. But it is only
when it is distinguished from the central tradition of the Albertian picture that its
particular nature becomes clear. See Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: tatlon as
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977); Roger ScrutOn, "Photography and Represen- essay in L
tation," Critical Inquiry 7 (1981):577-603; Rosalind Krauss, "The Photographic Press, 19:-:
Conditions of Surrealism," October 19 (1981 ):26; Joel Snyder, "Picturing Vision," and Los
CriticalInquiry 6 (1980) :499- 526, Kirk Varnedoe, " Th e Artifice of Candor: Impres- 43. For.
sionism and Photography Reconsidered," Art in America (January 1980):66-78; and the Mirror
Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography 44.
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1981 ).
38. In terms of the analysis of light, we might say that the southern artist is
concerned with lux (light emitted by the eyes to explore the world) and the north-
erners with lumen (light given off by objects). Gombrich has offered us Leonardo's
lume and lustro with just this force. (See E. H. Gombri ch, "Light, Form and Texture alternative,
in Fifteenth Century Painting North and South of the Alps," The Heritage of Apelles whom we
(Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1976), pp. 19- 35.) But it appears from recent studies that tions' by the
a distinction between the two theories of vision- the so-called extramission and the is also ev""-"I<":i
intromission accounts of light of which Ronchi made so much-was not basic to resolved for
notions of vision even in the Middle Ages. (See Lindberg, Theories of Vision, pp.
143-46. )
39. Panofsky's seminal paper on perspective as symbolic form, which argued that
the system is but one possible convention among many, has often been disputed. The
Notes to Pages 45-47 245

of art historian Gombrich and the physiologist Pireone are among a number of scholars
:om- to argue that linear perspective is the correct way to represent the world on a picture
• me plane. Samuel Edgerton (p. 163), who describes perspective as a "relatively non-
subjective way to make pictorial images," tries to take a stand somewhere in between
:bose the two views. T . Kaori Kitao has recently shown that the root of this dispute lies
in the fact that Alberti's text, paradoxically, supports both what he calls the illusionist
and the constructivist claims. See Erwin Panofsky, "Die Perspektive als 'Symbolische
Form,' " Vortriige der Bibliothek Warburg: 1924-25 (Leipzig-Berlin, 1927), pp.
258-330; E. H . Gombrich, "The 'What' and the 'How': Persepctive Representation
and the Phenomenal World," Logic and Art: Essays in Honor of Nelson Goodman,
,- for the eds. R. Rudner and I. Scheffler (Indianapolis: Babbs-Merrill, 1972), pp. 129- 49; M.
- pictorial H. Pirenne, "The Scientific Basis of Leonardo da Vinci's Theory of Perspective,"
00 of the The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3 (1952-53):169-85; Samuel Y.
e of this Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York:
srudies of Harper and Row, Icon Editions, 1976); and T. Kaori Kitao, "Imago and Pictura:
Perspective, Camera Obscura and Kepler's Optics," La Prospettiva Rinascimentale,
:!ustrating ed. Marisa Dalai Emiliani (Florence : Centro Di, 1980), 1:499-510.
y. Galassi 40. James Ackerman, "Alberti's Light," p. 20, n. 50.
on which he 41. Walter A. Liedtke, "Saenredam's New Church in Haarlem Series," Simiolus
of the linear 8 (1975-76):154, and Liedtke, review of Wheelock, The Art Bulletin 51 (1979):492.
o rks reveals, 42. The Albertian picture has been so dominant in the Western tradition ever since
invention of the Renaissance that exceptions to it are rarely granted and attempts to analyze these
rth. Seen this exceptions to it are even rarer, In recent times, Leo Steinberg's definition of Rau-
s cribing and schenberg's flat-bed picture plane, "in which the painted surface is no longer the
. . .
rusu c opuon analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes," and Michael
I taken up at Fried's interest in the absorptive and antitheatrical (for which read anri-Albertian)
em it should images in France are rare examples of pictorial analyses that recognize such "differ-
it is only ence" to be a problem . They do so in each case in an attempt to deal with images that,
nure that its so they claim, challenge what so much Western art specifically confirms: our orien-
"'ew York: tation as upright figures looking out through a frame to a (second) world. See the title
.d Rep resen- essay in Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (London and New York: Oxford University
>hotographic Press, 1972), pp. 82-91; and Michael Fried, Absmption and Theatricality (Berkeley
ing Vision ,» and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).
aor : Impres- 43. For a powerful critique of this tradition, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and
:66-- 78; and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press , 1979).
Photography 44. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. A. Philip McMahon, 2 vols.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956, 1 :23, par. 34.
lern artist is 45 . Ibid., p. 48 par. 71.
.J the north- 46. The clearest account of the profound dilemma about the status of the observer,
s Leonardo's which is built into both Albertian perspective and Leonardo's (or the northern)
I and Texture alternative, was that by the late Robert Klein, who wrote: "Zenale and Piero [for
'ge of Apelles whom we could substitute Alberti) counted on a spectator 'placed in proper condi-
: srudies that tions' by the distance which he adopts; Leonardo's specatator is nowhere ... but he
iSion and the is also everywhere, for the work takes the place of the eye. The question cannot be
not basic to resolved for each party necessarily tumbles into the adversary's camp. The objective
r pp. and scientific attitude, which refuses to reproduce the aberrations and weaknesses of
vision, is obliged to count upon them for the perception of the work; the analytical
b argued that attitude which incorporates them into the work must deny the existence of the
lisputed. The spectators." "Pomponius Gauricus on Perspective," The Art Bulletin 43 (1961) :228.
246 Notes to Pages 48-53

The distinction is between the painting considered as a su bstitute for the world
(Albertian) and the painting considered as a replica of the world (northern) . This
point is in fact made by Pirenne himself (who, however, in effect denies the possi-
bility of the second option). See M. H. Pirenne, Optics, Painting and Photography
(Cambridge: University Press, 1970), p. 138.
47. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Jean Paul Richter, 2 vols. (New
York: Dover Publications, 1970), 1:18, par. 20.
48. Leonardo da Vinci , Treatise on Painting 2:49, par. 72.
49. lowe the reference to Prospero to a marvelous essay on Leonardo by E. H.
Gombrich, "The Grotesque Heads," The H eritage of Apelles (Oxford: Phaidon g ....
Press, 1976), p . 75.
50. Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin , ed . C. Jouann y (Paris, 1911 ), p . 143. For
an analysis of this letter, see Carl Goldstein, "The Meaning of Poussin 's Letter to De
Noyers," The Burlington Magazine 108 (1966):233- 39.
51. I want to thank Gerald Holton for calling my attention to this drawing when
I was first thinking about these problems. He suggested to me the revolutionary
nature of Kepler's notion of sight and anticipated its possible relevance to a study of
Dutch pictures. This dra wing, Holton advises me, was probably not drawn by Kepler
himself. It is based on a design by Christoph Scheiner and was most likely sent to
Kepler by Melchior Stoltzle in September 1615, when Kepler was himself working
on this kind of device.
52. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press , 1907),2 :206.
53 . "Hoe de zichtbaere Natuer zich bepaelt vertoont." Hoogstraten, Infeyding,
p.33.
54. Pieter Saenredam (1597-1665), the son of an accomplished engraver, appren-
ticed in H aarlem with the history painter Frans Pietersz. de Grebber. His first
important commission was to illustrate Ampzing's history of the city of Haarlem
(1628). Almost all of his works are portraits of Dutch church interiors. He recorded
them in drawings made on trips taken for the purpose and then, sometimes years
later, he would take paintings from the drawings, often annotating the drawings
when he did so. Saenredam's works have been admired by writers as different in
purpose and tOne as J. Q. van Regteren Altena, "The Drawings by Pieter Saenre-
dam," in Catalogue Raisonne of the Works of Pieter Jan sz . Saenredam (Utrecht,
1961), pp. 17-28, and Roland Barthes, "The World as Object," in Critical Essays,
trans. Richard Howard (EvanstOn: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 3-12.
55. Vredeman's contemporaries, in particular Karel va n Mander in his life of
Vredeman, acknowledge this representation of views viewed in the very way they
describe his works . A group of twenty-six engravings is described as "views into
palaces from points without and within" ("26 stucken, insiende en van boven siende
Paleysen, uytwendigh en inwendigh"), and a little gallery painted for a gentleman in
Hamburg depicts a "view into a little green garden. Opposite the gallery ... a
wooden fence with a view through an open door to a pond and swans" ("een doorsien pIcture.
van groenicheyt: recht tegen over de Galerije ... een houten schutsel, een Prospect himself, he
van een opstaende deur, toonende eenen Vijver met Swanen"). Karel van Mander, of cases, th
Schilder-Boeck, fols. 266,266' . 68. It tu
56. See Ann Banfield, "Where Epistemology, Style, and Grammar Meet Literary it at first app'
History: The Development of Represented Speech and Thought," New Literary study of this
History 9 (1978):417-54. The distinction Banfield makes between the properties of from Alberti
Notes to Pages 53-68 247

world represented thought and speech (known also as style indirect libre or erlebte Rede)
and those of narration per se has interesting analogies to th e distinction I am drawing
"'e POSSl - between descriptive and narrative pictorial modes. As if to confirm this, Banfield
:ography concludes her forth coming book by drawing an analogy between represented dis-
course and those lenses and mirrors that are so closely connected with Dutch pictur-
ols. (New ing. What Banfield says of lenses supports not only her definition of represented
thought but also my definition of the descrip ti ve picture : "the lens is witn ess to the
fact that representation, even a representation of the mind , need not imply a repre-
by E. H. sented mind." Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and R epresentation in the Lan-
Phaidon guage of Fiction (London: Routledge and Kcgan Paul , 1982).
57. Van Regcren Aitena, "The Drawings by Pieter Saenredam," p. 25.
,p . 143. For 58. See L. Brion-Guerry, Jean Pelerin Viator: Sa Place dans I'Histoire de la
Lener toDe Perspective (Paris: Soci",e d'Edition Les Belles Lettres, 1962), pp. 219-20 for the
passages with which I am principally concerned . Viator's text, originally published
when in Latin and French in 1505, 1506, and 1521, remained popular enough to warrant
a fourth edition in 1635. D iscussion of Viator's construction has stressed that it gives
final results that are id entical to A lberti's, while adm ittin g that it is much more
abstract in nature. See William M. Ivins, Jr. , On the Rationalization of Sight (New
York: Da Capo Press, 1975) for the established view.
59. See Timothy K. Kitao, "Prejudi ce in Perspective: A Study of Vignola'S Per-
spective Treatise," The Art Bulletin 44 (1962): 173-94. Kitao points out that Vignola
2 vols. completel y rejects a perspective construction that features two or more eyepoin ts (the
prejudice of the article's title), and suggests, I think correctl y, that this can be
explained in part "as an instance of culturally conditioned preconception" (p. 185).
60 . Brion-Guerry, Viator, pp. 221, 218 .
61. Jan Vredeman de Vries, Perspective: ld est Celebernma ars inspicientis aut
transpicientis oculcrum aciei, in pariete, tabula aut tela depicta ... (The Hague and
Leiden: 1604-5).
62. Hoogstraten, Infeyding, pp. 273-75.
63 . Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de Pi" Eccellenti Pittori Scultori ed Architettori, In
Le Opere, ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols . (Florence: Sansoni , 1878-85),4:98.
64. See David Summ ers, "Figure come Fratelli: A Transformation of Symmetry
Saenre- in Renaissance Painting," The Art Quarterly n.s. 1 (1977):59-88, and "Maniera
i'" (Utrecht, and Movement: The Figura Serpentinata, " The Art Quarterly 35 (1972):269-301,
feal Essays, and Leo Steinberg, "Picasso: Drawi ng as if to Possess," Artforum (Octo ber,
!,pp .3-12. 1971 ) :44- 53. The point is further developed by Steinberg in· his Other Criteria, pp.
" his life of 174-92. As Summers correctly points out ("Figure come Fratelli, " p. 86 n. 19),
ry way they Giorgione's work has a decidedly northern flavor.
into 65. Kepler, Ad Vitellionem, G. W., 2: 143.
iJoy ensiende 66. Hoogstraten, lnleyding, p. 274 .
gentl eman in 67. See Gary Schwartz, "Saenredam, Huygens and the Utrecht Bull," Simiolus
llIery ... a (1966-67) :90- 99 for a full discussion of the meaning and the commission of ,his
reo doorsien picture. Although the figures in his painti ngs were not normall y executed by the artist
"'" Prospect himself, he was clearly responsible for establishing their positions and, in a number
fan of cases, the direction of their gazes.
68. It turns out th at even this image is nOt the linear perspectiv e construction that
leet Literary it at first appears to be. Only after this chap ter was completed did I discover a recent
Literary study of this particular etch ing th at demonstrates that it, too, must be distinguished
properties of from Albertian perspective. In a masterful essay- the best that I have ever read on
248 Notes to Page 70

