Svetlana Alpers.
The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century

A study of visual culture in seventeenth-century Dutch society.

In The Art of Describing, the American art