Saenredam's representation of space-B ob Ruurs shows that even this work is con-
structed by means of a mixture of central perspective and the unconscious use of what
he calls p roportional notation. (Ruufs proposes that we use thi s term instead of th e
usual curvilinear perspective to refer to a notation that requires that the distance
between any given twO points of the picture be always directl y proportional to the
angle under which a particular observer would see the two points.) Proportional
notation, as Ruufs points out, cannot be adiieved on a flat plane. I would argue,
however, that in making the attempt Saenreclam, like the cartographers to whom
Ruufs correctly compares him, confirms that he accepts the image as a flat surface
rather than conceiving of it as a framed window through which we look, as did the
practitioners of linear persp ective. The question is not only what's in a picture, but
what is a picture. See Bob Ruurs, ''Drawing from Naru re: The Principle of Propor-
tional Notation," La Prospettiva Rinascimentale, ed. Marisa Dalai Emiliani (Flor-
ence: Centro Di, 1980), pp. 511-21.
69. As my interpretation suggests, I think that the long-held view of the intrin-
scially puzzling nature of Las Meninas is justified. The question is wh y and in what
respect we take it to be puzzling. A powerful study by the philosopher John Searle
posits some of the same contradictions of which I have written. His conclusion differs
from mine because Searle assumes that there is a single canon of classical pictorial
representation with which the Velaz quez picture is not consistent. The correction I
offer to his reading is to id entify the inconsistency with the presence of two identi -
fiable and incompatible modes of pictorial representation. It is, then, not th e excep-
ti on to a single representational canon but the tension between the two that is at the
heart of the picture. Velazquez is engaged in a testing and questioning of th e nature
of the artist's relationship to his work and to the world that is central in Western art.
The refutation of Searle's position by Snyder and Cohen accommodates th e picture
on the narrowest of grounds to what they (and Searle) would caU the classical canon
of pictorial representati on. By arguing that the vanishing point is at the fa r, open door
and that the mirror on the wall cannot be reflecting the ki ng and queen standing
before the picture but must represent the king and queen as they are depicted on the
hidden canvas, they think that they have ruled out the paradoxical nature of
Velazquez's work. My sense of the paradoxical nature of Velizquez's representation
is not dependent on these arguments, which seem well taken. By identifying the
painting's point of view as a geometrically defined point outside the picrure, Snyder
and Coh en ignore the contradictory view from w ithin, which is what Velazquez has
presented by the artist looking out. See "Las Meninas," in Mi chel Foucault, Th e
Order of Things (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 3- 16;
John Searle, "Las Meninas and Representation," Critical Inquiry 6 (1980) :477-88;
and Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, "Reflections on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost,"
Critical Inquiry 7 (1980):429- 47.
70. Crombie, "The Mechanistic Hypothesis, " p. 85.
71. Art historians have, understandabl y, been alert to those junctures when artists
and their spokesmen assumed that there was a virtue to being at the forefront of
natural knowledge. The Renaissance artist- engineers who studied anatomy and em-
ployed the perspective system, and the interest shared in the nineteenth cenrury
between painters, photographers , and students of light are two examples that have
been studied. U ncil recently, the seventeenth century has been seen in the art-
historical literature as a time when art was no longer significantly tied to such
knowledge. In two well-known essays, Panofsky and Ackerman argue that th e new
Notes to Pages 71-74 249

con- compartmentalization of knowlege displaced art from its central place in the system
- what of knowledge. It is no accident that this analysis was made by students of Italian
- of the Renaissance art, for if one looks to the north, one finds that this compart-
mentalization (which is, to use Foucault's term, the classical episteme) has the effect
of distinguishing the image from other forms of knowledge and thus gives it its own
particular access to a different kind of knowledge. The nature of this is what the
present chapter and the next are about. See Erwin Panofsky, "Artist, Scientist,
Genius: Notes on the Renaissance Dammerung," in The Renaissance: Six Essays
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), pp. 123-82; James Ackerman, "Science and
Visual Art," in Seventeenth Century Science and the Arts, ed. Hedly Howell Rhys
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 63- 90; and Aaron Shean,
"French Art and Science in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Some Points of Contact,"
The Art Quarterly 34 (1971 ):434- 55.
72. E. H. Gombrich, "Light, Form and Texture," p. 20.
73. In proposing this "storage" model for the relationship between northern art
and science, I am struck by its similarity to a recent study of the relationship between
psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature that suggests that literary texts were the
storage places for insights that were only much later made central to Freud's psycho-
analytic studies. See Wolf Lepenies, "Transformation and Storage of Scientific Tradi-
tions in Literature" (paper delivered at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton ,
New Jersey, 1980).

Chapter Three
1. Hegel, in a short passage in his lectures on aesthetics, already characterized
Dutch painting in terms close to these. He argued that the Dutch replaced an interest
in significant subject matter with an interest in the means of representation as an end
in itself ("die Mittel der Darstellung werden fur sich seiber Zweck"). More recently,
Meyer Schapiro developed a similar point in reference to stilllifes by Cezanne and
also suggestively related the entire genre of still life to Western bourgeois society. My
purpose in this chapter is to try to relate such pictorial phenomena to notions of
presentatIon knowledge current in the seventeenth century. See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics:
the Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:599;
rure, Snyder Meyer Schapiro, "The Apples of Cezanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still-life,"
Selected Papers: Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: George Braziller,
The 1978), pp. 1-38. In her current research on Jan Bruegel, Anita Joplin is dealing in

t
ClUlt'
pp. 3- 16, detail with the background and earlier history of the notions of art, nature, artifice,
;; :477-88; and knowledge wi th which I shall be concerned in this chapter.
.cox Lost," 2. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665), Ar; reprinted as vol. 13 of
Early Science in Oxford, ed . R. T . Gunther (Oxford, 1938).
3. Robert Hooke, "An instrument of Use to take the Draught, or Picture of a
!P'hen artists Thing," in Philosophical Experiments and Observations (London, 1721 ), pp.
forefront of 292-96.
IDY and em- 4. Hooke, Micrographia, G' .
Il:h century 5. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving
.. tha t have of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667; reprint, eds. Jackson 1. Cope and Harold
in the ar[- Whitmore Jones[St. Louis: Washington University 1958]), p. 89. Hereafter cited as
ied to such Sprat, History .
bat the new 6. Ibid., p. 401.
250 Notes to Pages 75-83

7. For a relevant account of the success of Bacon in Holland, see Rosal ie L. Coli e,
'Some Thankfulnesse to Constantine,' (The Hague: Martinus N ijhoff, 1956), pp.
73- 91. See R. W. Gibson, Francis Bacon: A Bibliography (Oxford: Scrivener Press,
1950), for a record of the many editions of his works published in Holland.
8. R. Hooykaas, "Science and Religion in the Seventeenth Century: Isaac
Beeckman (1588-1637)," Free University Quarterly 1 (1952): 169- 83.
9. Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 a1634, ed. C. de Waard, 4 vols. (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1939-53), 3:317- 18.
10. Ibid., 1:321; 3:265; 2:382; 2:315-16; 1:xviii.
11. Ibid ., 1:322; 2:248.
12. Hoogstraten,Inleyding, pp. 24-2 5.
13. Ibid. , p. 34.
14. Hooke, Micrographia, p. 153.
15. Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 140.
16. ''Van de gelijkheyt en ongelijkheyt der zweeming" (roughly, "On likeness
and difference in resemblance"), Hoogstraten, Inleyding, pp. 38- 40.
17. Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 39.
18. The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Dou glas
Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857-64),4:55. Hereafter cited as Bacon, Works.
19. Michel Foucault, The Order of Thing (New York: Vintage Books, 1973) , pp.
54-56.
20. Abraham Cowley, "To the Royal Society, " in Sprat, History, p. 62 .
21. The relevant passages of the long inscription reads as follows: "Waerchtige
Afteykeninge der Beelden, ... in eenen Appel boom gewassen ... tot bestraffinge,
beschaminge, ende overtuyginge van sekere onlangsche valsche Afbeeldinge, ende lack a
onder halinge ende wederlegginge van den gestroyden Landleugen tot onderrichtinge Caes
vande bedrogene Wereld uyt liefde der waerheid uyt gegeven ... en sijn de beelden workJ
geene andere aIs dese cnde kanter Dock anders niet in merken al is! schoon dar gh yse distinl
met eenen Kristalijnen Bril wel te degen besiet." Catalogue Raisonne of the Works he tht
of Pieter Jansz. Saenredam (Utrecht, 1971 ), pp. 267-68. Despil
22. Charles Ruelens and Max Rooses, Correspondance de Rubens, 6 vols. (A n- conve;
twerp, 1887-1909), 4:381. The translation is by Ruth Magurn, trans. and ed., The landis
Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press , 1955), Kleinl
p.247. De
23. Bacon, Work s 4:32-33. Confirmatio n that th.e Dutch microscopists long serve(
thought of themselves as Baconian in this sense is offered by Boerhaave's intro- of the
duction to an edition of Swammerdam: "He affirmed nothing but what he saw, and scribe
was able to demonstrate everything he affirmed. He in good earnest followed Lord the ev
Bacon's advice." Herman Boerhaave, "The Life of the Author," in John Swammer- empla
dam, The Book of Nature; or the History of Insects, trans. Thomas Flloyd (London, mend4
1758), p. xvi. pread
24. Aile de Brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, 10 vols. (A msterdam: Swets "One
and Zeitlinger, 1939-79),2:390-94. For general studies of Leeuwenhoek, see Clif- c1ingil
ford Dobell, Antony van Leeuwenhoek and his "Little Animals "(New York: Dover groun
Publications, 1960); A. Schierbeek, Antoni van L eeuwenhoek: zijn lev en en zijn markc:
w erken (Lochem, 1950), and Mea suring the Invisible World (London and New rather
York: Abelard Schuman, 1959) .
25. "santgens . . . diemen up cen swartsijde taff soude mogen werpen." I bid" Lastm
1:212 . Simioi
Notesto Pages 83-90 251

26. Ibid., 2:79.

27. Ibid ., 10 :126.
Press , 28. Q uoted in Dobell, Leeuwenhoek, pp . 31 4-1 6.
29. Hooke, Micrographia, p. 153.
30. Jacqu es (or Jacob) de Gheyn II (1556- 1629), as we saw in the first chapter,
was admired and beloved by Constantijn Huygens. A student of Hendrick Goltzius,
4 ,·ols. (Th e he was an extraordinary draftsman-and in later life a painter- whose prodigious
skill in representation was matched by a great breadth of interests: ani mals and people
both alive and dead, flowers, landscapes, witches' rites, and more are described wi th
remarkable care and with affec tion. His relative obscurity is due to the fact that so
many of his works are drawings that are inaccessible to the general pu blic. In manner
and subject , De G heyn heralds many things that matter most to the Dutch artists of
his day. The fine, basic study is J. Q. va n Regteren Altena, j acques de Gheyn: An
Introduction to the Study of His Drawings I (no further volumes) (Amsterdam:
likeness Swets and Zeidinger, 1935). Just before his recent death, Van Regteren Altena
completed his long-awaited book on all of De Gheyn's works. For good re-
produ ctions of the drawings, see J. Richard Judson, The Drawings of j acques de
,Douglas Gheyn I1 (New York : Grossman, 1973) .
, Works. 31. For Plutarch's brief account of Caesar's dictation of letters, see Fall of the
1973), pp. Roman Empire: Six Lives by Plutarch, trans. Rex Warner and intro. Robin Seager
(Harmondsworth , Middlesex : Penguin Books, 1972), p. 261.
62. 32. William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York : Dover,
1959), 1:409.
33. Riegl pointed out the distinctiveness of the kind of composition, or rather the
lack of composition in the traditional sense, evident in a painting like De Gheyn's
Caesar Dictating. Realizing that it was characteristic of a large number of northern
works, Riegl defined it as a coordinated composition of attentive individuals to
distinguish it from th e subordinated ordering of acting figures favored in Italy, and
he th ought that its epitome was to be found in the Dutch genre of group portraits.
Despite its dated psychological terminology, Riegl's analysis still rings true. For a
convenient translation of his central arguments, see the selection from Das hol-
liindische Gruppenportrat in Modern Perspectives in Art H istory, ed. W. Eugene
Kleinbauer (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1971 ), pp. 126-38 .
D escription of attentive behavior has a long history in the north, where it often
served as a mode of pictorial narration. The apos tles in Hugo van der Goes's Death
of the Virgin (Bruges) who are attentive to her death are the forebears of De G heyn's
scribes. Such figures are not actors in a dramatic event; they rather bear witness to
the event from within the picture. The ordering of a picture through witnesses was
employed by many seventeenth -century Dutch history painters and was recom-
mended by Van Mander. Rembrandt's Denial of St . Peter and his etching of Christ
preaching known as La Petite Tombe are composed in this way. Van Mander wrote,
"One introduces the witnesses of an event on hills, in trees, on stone stairways, or
clinging to the pillars of a building, together wi th others, in the foreground, on the
ground below ." Van Mander, curi ously, compares the painter of such a work to a
market seller di splaying his wares, which suggests that it is in fact attentive wi tnesses
rather than the event itself, and in turn ou.r visual interest in them as in objects to
possess, that are central to such pictures . See B. P. J. Broos, "Rembrandt and
" Ibid ., Lastman's Coriolanus: The History Piece in 17th Century Theory and Practice,"
Simiolus 8 (1975- 76) :203 .
252 Notesto Pages 91-98

34. One migh t say that Dutch stilllifes present the anatomical view of the lemon.
As an example of the kind of sentiment with which I do not agree: " It is hard to feel
chastized by images of such beauty. And yet the sumptuous repasts, their luminous
peeled lemons left to shrivel and their opened oysters to rot, warn of gluttony and
and moral aftermath of hu man appetite." Leon Wieselti er, review of th e Chardin
exhibition in The New Republic, 24 Novem ber 1979, p. 25. A broadly revisioni st
view of still-life painting in general is presented in the many essays that constitute the
exhibition catalogueStilleben in Europa (Munster: Westfiilisches Landesmuseum fur
Kunst und Kulturgeschichte and Baden-Baden: Staaliche Kunsthalle, 1979- 80).
35. Bacon, Works, 4:58.
36. John Locke, An Essay Concerning H uman Understanding, ed . Alexander
Campbell Fraser (1894, rep rint, New York: Dover, 1959), 1:403.
37. Johann Comenius, The Gate of Languages Unlocked, trans. Thomas H orn
(London, 1643), D.
38. Robert Hooke, Micrographia, p. 154.
39. Die Ausgaben des Orbis Sensualium Pictus, ed. Kurt Pilz, Beitrage zur
Geschichte und Kultur der Stadt Niirnberg, 14 (Nurnberg: Stadtbibliothek, 1967).
Pilz lists 244 editions of the Orbis Pictus between 1658 and 1964. There is a handy
reprint of the 1658 edition in the series ''Die bibli ophilen Taschenbucher. "
40. Th e literature on Comenius is vast because he is of interest to Protestant
thinkers as well as to students of education. For a good general survey of his life and
writings, see part 1, M. W. Keatinge, trans. and ed., Th e Great Didactic of John
Amos Comenius, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1910; reprin t 1967) .
For Comenius in England , see G. H . Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius (Lon-
don : University Press of Liverpool, 1947) and Robert Fitzgibbon Young, Comenius
in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932); for Com en ius in the Nether- ea -
lands see Wilhelmus Rood, "Comenius and the Low Countries, " (Ph.D. dis- mace
sertation, Rijksuniv ersi teit , U trecht, 1970); Jean Piager, in tro. toJohn Amos Com- to
enius on Education, Classics in Education no. 33 (New York: Teachers College
Press, 1967).
41. Comeniu s, The Great Didactic, p. 186 .
42. Ibid. , p. 188.
43. Evelyn's Sculptura, ed. C. F. Bell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), p. 140.
See Benjamin D eMott, "Comenius and the Real Character in England, " PMLA 70 46.
(1955):1068-81; Clark Emery, "John Wilkins' U niversal Language," Isis 38 47.
(1948) :174-85; Murray Cohen , Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England,
1640-1785 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); and Vivian
Salmon, The Study of Language in 17th Century England (Amsterdam: John Ben-
jamins, 1979). A convenient edition to refer to is Johann Amos Comenius, Visible
World, trans. Charles Hoole (London, 1659; reprin t ed. John Sadler [New York:
Oxford University Press, 1968].
44. Cost was an important factor in the restricted use of illu strated books for
classroom purposes at the time. For the way in which education was conducted, see
Pieter Antonie de Planque, Valcoogh's 'Regel deT Duytsche Schoolmeesters' (Gron-
ingen: Noordhoff, 1929), and J. ter Gouw, Kijkjes in de Oude Schoolwereld, 2 vols.
(Leiden, 1872). For children's books, see G. D. H . Schotel, Vaderlandsche Volks- O livier
boeken en Volkssp rookjes, 2 vols. (Haarlcm, 1873), and William Sloane, Children's Metaph)
Books in England and America in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia 48. B
Notes to Pages 98-100 253

anon. University, King's Crown Press, 1955). We shall touch again on the subject of
_ :0 feel education when we deal with the culture of letter-writing in chapter 5.
___-u nous 45 . My reference here is specific: I am taking issue with a previous interpretation
.....::on'y and of this drawing. De Gheyn's mother and child looking at the pictures in the book have
been offered as prime evidence that the so-called realism of seventeenth-century
Dutch art is really not realism at all. It is nonhistorical, so it has been argued, to see
this work as realistic. The alternative we are offered is to see it as an allegory drawing
F::seum fur on contemporary notions of knowledge. It illustrates the middle term of the Aris-
toteJian tripartite division of learning : natura. exercitatio, and ars. In this view, De
Gheyn's drawing, like other Dutch works, belies its surface to call attention to deeper
meanings. Its message is: "It is not enough just to look at what exists on earth . That
only enables one to 'picture' things, not to understand their tru e essence" (p. 17). I
have three objections to this: (1) not onl y does this work display a concern for
observation common to De Gheyn's works, it ma y even be said to thematize that
concern in th e boy's attention to the pictures on the page; (2) the relevant context is
not a notion of knowledge or understanding that denies the visible world and eludes
pictorial representation, but one that is identified with the representation of the
visible world; (3) the interpretive stance that contrasts realism and allegory is mis-
leading, since there is no such thing as simple realism. This stance is particularly
misleading in the case of an art that locates knowledge in the represented surfaces of
the world and replaces the established figures of Nature or Learning (Natura or
Minerva, let us say) with a child, seated beside his mother, engrossed in learning
through the pictures in his book. See H essel Miedema, "Over het realism in de
Nederlandse schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw," Oud Holla nd 89 (1975) :2- 18.
Miedema's interpretation of the De Gheyn drawing is related to J. A. Emmens's
earlier study of a triptych by Dou. There, too, the author invoked the Aristotelian
modeJ of learning as the key to the work. And there, too, the interpretation seems
to me to insist wrongly that the meaning of the picture is at odds wi th the pictorial
surface-and one must remember how attentive to su rfaces D ou was-rather than
being at one with that surface. See J. A . Emmens, HNatuur, onderwijzung en oe-
fening; bij een drieluik van Gerrit Dou ," in Album discipulorum aangeboden aan
professor Dr. J. G. van Gelder ter gelegenheid van zijn zestige verjaardag 27
februari 1963 (Utrecht, 1963 ), pp. 125-36.
46. Comenius, The Great Didactic, pp . 114, lIS.
47. See Walter E. H oughton , Jr., "The History of Trades: Its Relation to
Seventeenth -Century Thought," in Roots of Scientific Thought: A Cultural Perspec-
tive, eds. Philip P. Wiener and Aaron Noland (New York: Basic Books, 1957), pp.
354-81, and Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern
Era, trans. Salvator Attanas io and ed . Benjamin Nelson (New York, Evanston , and
London: H arper and Row Torchbook, 1970). Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi
shared Bacon's engagement with the practical arts and, related to this, Gassendi was
fascinated with the knowledge gained through sight. Though th ese thinkers take us
far from Dutch painting, they are nevertheless justifiably cited as part of the larger
seventeenth-century culture of wh ich Dutch images are part. See Tullio Gregory,
Scetticismo ed empirismo: Studio su Gassendi (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1961) , and
O livier Rene Bloch , La Philosophie de Gassendi: Nominalisme, Materialism e et
Metaphysique (The Hagu e: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971 ).
48. Bacon, Works , 4:13 .
254 Notes to Pages 100-105

49. Ibid., p. 28.

SO. For Bacon's notion of natural histories and their distinction from civil his-
tories, see Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discov ery and th e Art of Discourse (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 135-49; 151-56.
51. There is a body of literature by historians of science that debates th e con-
tribution of the scholar and the craftsman to natural knowledge in the seventeenth
century. The diplomatic soluti on to this problem of the relationship between the-
oretical and practical activities is to say that both played their role. For this view, see
Rupert Hall, "The Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific Revolution," Critical
Problems in the History of Science, ed . Marshall Clagett (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1959), pp. 2- 23. Thomas Kuhn. offers a more nuanced inter-
pretacion, which tries to distinguish between the kind of contributions that were
made by the classical and the Bacoman sciences, as well as between their practitioners:
scholars versus craftsmen, and academi cians versus amateurs.
52. lowe knowledge of this to Wolf Lepenies, who suggested its relevance to
Dutch art. See Wolf Lepenies, Das En de der Naturgeschichte, Suhrkamp Ta-
schenbuch der Wissenschaft no. 227 (Baden-Baden: Suhrkamp, 1978), p. 51.
53. Goethe's Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge:
M.LT. Press, 1970), p . 254. Gerald Holton called my attention to this passage. It
seems most appropriate that the scientist responsible for the discovery of the visual
(versus behavioral) phenomenon of patterns on a butterfly's wings was a Dutchman
called Oudermans, after whom the phenomenon is named. See Adolf Ponmann,
New Paths in Biology, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York, EvanstOn, and Lon'
don: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 77.
54. The interest today in the whole problem of the distinction between art and
craft has the effect of calling into question the boundaries between them that we in
the West usually assume. See Howard S. Becker, "Arts and Crafts," American
Journal of Sociology 83 (1978):862-89. Kristeller has carefully traced the original
notion of the fine arts to the eighteenth century, before which time the classification
system of the different kinds of human makings was signifi cantly different. It is to Bes
an aspect of the difference that I am pointing here. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The
Modern System of the Arts," in Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and dero:
the Arts (New York, EvanstOn , and London: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), pp. 73.
163- 227 .
55. This is the masterpiece, one of only a small numbe.r of works that we have,
by the Leiden painter of portraits and stilllifes, David Bailly (1584-1657). He ended
his life as a servant at the university. See J. Bruyn, ' 'David Bailly," Oud Holland 66
(1951 ):148-64; 212- 27; and on this painting, M. L. Wurfbain, "Vanitas-stilleven
David Bailly (1584- 1657)," Openbaar Kunstbezit 13 (1969) :7a-7b. I want to thank
Dr. Wurfbain for sharing with me his further thoughts about Bailly and this picture.
56. Bacon, Works 4:29.
57. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Ex ercises or The Doctrine of Handy- Works, 2
vols. (London, 1677- 83), I:A4.
58. I t is onl y modern usage that clearly distinguishes between the double sense of
craft as (1) a human making and (2) deceit. See The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v .
"craft. "
59 . Bacon, Works 4:30.
60. Ibid., p. 26. ologists
61. See Charles B. Schmitt, "Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of Za- esnng res
Notes to Pages 106-12 255

barella's View with Galileo's in De Motu , " in Studies in the Renaissance 16 (New
his- York: The Renaissance Society of Ameri ca, 1959):80- 137. The tradition of appealing
Cam- to experience and above all to the eye had a long life in Holland. s'G ravesande, who
was named professor of mathematics and astronomy at The Hague in 1717 , wrote
that "il faut observer d'un ceil attentif routes les operations de la narure," Pierre
Brunet, Les Physiciens Hollandais et la Methode Experimentale en France au XVII'
""""",n th e- Siecle (Paris : Librarie Scientifique Albert Blanchard, 1926), p . 49 .
62. M . L. Wurfbain, "Vani ras-stilleven D avid Bailly," p. 7b .
63. Sprat, History, pp. 344-45.
64. Bacon, Works 4 :26.
65. Ibid. , p. 271.
66 . Ibid. , p. 258.
67. Hooke, Micrographia, G; Sprat, H istory, p. 245.
68. For Evelyn's projects, see Walter E. Houghton, Jr., "The History of the
feI''''alnce to Trad es," pp . 367-8 1.
Ta- 69. Sprat, History, pp. 258, 307,193. Bread-making was one of the crafts illus-
51 trated by Comenius in his Orbis Pict us .
70. See [Balthasar] de Monconys,fournal des voyages, 3 vols. (Lyon: 1665- 66) :2.
passage. It Visits to such collections were a major entertainment for travelers to Holland at the
me visuaJ time. The most useful publications of these materials are those that are topically
Dutchman arranged. See, for example, the sections on private collections in Jul ia Bientjes.
Porrmann, H olland und der Holliinder im Urteil Deutscher Reisender 1400- 1800 (G roningen:
and Lon' J. B. Wolters, 1967), pp. 72-80. In England natural knowledge was already encour-
aged under royal patronage in th e seventeenth century . In Holland the organization
of societies for such pursuits depended o n private and civic resources and did not get
under way until the later eighteenth century. One of the oldest Dutch societies of this
kind was founded by the Haarlem burgh ers only in 1752, while th e Teyler Stichtung
in the same town dates from 1778.
71. Filips van Zesen, Beschreibung der Stadt Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1664);
Beschrijv ingh Der wijdt-vermaarde Koops-stadt Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1664).
72. Denis Diderot, "Voyage en Hollande," in Supplement aux Oeuvres de Di-
derot, (Paris, 1818), p. 68.
73 . I am quoting from the translation of the ordinance of 11 May 1611 by J. M .
Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft in the Seventeenth Century: A Socio-
Economic Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). The bas ic, general
study on th e guilds of Saint Luke in Holland remains G. J. Hoogewerff, De
Geschiedenis van de St. Lucasgilden in Nederland (Amsterdam: P. N . van Kampen
and Zoon, 1947). For the art market in general, see H. Floerke, Studien zur
niederliindischen Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte, Die Formen des Kuns thandels , das
Atelier und die Sammler in den Niederlanden von 15. - 18. Jahrh undert (Munich-
Leipzig, 1905).
74 . The most popular and often quoted account of this kind is " Pai nting-The
Artist as Crafts man, " chapter 6 of J. L. Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch
Republic During the 17th Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974). In
recent years th e history and sociology of science has gone much fa rther in the
direction of studying the boundaries between science and other forms of
knowledge - thu s considering science as a social construct- than historians and soci-
ologists of art have done with art. The issues in these different fields bear an inter-
esting resemblance in the seventeenth century, and art historians might do well to get
256 Notes to Pages 113-22

some hints about how to proceed from stud ents of science. For a stud y that bears on
the relationship between cognative systems, which is of relevance to the relationship
between artists and craftsmen that I am proposing, see Peter Wright, "Astrology and
Science in Seventeenth-Century England," Social Studies of Science 5 (1975):
399-422. For the politics involved in the success of a parti cular form of knowledge-
an important question I have not considered-see Peter Wright, "On the Boundaries
of Science in Seventeenth Century England," Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 4
(1980).
75. See E. Taverne, "Salomon de Bray and th e Reorganization of the Haarlem
Guild of SI. Luke in 1631 ," Simiolus 6 (1972-73):50-66. Taverne, who prizes a
conceptual framework as essential to the serious practice of art, emphasizes the
theory rath er than , as I do, th e practice of the artists in Haarlem.
76. It is true that the term fijnschilder, which is more commonly used in the
middle of th e century than it is earlier, was not used to distinguish a particular kind
of picture but rather co discinguish th e painting of pictures from rougher forms, such
as the painting of signs or houses. However, the increased use of the term reflects a
consciousness of difference, which the crafted surfaces of the painters also testify to.
See Lydia de Pauw-de Veen, ''De begrippen 'schilder,' 'schilderij' en 'schilderen' in
de zevenciende eeu w," Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie VGor
Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie, Klasse der Schone Kunsten
31, no. 22 (1969), pp. 16- 54.
77. lowe this point to a conversation with Prof. Th. H. Leunsingh Scheurleer,
to whom I am most grateful.
78. J. M. Montias has substantiated the declining quali ty of tiles in the eleventh
chapter of his book Artists and Artisans. In answer to my query, Montias suggested
in a letter that the evidence is that as the position of the craftsmen declined, the
painters replaced them in suppl ying the designs for the "applied" arts.
79. For an account of the collectible objects in Kill's works, see Lucius Grise-
bach, William Kalf (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1974), pp. 113ff.
80. J. A. Emmens, "De Kwakzaler: Gerrit Dou (1613-1675)," Openbaar
Kunstbezit 15 (1971 ):4a-4b .

Chapter Four
1. On Vermeer's map as a source for cartographic hi story, see James Welu,
"Vermeer : His Cartographic Sources," The Art Bulletin 57 (1975):529-47 and "The
Map in Vermeer'sArt of Painting, " I mago Mundi 30 (1978):9- 30. Footnotes 54 and
56 in the first article list the major studies of the map and of the interpretation of th e
painting itself. In a brief and perceptive footnote to a study by J. G. van Gelder, J.
A. Emmens connects the map to the topographic and geographic ambitions of the art
of painting. See J. G. van Gelder, De Schilderkunst van Jan Vermeer (Utrecht:
Kunsthistorisch Instituut, 1958), p. 23, n. 14.
2. To cite but a few from a great number of examples: Gemma Frisius titled his
1533 treatise on triangulation Libellus de locorum describendorum ratione . . . , the
Dutch rendering of which was Die maniere om te beschrijven de plaetsen ende
Landtschappen (Amsterdam, 1609); Petrus Montanus refers to Jodocus Hondius as
''De alder-vermaerste en best-geoffende Cosmagraphus ofte Wereltbeschrijver van Italy reye
onse eeuw" in his introduction CO the first Dutch edition of the Mercator-Hondius they rernj
Atlas (1634) . Schulz, "
Notes to Pages 124- 33 257

_a....-s on 3. Alfred Frankenstein, "The Great Trans-Mississippi Railway Survey," Art in

- --ooship America 64 (1976):55- 58.
::: ogy and 4. The major examples in the field of Dutch art are the several studies by James
j (1 975): Welu (cited below) and the exhibition catalogue The Dutch Cityscape in the 17th
knowl edge- Century and its Sources (Amsterdam : Amsterdams Historisch Museum, 1977). For
te Boundaries a general study of cartographical material published in Amsterdam during the sev-
, Yea rb ook 4 enteenth century with a fine eye for its cultural place and relationship to art and
artists, see The World on Paper (Amsterdam : Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1967),
:be Haarlem compiled on the occasion of the International Conference on Cartography by Mar-
vtho prizes a ijke de Vrij. Both exhibitions were held under the suspices of the Amsterdam Histor-
,;>basizes the ical Museum, which has been in the forefront of showing the ties that bind art to
society.
, used in the 5. J. Wreford Watson, "Mental Distance in Geography: Its Identification and
L-:icular kind Representation," unpublished MS of a paper delivered at the twenty-second Inter-
r rorms. such national Geographical Congress, Montreal, 1972.
m:n reflects a 6. Ronald Rees, "Historical Links between Cartography and Art," Geographi-
Iso testify to. cal Review 70 (1980) :62. See also P. D. A. Harvey, The History of Topographical
.dllIderen' in Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). This book, which appeared after I had
:ufemie voor completed my own research, is interested in some of the same material but differs
lOne Kunsten because it still approaches it from what I would call a cartographic point of view.
7. Kurt Pilz has argued against the attribution of the map of Bohemia to Com-
cheurleer, enius. See Kurt Pilz, "Die Ausgaben der Orbis Sensualism Pictus," (Nurnberg:
Stadtbibliothek Nurnberg, 1967), pp. 35- 37. For the previous attribution of the map
:be eleventh to Comenius, see L. E. Harris, The Two Netherlanders: Humphrey Bradley and
iz suggested Cornelis Drebbel (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961 ), p. 130 and Josef Smaha, Comenius als
"edined, the Kartograph seines Vaterlandes (Znaim, 1892) .
8. The circumstances of the making of this drawing were noted by J. Q. van
.UQU5 Grise- Regteren Altena in London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Drawings from the Teyler
Museum, Haarlem (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1970), no. 39.
" Op en baar 9. Antoine de Smet, "A Note on the Cartographic Work of Pierre Pourbus,"
Imago Mundi 4 (1947):33-36, and Paul Huvenne, "Pieter Pourbus als Tekenaar,"
Oud Holland 94 (1980): 11 - 31. F or more general studies, see S. J. F ockema Andreae,
Geschiedenis der Kartografie van Nederland (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1947)
and Johannes Keuning, "XVIth Century Cartography in the Netherlands (mainly in
.&roes WeIu, the Northern Provinces)," Imago Mundi 9 (1952):35-63 .
. :. - and "The 10. Catalogue Raisonne of the works by Pieter Jansz. Saenrendam (Utrecht :
nores S4 and Centraal Museum, 1961). Giuliano Briganti, Gaspar van Wittel e l'origine della
",:ion of the veduta settecentesca (Rome: U. Bozzi, 1966).
11. Maria Simon, «Claesz Ja05z. Visscher," dissertation, Albert-Ludwig Univer-
r: Gelder, J .
IiiOS of th e art
sitat (Freiburg, 1958).
12. Ernst Kris, "Georg Hoefnagel und der Wissenschaftliche Naturalismus," in
'Utrecht :
Festschrift fur Julius Schlosser (Zurich, Leipzig, Vienna: Amalthea Verlag, n.d.), pp.
243-53.
"'" citled his
r..e . . . ) the 13. Quoted (in translation) in Johannes Keuning, "Issac Massa, 1586-1643,"
ende Imago Mundi 10 (1953):67.
Hondius as 14. A recent study of the nature and use of maps in mural cycles in Renaissance
chrijver van Italy reveals how differently they were perceived. For all the interest in maps in Italy,
n :--Hondius they remained distinct from pictures both in execution and in format. See Juergen
Schulz, "The Use of Maps in Italian Mural Decoration," unpublished Nebenzahl
258 Notes to Pages 133-47

lectu re, Newberry Library, Chicago, 1980.

15. For the Greek I have used Claudius Ptolemaeus, Geographia, ed. Karl Muller
(Paris, 1883); for the Latin the Geographia, trans . Bilibaldus Pirckheymer (Basel,
1552).
16. Evidence for th is trad iti on of in terpretation is read il y available in [he various
translations of Apianus's Cosmograph ia , the text of which is based on Ptolemy.
Picture is invoked in the subsection of chapter 1 entitled "Geographia Quid. " The
editions consulted were in Latin (Antwerp, 1545), in French (Paris, 1553), and in
Dutch (Amsterdam, 1609), all in the Bri tis h Library.
17. Apianus's rendering of Ptolemy's introductory words is "Cosmographia (ut
ex etymo vocabuli patet) est mundi ... descrip tio," (A ntwerp, 1545). The Dutch
editi on reads : "Cosmografie is een Conste daer-men de gheheele Wereldt mede
beschrijft," (Amsterdam, 1609). Th e casual identity assumed between a description
and a picture in thi s mapping context is best brou ght out in Gemma Frisius's own
French translation of a passage from Apianus, in which geograph y is referred to as
"une descrip tion ou paincture & imitation, " (Paris, 1545), chapter 1, p. 3 v • The Latin
so translated reads: "Geographia [est] . .. formula quaedam ac picturae imita tio."
18. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages,
trans. Willard K. Trask (New York: Bollingen Foundation, Pantheon Books , 1953) ,
pp. 68ff., for a succinct sum mary of the system of ancient rhetoric of whi ch ekphrasis
IS part.
19 . See the ti tl e of Frisiu s's treati se on triangu lation above , n. 2.
20. A. S. Osley, Mercator: A Monograph on the Lettering of Maps . .. (New
York: Watson-Gup thill Publications, 1969).
21. Samu el Y. Edgerton, Jr. , Th e Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective
(New York: Harper and Row, Icon Editions, 1976), chaptcrs 7 and 8. John Pinto,
on th e other hand , has distinguished a nonperspectival mode of city representation-
a vertical plan-whi ch he also associates with I taly. This view, which specifically
lacks a located viewer and instead assumes a plu rality of views, is closer to the
north ern pictorial mode tha t I am defining. See John A . Pinto , HOrigins and D evel-
opment of the Iconographic City Plan," Journal of the Society of Architectt<ral
Historians 35 (1976) :35-50.
22. A subtle and original attempt to argue the mapping nature of north ern im ages
is found in Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977),
chapter 7, "The Mind's Miniatures : Maps." .
23. The modern Dutch artist Piet Mondrian offers this map-to-Iandscape se-
quence in reverse. In the series of studies entitled Pier and Ocean, started upon his
return to Holland in 1914, Mondrian gradually turned a landscape (a seascape, really)
into a map. He withdrew from depth and upended the pier until it was resolved into
a surface articulation of a most determined and single-mi nded kind. Mondrian first
revealed his relationship to th is native tradition in some early landscapes such as th e
ext
1902 Landscape near Amsterdam (Michel Seuphor, Paris), which lies on the border- 31
line between mapping and landscap e like some Dutch paintings of the seventeenth
Dut.
century (fig. 176). We might see Mondrian's so-called abstractions not as breaking der
with tradition but as heir to the mapping tradition th at we are defining.
InSUI
24. Samuel va n Hoogstraten, lnleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst Wou
(Rotterdam, 1678), p. 7. Inces
25 . Kepler is qu oted as comm encing on the use of peasants as informan ts in ed .,
mapmaking. See Egon Klemp, Commentary on the Atlas of the Great Elector 1972
Notes to Pages 147-52 259

176. PI ET MONDRIAN, Landscap e near Amsterdam. Collection Michel Seuph or. Photo
Giraudon .
. (New
(Stuttgart-Berlin-Zurich; Belser Verlag, 1971 ), p. 19. Antoine de Smet, "A Note on
the Work, " n. 9, refers to Pourbus's use of fishermen and pilots.
Pinto,
26. Ernst Gombrich , "The Renai ssance Theory of Art and the Rise of Land-
scape," in Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), pp. 107- 21.
27. Edward Norgate, Miniatura or the Art of Limning (1648-58) (Oxford : Clar-
endon Press 1919), pp. 45- 46.
28. Jan de Vries, Th e Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500- 1700 (New
tallle'e/ural
Haven: Yale University Press, 1974) provides the fullest evidence. See especially
chapter 2.
Images
29. Translated from the Latin Epigramma in Duos Montes in Andrew Marvell:
, 1977),
The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donna (Harmondsworth: P enguin Books,
1972), pp. 74- 75. F or a discussion of this problem in English poetry, see James
Turner, The Politics of Landscape (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard U niversity Press,
1979); for the term " landscape" see the same author, "Landscape and the 'Art
Prospective' in England, 1584-1660,' " Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 42 (1979):290- 93.
30. lowe this poi nt ( 0 Linda Stone who came upon it in the course of her
extensive study of th e representation of texti les and th eir production in Dutch art.
3 1. The distinctively urban direction taken, both economically and socially, by
Dutch life on the land seems to inform these works. As the economic historian Van
der Woude put it in an important article, "It was the city, the citizens and urban
institutions which had to be reckoned with by village people." See A. M. van der
Woude, "Variations in the Size and Structure of the H ousehold in the United Prov-
inces of the Netherlands in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centu ries," Peter Laslett,
rexmants In ed., Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
Elector 1972), p. 304.
260 Notes to Pages 152-69

32. Wolfgang Stech ow Dutch Landscape Painting oj the Seventeenth Century

(Lon don: Phaidon Press, 1966) gives the standard account.
33. Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Cologne,
1572-1617),3 , N. .
34. R. A. Skelton in his introducti on to the reprint of Braun and Hogenb erg,
Civitates (Cleveland and New York, 1966).
35. Petrus Apianus, Cosmographia (Antwerp, 1545), chapter 19.
36 . Braun and H ogenberg, Civitates, 3, AV, B.
37 . Keuning, "Isaac Massa," p . 67.
38 . Norgate, Miniatura, p. 51.
39 . The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "graphic."
40. The Jacob van Ruisdael exhibition of 1981-82 brought to light that Ruisdael
himself had provided anoth er link between maps and landscapes. Ruisdael's extraor-
dinary Panorama of Amsterdam, Its H arbor and the II, now in a private collection ,
is th e tru e successor to Micker's painted map of Amsterdam. See Seymour Slive and
H. R. H oetinck , Jacob van Ruisdael (New York: Abbeville Press, 1981), no. 46 .
41. Munich, Haus der Kunst, Das Aquarell, 1400-1950, 1973.
42. Johan Blaeu, Le Grand Atlas (Amsterdam , 1663), introduction, pp. 1, 3.
43 . P etrus Apianus, Cosmographia (Antwerp, 1545), chapter 1.
44. Kurt Schottmuller, "Reiseindrucke aus Danzig, Lubeck, Hamburg and H oI-
land 1636," ZeitschriJt des westpreussisch en Geschichtsverein 52 (191 0) :260. Op
45. Herman Kampinga, De Opvattingen over onze Oudere Vaderlandsche Ges- ;
chiedenis bij de Hollandsche Historia der XVI ' en XVl/ ' Eeuw (The Hague: Mar-
tinus Nijhoff, 1917). pun.
46. The phrase in Dutch is "tot een klare ende held ere sonne der onbedekte
waarheyt, te spriet-oogen . .. . " It is quoted by Kampinga, De Opvattingen , p. 47 , centu::
and Dousa's Riim-Kroniik is discussed on p. 29. mtera:.
47. R. Joppien, "The Dutch Vision of Brazil," in Johann Maurits van Nassau-
Siegen 1604-1679 (The H ague: The Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichtung, 1979), p.
296. This publication on Prince Maurits includes thorough studies of the Dutch
pictorial records (including their maps) of Brazil.
48 . Dr. I. C . Koeman, Collections oj Maps and Atlases in the Netherlands (Lei-
den , 1961 ).
49. F . Muller, De Nederlandsche Geschiedenis in Platen (Amsterdam: Frederik
Muller, 1863-70), 1, xiii- xviii .
50. It is perhaps not surprising that a mod ern interpretation of Vermeer's Art oj
Pain ting attemp ts to accommodate it also to the Aristotelian triad of natura, ars,
exercitatio. But to see this painting as a rheto rical exercise seems to me ( 0 be a
misrepresentati on. See Hessel Miedema , "Johannes Vermeers 'Schilderkunst,' Proef
(September, 1972).
Chapter Five
1. Though th ere is a growing literature on letters and words in cubism, there have
been o nly a few attempts to deal with earlier art: Mieczyslaw Wallis, "Inscriptions
in Paintings," Semiotica 9 (1973) :1 - 28 ; "L' Art de la signature," the title of th e entire
issue of Revue de l'Art no. 26 (1974); and a small exhibition, "Just Looking at
Words : Words in Painting," at th e Rij ksmuseum, Amsterdam, 7 July to 7 Octob er outside cl
1979, which focu sed on the phenomenon bur did not note its peculiar role in Dutch
art. Dutch or
Notes to Pages 169-86 261

2. An instructive, though admittedly rather extreme, instance of the mnemonic

function of Renaissance paintings was built into a project for explaining art to the
;::e, blind that was recently devised by a leading scholar of Italian art. When I asked how
. he meant to go about this apparently impossible task, he told me that he was going
to set down (on ' tape, or in braille) the story narrated by each picture. That, he
explained, (meaning the story) is what you take away or remember from a painting
after looking at it. Of course Italian art was not devised for the blind, but it certainly
intended to illuminate and recall texts in a way that this project suggests.
3. I am indebted to Gary Schwartz's fine study for the identification of the
inscription (which is from a version of Colossians 3:16) and discussion of its place in
the debate over the use of the organ in churches. It is very likely, as Schwartz argues,
.r Ru isdael that this painting of Saint Bavo, like that of the Mariakerk to which we shall turn in
's extra or- a moment, was commissioned by Constantijn Huygens. He was the author of a short
Uection, book that argued for the reintroduction of the organ into sacred use in Dutch
, live and churches: see Constantijn Huygens, Use and Nonuse of the Organ in the Churches
, no. 46. of the United Netherlands, trans. and ed. Ericka E. Smit-Vanrotte, Musical The-
orists in Translation 4 (Brooklyn, N. Y. : Institute of Mediaeval music, 1964). See also
pp. 1, 3. Gary Schwartz, "Saenredam, Huygens and the Utrecht Bull," Simiolus 1
(1966- 67) :68-93 .
. and Hol- 4. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori scultori ed architetti in Le
toJ. Opere, ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1878- 85), 7:277- 78.
rsche Ges- 5. I am not disputing previous interpretations that identify the mirror framed by
e: Mar- scenes from the Passion as the speculum sine macula or a symbol of the Virgin's
purity. But I think it would be wrong to insist on this as its only explanation in the
oobedekte painting. I do, however, dispute the tendency, common in studies of seventeenth-
p. 47, century art, to insist on transience as the prime concern and thus to undermine the
interest in representation that is so basic to the culture. For this view of theArno/fini
I.\-assau- Wedding mirror, see Heinrich Schwarz, "The Mirror in Art," The Art Quarterly 25
1979), p. (1952):97-1 18. Jan Bialostocki concludes an otherwise interesting essay by relating
he Dutch mirrors in the Baroque to transience in "The Mirror in Painting: Reality and Trans-
cience," Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard
pods (Lei- Meiss, eds. Irving Lavin and John Plummer, 2 vols. (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1977), 1 :71.
: Frederik 6. See B. P. J. Broos, "The O's of Rembrandt," Simiolus 4 (1971 ): 150-84.
Broos's emphasis on the admiration with which calligraphy was regarded in Holland
,,-'s Art of is I think justified. This chapter offers evidence of a different kind to add to his.
:::tTa. ars. Hessel Miedema's response to Broos, in which he tried to redress the balance between
e to be a painting and calligraphy to give the former its due, is I think based on the mistaken
tst,' Proef assumption that the Dutch agreed with the Italian view of such things. See Hessel
Miedema, "The O's of Broos," Simiolus 5 (1971-74):185-86.
7. The relation of letters and things inscribed in such a work puts one in mind of
Saul Steinberg. Letters, as a review of a show of his work put it, present themselves
here have to him as things . Or as Steinberg put it (quite in keeping with the Dutch), "I have
s.cnpnons always had a theory that things represent th emselves." Quoted in Time Magazine,
o e entire 17 April 1978, p. 95.
ooki ng at 8. Of course Latin inscriptions did occur on the lids of keyboard instruments
. October outside the Lowlands. But, as Alan Curtis kindly confirmed, among all the preserved
in Dutch instruments with original decoration there is none with a Latin inscription that is not
Dutch or Flemish.
262 Notes to Pages 188-201

9. For the identification of the book that Dou's figure is looking at, see H. M .
Rotermund, "Rembrandt's Bibel," Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 8
(1971 ):134. Tiimpel has argued that Rembrandt's old woman is Hanna. The im-
portance of this contrast between DOll and Rembrandt was brought to my attention
by Mary Vidal, "Representations of the Book in Rembrandt's Art," (M.A. dis-
sertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1978).
10. E. de Jongh, Zinne- en minnebeelden in de schilderkunst van de zeventiende
eeuw (Amsterdam: NederiandseStichting Openbaar Kunstbezit en Openbaar Kunst-
bezit in Vlaanderen, 1976), pp . 49-55.
11. Otto Vaenius, Amorum Emblemata .. . (Antwerp, 1608), pp. 132-33.
12. J . H. Krul, Pampiere Wereld (Amsterdam, 1644), p. 81. The connection
between such an image and paintings by Ter Borch was suggested by S. J. G ud-
laugsson, Gerard Ter Borch, 2 vols. (The Hague: Martinus N ijhoff, 1959).
13. The basic stud y dealing with letter manuals in general and the Dutch scene in
particular is Bernard Bray, L'Art de La Lettre Amoureuse: des Manuals aux Romans
(The Hague: Mouton, 1967). For the French schoolmasters in Holland, see K. J.
Riemens, Esquisse historique de l'enseignement du Fram;ais en Hollande de au
XIX sieele (Leiden, 1919).
14. I mea n by this to suggest that the motif for Dutch "genre" scenes is less mora l
teaching than engagement with social ritual at the point where pictorial traditi on and
contemporary social custom meet. Another example is the so-called Gay Company
or Gezelschap scenes of festivity and drinki ng in garden settings, which are related
to the pictorial theme of the Garden of Love and to actual premarital or May-day
celebrations. (I have touched on this point at greater length in my "Realism as a
Comic Mode: Low-life Painting Seen through Bredero's Eyes," Simiol", 8
(1975-76):115-43 , see esp. nn. 18 and 45.)
15. J ean Puget de la Serre, Secretaire a la Mode (Rouen, 1671 ), pp . 188-89; 194.
16. "Litterae quae vera amantis vestigia," Amorum Emblemata (A ntwerp, 1608 ) ,
p. 132.
17. For the growth of th e postal service at this time, see J. C. H emmeon , The
History of the British Post Office (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912);
Eugene Vaille,Histoire General des Poste (Pari s : Presses Un iversi taires de
France, 1950), vols . 2 and 3. A cu rious picture by Pieter de Wit in the Rijksmu seum
testifies to the importance of the postal service for the Dutch in far-flung parts of the
world. D irck Wilre, a Dutch representative in Elmina, West Africa, clothed in the
latest fashion, and standing in an interior decorated as it would be back home, looks
on as a native stoOpS to show him a land scape painting of the region . On the table
beyond li es a letter, plainly addressed to his wife, which serves to recall his distant
home. See the Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 27 (1979):7- 29 on this painting.
18 . The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius, p. 84 .
19. See Garcilosa de la Vega, EI Inca, Royal Commentaries of th e Incas, trans.
Harold V. Livermore (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1966),
1:603-5. J. H. Elliott suggested to me that de la Vega, who was known in Europe
at this time, is th e probable source of Comenius's remark.
20 . Karel van Mander, Schilder-boeck, 1, fo!' 51b .
21. The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius, pp. 188-89 .
22. G. B. della Porta, Natural Magick, pp. 356, 357.
23. Thomas Digges, A Geometrical Practical Treatize Named Pantometria (Lon-
don, 1591 ), p. 28. Cornel is Drebbel also claimed to have invented an optical device asl
Notes to Pages 201-15 263

..
, that enabled him to read letters at the distance of an English mile. To further close
the tight circle of friends engaged in natural knowledge at the time, the letter to the
English king in which Drebbel makes this claim found its way into Beeckman's
journal. For this, see L. E. Harris, The Two Netherlanders: Humphrey Bradley and
Camelis Drebbel (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961), pp . 146-48.
24 . Robert Hooke, Micrographia, p. 3.
25. There is not, nor perhaps could there be, any textual equivalent to this picto-
rial admission on Vermeer's part. But it is not irrelevant that Van Hoogstraten, in the
tide-print to book 1 of his Inleyding, depicts the artist, spyglass in hand, perched on
th e shoulder of his teacher in order to see further: to learn to be an artist is literally
to peer beyond the rest-like the users of the spying-lenses that we have been citing.
J. G ud- Th e text accompanyin g the print reads, "Macr die op's meesrcrs nek getilt zi jn, zien
licht verder," Hoogstratcn, Inleyding, p. 1.
26. To pin down the classical mode of Rembrandt's presentation of this nude, a
relationship has been suggested between it and an engrav ing by Fran!rois Perrier after
the antique. See Hendrik Bramsen, "The Classicism of Rembrandt's Bathsheba, "
The Burlington Magazine 92 (1950):128- 3 1.
27. For a study of the representation of Bathsheba in art, see Elizabeth Kunoth-
Leifels, Ober die Darstellungen der " Bathseba im Bade": Studien zur Geschichte
des Bildthemas 4. bis 17 Jahrundert (Essen: Richard Bacht, 1962).
28. For the current state of research and thinking about the pre-Rembrandtists,
see Astrid and Christian Tiimpel, The Pre-Rembrandtists (Sacramento: E. B.
Crocker Art Gallery, 1974) and Astrid Tiimpel, "Claes Cornelisz. Moeyaert," Oud
as a Holland 88 (1974):1-163 .
8 29. The History of Susanna, 20- 22, Apocrypha, King James Version.
30. This strain seems to run long and deep. The comic strip that appears at the end
of the catalogue of the 1979 Vondel anniversary exhibit at the Theatermuseum in
Amsterdam is not, as a recent reviewer put it, the sign of a student's book, or a "naive
attempt to reach a more general audience" (Peter King, "Commemorating Vonde1
and Hooft," The Times Literary Supplement, 7 August 1981, p. 90S). It is a long
estabushed Dutch mode of setting forth a story.
31. Terms such as "down-to-eanh" are often applied (0 Dutch narrative paintings
by way of exp laining what I think is more properly seen as a specific narrative mode.
See, for example, the description of the Dance of Salome, by the little-known Jacob
Hogers, in the exhibition catalogu e Gods, Saints and Heroes in Dutch Painting in the
Age of Rembrandt (Washington: National Gallery of Art; 1980), p. 264.
32. See Svetlana Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, Corpus
Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard 9 (Brussels: Arcade Press; London: Phaidon Press,
1971).
33 . For this explanation of the pre-Rembra ndtists' narrative mode, see Christian
Tiimpel, The Pre-Rembrandtists, pp . 132-47.
34. Heckscher made this point in the course of pointing out the objections to
in Europe ill ustrated texts that had to be overcome by the progressive anatomists of the time.
See William S. Heckscher, Rembrandt's Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tl<lp (New Yark:
New York University Press, 1958), pp. 62- 64.
35. For an overview of the current state of knowledge in this area, see Pieter J. J.
van Thiel, "Moeyaert and Bredero: A Curious Case of Dutch Theatre as Depicted in
(Lon- Art," Simiolus 6 (1972-73) :29-49. Van Thiel is cautious about insisting on the stage
device as the source of the "look" of Dutch pictures . Indeed, in the case of the Moeyaert
264 Notes to Pages 215-20

painting with which he is concerned, he comes to the conclusion that the painting is
based on the reading of the rext, nor on a performance of the play. See also Kurt
Bauch, Der friihe Rembrandt and seine Zeit, (Berlin : Gebr. Mann, 1960), pp .
68-73, and Christian Tiimpel, The Pre-Rembrandtists, p. 164.
36 . An interesting example of the relationship between Vonde!'s biblical play
j oseph in Egypt of 1640 and a painting by Jan Pynas suggests the complexity of this
matter. In his introduction to the published play, Vande! acknowledges that he
followed Pynas's painting of the ''Discovery of the Bloody Coat" and goes on to say
how much pictures can he!p playwrights. If we read the play we find, curiously, that
rather than dramatizing the scene thar is represented by Pynas in the painting,
Vonde! instead describes it in the form of a monologue put into the mouth of Ruben.
The picture, in other words, becomes a caption on the stage. Bauch concluded from
this that Vonde! was less of a dramatic playwright in the manner of the contemporary
English or Spanish stage than he was a painter! On the basis of what I have said about
the pre-Rembrandtists' narrative mode, I would add that what Vonde! and the
pre-Rembrandtists shared was a commitment to description. In this instance th e
playwright took a lesson in it from the painter. For the passage from the Vande! play
based on Pynas, and an illustration of the Pynas painting, see Bauch, Der [ruhe
Rembrandt, pp. 71-73.
37. I chose these two particular examples because I was struck by them when they
were both hung in the exhibition "Gods, Saints and Heroes: Du tch Painting in the
Age of Rembrandt," which originated at the National Gallery in Washington in
1980-81. Though it is true as Albert Blankert points out in the catalogue (p . 170),
that Bol expands and develops his composition through a series of preparatory
sketches, the conversation between Fabritius and Pyrrhus remains its central feature.
38. J. Cats, Spiegel van den Ouden en Nieuwen Tyt (The Hague, 1632) pp .
12 - 13.
39 . I was told of this contest by members of the staff of the Detroit Institute of
Arts.
40. Julius S. Held, ''Das gesprochene Wort bei Rembrandt," in Neue Beitrage
zur Rembrandt-Forschung, eds. Otto von Simson and Jan Kelch (Berlin: Gebr.
Mann, 1973), pp. 111-25.
41. Another case in point is Rembrandt's handling of Christ and the Woman
taken in Adultery. The subject offered the opportunity, often taken up by artists, of
representing Christ's words inscribed in the dust. Rembrandt eschews these written
words. But in one drawing he adds some of his own: across the bottom of a sheet in
Munich (Benesch 1047) Rembrandt has written "so eager to ensnare Christ in his
reply, the scribes could not wait for the answer" (fig. 177). More like the humanists
of rhe preceding century than the artists of his own, Rembrandt does not seek to put
the wisdom of Christ in to visible words; instead he comments on the response to
those words. Cia
42. In this consideration of the Dutch narrative mode, as in my book as a whole, Yo]
I am in disagreement wirh an influenrial essay by J. A. Emmens which argues that br
in seventeenth -century Holland the word was valued over the image, or hearing over R",
sight. Th ough this might seem to be the predictable attitude of a Protestant culture,
it seems distinctly not to have been the case for the Dutch. Rembrandt, however, is aru
the exception. In making him the central example, Emmens treats the exception as the
th e rule. See J. A. Emmens, "Ay Rembrandt, Maal Camelis Stem," Nederlands I
Kunsthistorisch jaarboek 7 (1 956):133-65 . Un
Notes to Pages 223-25 265

reatu re .
1632) pp.
177. REMBRANDT VAN RIJ N, The Adulterous Woman before Christ ( drawing).
",ti ru te of
Staarliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich.
Beitrage
: Gebr. Epilogue
I. Francisco de Hollanda, Four Dialogues on Painting, trans. Aubrey. F. G . Bell
e W'oman (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 15- 16.
artiS tS, of 2. Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook, trans. Daniel V.
I5.e v.n tten 11lOmpson, Jr. (New York: Dover Publications, n.d.,), pp. 48-49.
f.a sheet in 3. Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p. 66 .
risr in his 4. It was Rembrandt's distance from the Italian narrative mode that dominated my
'b lman istS
f""k to pu t
interpretation of his works on an earlier occasion and led me to group him with
descriptive artists. I am now more conscious of the deep ambivalence of his art : it
to draws on, yet is profoundly other than, each of these established modes . For Lord
Clark's remark, see Kenneth Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (New
ts .. wh ole, York: New York University Press, 1966) , p. 2. My earlier characterization of Rem-
u-gues that brandt as a descriptive artist is found in my "Describe or Narrate?: A Problem in
r:a.."ng ov er Realistic Representation," New Literary History 8 (1976-77):23- 25.
c : culture,
5. Rembrandt's establishment of his own program in which he trained young
1Dv.-eYer, is
artists as he wanted them trained is further evidence of his renegade relationship to
:cepnon as the traditional craft of the Dutch painter.
6. With the exception of the works of a painter like Hendrick ter Brugghen in
Utrecht and the history paintings painted on occasion by painters of domestic scenes
266 Notes to Pages 227- 30

such as Metsu, there is a sense in which th ese two traditions -illustrative works on
the one hand and crafted rep resentati ons on the other-remain separa te in H o lland
until late in the century. It was Jan Steen's unique ach ievement to be able to com bine
them both: he produced works that illustrate historical themes while deploying th e
highest level of skill of the descriptive mode.
7. One might. however) argue that Rembrand t shares his Dutch compatriates'
notion of an attentive viewer but that he assu mes different and more demanding work
(0 be done o n our part. Contrary, th en, to what I have been sugges ting , his art too

can be seen as an art of describing, but of a most unprecedented kind . He locates that
practice in the very material of the paint surface itself, with results that are as
idiosyncrati c as, and comparable to, what Picasso did in 1906 and 1907 with the
pictorial traditi on of representing objects in space. The germ of this thought, wh ich
occurred to me only after I completed the book, l owe to Michael Baxandall.
8. l owe much of this account of Rembrandt's Julius Civilis to a fascinating and
persuasive unpublished paper by Margaret Carroll , which I want to thank her for
letti ng me read . There is, of course, more to the painting than what I can say here.
A fu ll account of it would have to consider also the role of the model provided by
Leonardo's Last Supper fo r the group at the table. Such reaching out to a hallowed
Italian work is also a way of admitting a historical, in the sense of a tempo ral,
dimension to the work. Rather than resolving history into one-as Poussin aimed to
do-Rembrandt would seem to have been trying to compli cate th e Dutch sense of
their present rebelli on by relating it to both a Catholic and to a paga n oath of fealty .
Rembrandt was not alone after the mid-century mark in striving to create a Dutch
past that would situate what were generall y perceived as present tru ths in a temporal
framework. In his two well-known vi ews of The Jewish Cemetery, and more subtly
in certai n la ndscapes of the 16605 that displa y primeval trees and undrained swamps
that admit of natural rot, decay, death, and new growth, Jacob Ru isdael offered a
historiated alternative to the mapped histories of his Haarlempjes. It is very likely
that the signs of political and economi c troubles that surfaced even as the newly built
Amsterdam Town Hall proclaim ed the achi evements of the Dutch Republic had
somethi ng to do with thi s commo n historical concern.

Appendix
1. E. de Jongh has published a series of essays and supervised an exhibition
presenti ng the. emblematic interpretation of Dutch pictures . See his Zinne-en min-
nebeelden in de schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: N ederlands
O penbaar Kunstbezit, 1967) ; "Realisme en schijnrealisme in de hollandse schil-
derkunst van de zeven ti ende eeuw," in Rembrandt en zijn tijd (Brussels : Paleis voor
Schone Kunsten, 1971), pp. 143- 94 (also available in a French edition); Tot Leering
en Vermaak (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1976), an exhibition catalogue organized
by De Jongh and assistants; fo r a brief exampl e of the approach in English sec E. de
Jongh, "Grape Symbolism in Paintings of the 16th and 17th Centuries," Simiolus 7
(1974) :1 66-9 l.
2. Hessel Miedema, " The term Emblema in Alciati,"Joumal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968) :234- 50.
3. Robert Klein , «Th e Theory of Figurative Express io n in Italian Treatises on the
Impresa, " trans . Madeline Jay and Leon Wieseltier, in Form and Meaning: Essays
on the Renaissance and Modem A rt (New York : The Viking Press, 1979), pp. 3-24.
NotestoPages 230- 31 267

4. See, for example, th e "Voor-reden" to J. Cats, Spiegel van den Ouden en

orks on Nieuwen Tyt in Aile de Wercken (Amsterdam , 1712),2:479-82. Cats's presentation
- Holland
is rather like Hoogstraten's insofar as he does not proceed by developing a singl e li ne
of argument, but rather by setting forth a series of separate proposals about the nature
of emblems.
5. Mario Praz came to this conclusion in his Studies in Seventeenth-Century
I magery, 2nd. ed. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia c Letteratura, 1964), p. 170. It is a rare
Dutch emblem that features the eccentri c and puzzling assemblage of objects and
abbreviated actions so common in the Italian tradition. Wh ile Roemer Visscher's
Sinnep oppen of 1614 does feature some hands extending puzzli ng objects from the
that are as
sky, in general the images in his book depict actions or objects in common use.
)9:)7 with the
6. De Jongh's recent work has pointed out the multivalent nature of emblems : a
whi ch pearl can represent virtue in one context but vice in This emphasis on
multivalence does not, however, alter the basic notion of how D utch pictures mean
and that is assumed by th e emblematic interpretation. See E. de Jongh, "Pearls of Virtue
thank her for and Pearls of Vice," Simiolus 8 (1974- 76):69- 97.
1 can say h ere. 7. The popularity of this pictorial mode has lasted into modern times. It is am us-
provided by ing that in Holland th e frequent warning to dogs and their owners against fou li ng the
m a hallowed
public footpaths are posted not in the form of the text of an ordinance threatening
at a temporal, a fine, but as an emblem: brightly colored images of unmannerl y dogs are stencilled
. aimed to onto the sidewalks with an inscription above reading "I n de Goot" or "in the gucter."
Du tch sense of 8. The most suggestive in terpretation of Dutch art and society along more com-
oath of fealty. plex lines is found in twO articles by the historian Simon Schama: " The Unrul y
create a D utch Realm: Appetite and Restraint in Seventeenth Centu ry Holland, " Daedalus 108 no.
in a tempo ral 3 (1979):103- 23 and "Wives and Wantons: Versions of Womanhood in 17th Century
more subtly Dutch Art," Oxford Art Journal (April 1980):5-13. On the evidence of their images
.:r-aitled swamps of themselves, I tend to find th e Dutch in the seventeenth century to be less ridden
offered a wi th anxiety than does Schama.
I : is very likely 9. See Christopher Brown, Carel Fabritius (Oxford: Phaidon, 198 1), p. 48 , and
:he newly built Peter Sutton, Pieter de Hooch (Oxford: Phaidon, 1980), pp . 44- 51. The problem of
Republic had interpretation that these instances reveal is not, of course, uniqu e to the study of
Dutch art. But, to come full circle to where this book began, it is endemic to the
discipline of art history, which has confined itself too long to a single theory of
. .
InterpretatIon.
fed an exhibition
Zinne-en min-
m:
nollandse schil-
eIs: Paleis voor
on ; Tot Leering
"_'agu e organized
r English see E. de
Fries," Szmwlus 7

W'a rburg and

u..-: Treatises on the

- Essays
5>.19- 9 , pp. 3- 24.
A-

91
BaiU:
IV-
BanE
Bare
Lv:
Bast.
B=
Beed
Beve
of
Ber e
ver
th,
Biers
12-
Blaet.
15'
13'
Na
Index

References to illustrations are printed in italic type.

Ackerman, James, 42, 45 Bol, Ferdi nand, 112; Elisha Refuses King
Alberti, Leon Battista, 22, 41-45, 53, Naaman's Gifts, 215-17,216; The In-
137-38; definition of the picture, xix- xx, trepidity of Fabritius in the Camp of Pyr-
27; iston'a, xxi rhus, 215-17,216
Ampzing, Description and Praise of the Borch.. Gerard ter, xvii , 114 , 225; A Lady
Town of Hoar/em, 152-54 Reading a Letter, 192 ,195, 202; A Lady
Angels, Philips, Lof der Schilder-Canst, 242 Writing a Letter, 192, 194; Postman De-
Anonymous: Couple with Child, 233,233; livering a Letter, 192
miraculous images found in an apple tree, Bosschaert, Ambrosius [he Eld er, 83
80, 80- 83; The polder "Het Grootslag" Brahe, Tycho, 33
near Enkhuisen, 142,145; Radish, 101, Braun, Georg and Franz Hogenberg: Civi-
101, 183 tates Orbis Terrarum, 128 , 133, 134, 152,
Anthonisz., Comelis, 157 154 , 156-57j Den Briel, in Civitates Or-
Apianus, Petrus, 134, 156, 159; "Geo- bis Terrarum, 139,141; Nijmegen, in
graphia and «Chorographia," 134 , 134,
H
Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 123,152,153
167,167 Bray, Jan de, A Represented as
Atlas van Stolk, 165 Ulysses and Penelope, 14,14
Bray, Joseph de, In Praise of Herring, 183,
Bachrach, A. G. H., 10,237 185
Bacon, Sir Francis, 4-5, 27, 50, 74, 96, Bray, Salomon de, 113
161, 250; an d art, 99-109; mechanical Bruegel, Pie[er [he Elder: topographical
and experimental history, 99-103, views, 40-41, 128, 142, 144- 45; per-
105-6, 109; Great Instauration, 9- 10, formative figures, 218; Bay of Naples,
82,94, 100, 105; Novum Organum, 75, 128,131; Proverbs, 230; The Seasons,
91,100; Parasceve, 72, 100-102, 109 144
Bailly, David, 116,254; Still Life, 103 - 9, Bronzino, Agnolo, St. John the Baptist, 59,
104 (see also color plate 1) 61
Banfield, Ann, 247 Brugghen, Hendrick ter, xxii i, 238, 265-66
Barentsz, WiIlem, Caertboeck Vande Mid- Burke, Peter, 238
landtsche Zee, 128,131
Bast, Pi eter, 152 Camera obscura, xvii, 27-33, 4 1, 73-74,
Baxandall, Michael, xx, xxv , 235, 266 159,240- 41; and Huygens, 11-13,239;
Beeckman, Isaac, 74-76,116,148,262- 63 and Kepler, 36, 50-51
Beverwyck, Johan van, 75, 148; illustration Caravaggio. Michelangelo da, xxi, xxiii, 24,
of the working of the eye, 28, 41, 42 38
Beyeren, Abraham van, Still Life with·a Sil- Cats, Jacob. xxv i-xxvii , 75, 217, 230-33,
ver Wine Jar and a Reflected Portrait of 267; "Elck spiegelt hem selven," 217,
the Artist, 19,20, 21 217; Illustracions to Silenus Alcibiades,
Bierstadt, Albert, Yosemite Winter Scene, 231,232
124, 125 Cennini, Cennino, 223
Slaeu, Willem Jansz., World Atlas, xxvi, C lark, Lord Kenneth, 27, 224, 265
154, 159; map of Africa in World Atlas, Colie, Rosalie, 10,237
134, 135j landmarks in Le Flambeau de Comenius, Johann Amos, I27 j pictures as
Navigation, 142,143; map of Delft, 156 models of language and making, 93-111;
Blanken, Alben, 264 and letters, 197- 201; Great Didactic,

269
270 Index

Comen ius. Johann Amos-comimted fromentin, Eugene, The Masters of Past

94 - 95, 98:'99, 10 1; Janua Time, xviii - xix, 29-30, 39
Reserla , 94; Opera Didactica, 110; Orbis
Pidns, 72,93-99,231; "Cookery," in Galassi, Peter, 244
Orbis Pictus, 98,99; '''A Tree," in Orbis Galileo, 25
Pictu5, 96,97 Geertz, Clifford, 8
Cowley, Abraham, 79-80 Gheyn, Jacques de, 11,38,251 ; and al-
Curtis , A lan , 26 1 chemy, 5; attentiveness to vi sible world ,
Cuyp, Aelbert, xvii; View of Amersfoort, 5-8,85-90; crafted surface, 225; and
146, 147; Two Young Shepherds, 151 , Huygens, 2, 5-8; and visual literacy, 96,
152 100; Caesar Dictating to His Scribes,
89-90 ,89; Four Mice, 84,86; Hermit
Descartes , Rene, illustration of the theory Crab and Witchcraft, 6,6; 'page from a
of the retin al image, 34, 4 1 drawing book, 7, 7,38, 158; Studies of a
Diderot, Denis, 11 1-1 2 Head, 85,87; Woman with Child and
Diest, Jeronimus van, The Seizure of the PicUlre-book, 96, 97, 253
English Flagship "Royal Charles," 183, Giorgione da Castelfranco, 58-59
184 Goedart, Joannes, 84
Digges, Thomas, 20 1 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 103
Dou, Gerard: and painter's craft, l Oa, 11 2, Goltzius, H endrick, 40, 139- 42, 242; map -
114, 115 ,231; in scriptions, 188; A Poul- ping mode , 139- 42; An Artist and His
terer's Shop, 27, 28; The Quack, 105, Model, 58- 59,60; 'Couple Viewing a
116- 18,117,233; Rembrandt's Mother, Waterfall, 139, 140, 141; Dune Land-
188, 191 scape near Haarlem , 139-42,140
Drawing: absorption of into painting in the Gornbrich, Ernst, 46 , 7 1,139-4 1,1 47,244
north, 38, 157, 180; as grapha, 135-36; Gowing, Lawrence, xx , 37, 224, 235
H oogstraten's und ersta ndi ng of, 38-39; Goyen , Jan va n: panoramic landscapes,
as inscriptions in painting , 172-92; used 139, 142 , 145 ; Views of Brussels and
in Goltz ius's "realistic" representation of Haeren, 132, /32 ; 'View of the Hague.
landscape, 139; and wri ting, 135-36, 154,155
176-77
Drebbel, Cornelis, 4- 5,12- 13,23,127, Hals, Dirck , Lady Tearing a Letter, 192,
262- 63; and camera obscura, 12 - 13 193,193, 197
Durer, Albrecht, xxiii -xxiv; Great Piece of Hals, Frans, 38; Lute Player, 106
Tu1, xxiv, 158; draftsman drawing a Heda, Wi ll em C lae,z ., 113; Still Life,
nu de, 42,43 , 224,243; MeiencoHa, XXIV; 90-91 , 92
Rabbit, 158 H egel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 249
H eld, Julius, 21 8
Eckhout, Alben, Tarairiu Man , 163,164 Heist, Banholomeu s van der, The Four
Emblems, xxvi-xxvii, 1, 193,229-33, Archers o[ the St. Sebastian Guards, 169,
266- 67; in The Art of Painting, 119, 171
166-67; in Hollan d, 217- 18 Heyden, Jan van cler, xvii . 29, 7 1
Ernmen s, J. A., 253, 256 Hobbema, Meyndert, 112
Evelyn , John, 96, 11 0 Hoefnagel, Joris, 24
Everdin gen, Caesar van, Duke \Y/illem 11 Hollanda, Francisco de , xxi ii , 19- 22, 223
Granting Privileges to the High Office of Holton, Gerald, 246, 254
the Dike-R eeve of Rijnland in 1255, 228, Hondiu s, 2, 159
228 Honthorst, Gerrie van, xxii i
Eyck, Jan van: and painter's craft, xxi, 25, Hooch, Pieter de, 38; The Courtya rd of a
17; in scripti o ns, 178- 80; reflections on House in Delft, 169,170
mirrored surfaces, 19,71, 178-80; The Hoogstraten, Samuel van, 241 -42; on
Arnolfini Wedding, 178 - 80,178, 179; drawing, 38 - 39, 76; o n the nature of pic-
Madonna with th e Canon van der Paele, tures, 76-79; on maps, 141 - 42 ; on per-
2/,44,179 spective, 51, 58-64, 14 1- 42,263; peep-
box, 62, 63
Foucault, Michel, xxiv, 70, 79, 248 Hooke , Rob ert: Micrographia, 72,73-74,
Frean de Chambray, Roland, 110 110,201 j illustration of seeds of thyme in
Fried , Michael, xx, 235, 245 Micrographia, 77,84,86
Index 271

PJ.S: Huygens, C hristian (the younger), 2, 10 , blstman, Pieter: and narrati ve, 207; Abra-
238 ham and the Angels, 207,209; The Angel
Huygcns, Constanti jn: artistic edu cati on, Addressing the Family of Tobias in De-
xxiv, 2; career, on Bacon and Dreb- parture, 207, 208; D avid Giving the Let-
bel, 13, 18, 23 , 100; on De G heyn , 2 , ter to Uriah , 207,208; Susanna and the
6-8; on lenses an d sight , 15-1 9; on pi c- Elders, 210, 2 11
tures and natu ral knowledge, 22- 25 ; and Leemans. Anthony, Still Life. 180, 181
Saenredam, 26 1; writin gs on art and art- Leeuwen, Short D escription of Leyden,
ists, 1- 4,22- 25,35,241; Auto- 161 - 62
biography, 1- 11, IS, 22-24 , 33, 237; Leeu wenhoeck, Anthony van, 23- 24, 25,
Daghwerck, 11-12 ,15-17,18,22,23, 83- 84
161 - 62 Leon ardo da Vi nci: on sigh t, 46- 48; The
Hu ygens, C onstantijn III: View of Madonna of the Rocks, 47; Th e Virgin
Maastricht across th e Meuse at Smeer- and Child with St. A nne, 47, 47
maes, 127-28, 129; .View of the \Vaal Leperues, Wolf, 249
from the To wn Gate at Zaltbommel, 132, Locke, Joh n, 91
148, 149 Lorrain e, Claude, 147

Italian art, contrasted to Dutch art: Alber- Magritte, Rene, Ceo n'esl pas une pipe,
ti's definition of a pi cture, 27; as basis of 169- 72
art- historical discipline, xix- xxiv; and Mander, Karel van, 24 1- 42 ; on G oltzi us,
class ical sciences, 102 ; disegna, 38-3 9; 40,242; on letters, 200; on Vredeman de
drawin gs fr om life, 40; and Kepler' s pic- Vries, 246; on witness es in paintings, 25 1
ture, 41 - 49; lux and lumen, 244; and Manet, Edouard, Dejeuner sur I'Herbe, xx i
maps, 257-58; narrative, xxi, 212, Map of the U nited Sta tes , 124 ,125
235- 36; p erspective, 245- 46; propo rti o n, Markgraf, G eorg, 162 , 163 ; map of Brazil,
19- 22, 85; resemblance and ideal view of 162,162
world in, 78 Ma rvell, Andrew, Epigramma in Duo Mon-
tes, 14 8-49
James, H enry, 26- 27 Masacci o, 71
Jam es, Will iam, 90 Massa, Isaac, 133 . 157
Johns, Jasper: Alphabet, 169- 72; Map , Marnam , Jacob, The Brewery and the
125, 125 Country H ouse of Jan Claesz. Loo, 38 ,
Jongh, E. de, 229- 31 39, 180,182
Mercator, G erardu s, 159; Atlas, 134; On
Kalf, Will cm: and painter's craft, 35, 100, th e Lettering of Map s, 137, 137
11 4- 15; Still Life, 91, 11 5,115, 11 8,225; Merian, Maria Siby lla. 84
use of dark ground, 83 Merton, R. K., 102,240
Kampinga, H erman, 161 Metsu, Gabriel, 265-66; inscriptions ,
Kepler, Johannes, 70-71, 109 ,243; theory 183- 86, 196- 197; and painter's craft ,
of vision, 30-38; compared to Viato r, 114; seei ng as sp yin g, 202-3; Duet, 183,
56; compared to Hoogstraten , 62-64; 186, 187; Th e Letter Writer S't rprised,
drawing of an optical device, 28, 49-50, 50 202,202; Man Writing a Letter, 197,
Kern, Ri chard H ., View of Sangre de 198, 202-3; Woman Reading a Letter,
Cristo Pass, 124,124 42, 196- 97,19 ; Wom an at the Virginal,
Kessel, Jan van, A m erica, 165 169, 183 , IS6, 186
Keyser, Thomas de, Constantijn Huygens Michelangelo, 38, 113, 177; on Flemish
and His Clerk, 1, 3, 192 p ainring, xx iii , 19-22, 223
Kitao , T. Kaori, 245 , 247 Micker, Jan Ch ri stiacnsz ., View of Am-
Klee, Paul , Einst dem Grall der Na cht, sterdam, 157,158 (see also colo r p late 3)
169-72 Mi edem a. H ess el , 243 , 253, 260
oi pic- Klein, Robert, 245 Miereveld, Michie! van , 23, 35, 112
Koninck , Ph ilips, 139, 145 ; Landscape with Mieris, F rans van (the elder), 100, 11 0, 1 14
a Ha wking Party, 19, 142 ,143, 144 Mo lyn, Pieter de, 113
Krauss , Rosalind, 243-44 Monconys , Balthazar de, 11 0, 148
_. Kri ste ller, Pau l O skar. 254 Mondri an , Piet, Landscape nea r Am-
--: in Krul, J. H. , 193 sterdam , 258,259
Kuh n, Thomas, 24 , 102, 24 0,254 Montias, J. M ., 255
272 Index

Moxon, John, Mechanick Exercises or the versatio ns, 2 18-20; texts in , 188-92; Saenreda
Doctrine of Handy-work, 105 Abraham and Isaac, 218- 20, 22 1; The 176, I,
Muller, Frederick, 165 Adulterous Woman before Christ, 264, the 1m
265; Anslo and His Wife, 188,190,220; 80-83
Naer het leven, 40- 41,242 Bathsheba , 204, 206-7,224; Beggar and Hi
Norden, John, Surueior's Dialogue. 148 Seated on a Mound, 15,16; Belsha.z zar's
Norgatc, Edward, Miniatura , 147, 157 Feast, 192; Chn·sl Preaching, 220,221, 51. 8"1
251; The Concord of the State, 192; The Haarll
Ochtervelt, j acob, The Musidans, 120, 121 Goldweigher's Field, 149,150, 15 1-52; Scham a,
Oneiiu5 , Abraham: and Bru egel, 12 8, 142, Hendrijke as Flora, IS; Homer Dictating, Schapirol
236; Theatrttm Orbis Terramm, 157 227,227; The j ewish Bride, 14- 15,15, Schn oor,
Osrade, Adriaen van, 112, 114 225,227; Moses, 192; Nathan Admon- Life,
Oude Kerk, Delft, the tOmb of Admiral ishing David, 212,213; The Oath of j u- Schwartz
Tromp, 174,174 lius Civ ilis, 225, 226, 227, 228, 266; The Searle, Je
Prodigal Son, 225 ,227; An Old Woman, Spranger
Pachr, Ono, xx, 235 188 , 191,262; Saskia as Flora , 15; Self- Wife "1
Panofsky, Erw in, xxi ii-xxiv , 224- 25; on Portrait (Frick), 15 , 16; View of Am- Sp rat, Th
Jan van Eyck, xxi, lS; on iconography, sterdam, 154,)55 ety, 74
xx, 235-36 Rijswick, Dirck van, Tribute to Nicholas Steen, JaJ
Paracelsus, 93 Verbureh, 180, 182 206; "1
Patinir, Joachim, 138 Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia. 166 Steen wyc
PClerin , Jean (V iato r) , 53-58, 247 Ronchi , Vasco, 241 Admir4
Penschilderij, 38, 180 Rubens, Peter Paul: contrasted to Sacn - Steinberg
Peny, Sir Willi am, The Advice of W. P., redam, "I72 , 175 ; on Drebbel , 5 ; and Steinberg
110 Hu ygens, 4; on print of images found in Sum mersl
Ph otography, 43, 243- 44 an apple tree. 82; and narrated depth,
Pi casso, Pablo, 266;figura serpentil1ata, 59; 211-14; oi l sketches of called drawin gs. Th eater al
Ma jolie, 169- 72; Sealed Woman, 59,61 38; painted cop ies. 40; source for Vc- Titian, 38
Pisanello, Antonio, 7 1 hl.zquC'.l'S Surrender at Breda, 160; use of
Pissarro , Ca mille , 132 both narrative and descriptive modes , xx, Uyt den!
Plin y, 24, 105 212; Apollo and the Python, 212- 14 ,
Pollaiuolo, Antonio and Piero del: figura 2 15; Entry of the Archduke Ferdinand, Vasari, G
serpentinata. 59; (attributed to) The Mar- 111 ; Landscape with H et Steen, 150, Veen,Ot)
tyrdom of St . Sebastian, 59,61 150-5 1; The Massacre of the Innocents , Vega, Gal
Porta, G. B. della, 41, 201 2 12,213; Medusa, 22; Meeting of jacob Velde, E.
Portraits historiees, 14- 15 ,239 and Esau . 160; The Miracles of St. Ig- 154
Pot, H en drik, I I3 natius Loyola, 172,173; St" Cecilia, 175, Vehizque:!
Potter, Paulu s, The Young Bull, 19, 19 175 ; Susanna and the Elders, 2 10,2 11 norther
Pourbu s, Pieter, 128 Ruisdael, Jacob van: and painter'S craft, 248; de
P.ou ss in, Nicolas: on aspect and prospect, 11 2; imaginary or historiated landscape, Seller, 1
48- 49 , 52; heroi c landscape mode, 14 7 132,266; panorami c landscapes and map - 11 8,241
Praz, Mario, 231 ping mode, 139, 145-47, 157,260; The 161
Protestantism, xxvi-xxvii, 24, 68, 2 14, 237 jewish Cemetery, 132, 266; Panorama of Venant, F
Proverbs, 76, 116- 18, 144-45,230 A msterdam, Its Harbor and the Ij, 260; 207, 20!
Ptolemy, Geography, 133-38, 167 View of Haarlem, 145-47,146, 157,266 Venezian<l
a
Pu gel de la Serre, Jean, La Secretaire la (Madon
Mode, 193 Saenredam, Pietcr, 38, 113,246- 48; in - Verm eer,
Pynas, Jan, painting described in play, 264 scriptions in church interiors, 172-80; 38; and
and mapping, 132, 138; and perspective, and hist
Regteren Ahena, ]. Q. van, 23 6 52- 53; viewpoints and viewers within
Reynolds , Sir Joshu a, journey to Flanders picture, 64 -69; Interior of the Buur
and Holland. xvii-xviii, xix, 29 - 30 ChurdJ, Utrecht, 52-53,54,5 5; Inten·or
Riegl, Alois , xx, 235, 251 of the Church of St. Bavo in Haarlem,
R embrandt van Rijn: biblical subjects, 207; 64,66,67, 175, 175; Interior of the
and descriptive mode, 224-28, 265- 66; Church of St. Odulphus in Assendeift,
history paintings, xxi i; and Hu ygens , 4; 169, 172- 74, 173; Interior of the St.
paint surface , 225 , 266; portraits Laurens Church at Alkmaar, 64,65; In-
historiees, 14- 15,239; represent ed con - terior of the Mariakerk in Utrecht, 176,
Index 273

Saenredam, Picter-continued conys, 110; and paime r's craft, tOO, 11 4,

176,177; Print to Belie Rumors aboul 115; The Art of Painting, 37,37, 106,
the Images Found in an Apple Tree, 11 9-26,120, 128, 136, 138-39, 147, 156,
80-83,81, 250; Profile Views of Leiden 165-68,166, 168, 222,242 (see a/so color
and Haarlem and Two Trees, 142, plate 2); The Astronomer, 122,222; The
152- 54, 180, 181 (see also color plate 4); Geographer, 122,222; The Lace-Maker,
St. Bav o, Haarlem, 68,68; The Seige of 31; The Music Lesson, 183,188,189; So/-
Hoar/em, 128 , 129, 139 dier and Laughing Girl, 30, J/ , 156;
Schama, Simon, 267 View of Delft, 27,29,31,35,123,
Schapi ro, Meyer, 249 123-24, 152- 59,228; Woman Playing a
Schnoor, Abraham van der, Vanilas Still Guitar, 118, 118, 224; \\'loman Reading a
Life, 84,87 Letter (Amsterdam), 122, 192,203-6,
Schwartz , Gary, 247, 261 204, 224; Woman Reading a Leuer
Searle, John, 248 (Dresden), 192, 202, 20J; Woman with
Spra nger, Banholomaus, Memorial to the SCdles, xxi
Wife of Bartholom;;us Spranger, 106, 107 Vignola, Giacomo Barrozzi da: Le due
Sp rat, Thomas, History of the Royal Soa- regole della perspettiva, 53-58, 138; the
ety, 74,79, 107-8, 11 0, I I I first "regola" Or the "construzione le-
Steen, Jan, 233, 265-66; Bathsheba, 205, ginima," 56, 138; the second " regola" Or
206; "Easy Come, Easy Go," 2 18, 219 the distance-point method, 56, 138
Steenwyck, Pieter, Allegory of the Death of Visscher, Claes Jansz.: map of the Sev-
Admira/ Tromp, 169, 174,174, 180 enteen Provinces (detail), 126,/27; map
Steinberg, Leo, 59, 245, 247 in The Art of Painting, 128, 147; The
Steinberg, Sau l, 26 1 Seige of Breda, 160,160-6 1; views of
Summers, David, 247 Amsterdam, 154
Vonde!, Joost van den, 264
Theater and Dutch art, 2 14-1 5, 264 Vries, Jan Vredeman de: Perspective,
Titian, 38 57-58; plate I, 57,57; plate 2,57,57;
plate 28,58,58; in Van Mander, 246
Uyt den geese, 40- 4 1, 242 Vroom, Hendrik, The Haarlem Gate, Am-
sterdam, 154,155
Vasari, Giorgio, xx, 38, 59, 177
Veen, OttO van, 193 Weenix, Jan, xvi i
Vega, GarciIosa de la, 198- 99 Wheelock, Arthur K., 240
Velde, Esias van de, Zierikzee, 152, 154, WiteIo,33
154 Wine, Emanuel dc, xx ii
Velazquez, Diego: and color, 38; combined Wind, Gaspar van: map of the Tiber, 128j
nonhern and southern modes, 69-70, View of the Tiber at Oroieto, 128,130 ;
248; descriptive mode, xx i; The Water- The Square and the Palace of Mon-
Seller, xxi; Las Meninas, 69, 69-70, lOS, tecavallo, 128, 1JO
118,248; The Surrender at Breda, 160 , Wolfflin, Heinrich, xx
161 Wotton, Sir Henry, 50-51
Venant, Franfois, David and Jonathan, Wollheim, Richard, xxiv
207,209
Veneziano, Domenico, St. Lucy Altarpiece Zesen, Philips von, Beschrifvingen Der
(Madonna and Child with Saints), 44, 45 wijdt-vermaarde Koops-stadt Amsterdam,
Vermeer, Jan: and thc absence of drawings, II I
38; and camera obscura, 30- 32,240-41; Zurbaran, Francisco de , Still Life with
and history painting, xx ii ; and Mon- Lemons. Oranges and a Rose, 52, 91

St .
,,",65; In -
;;rtchr, 176,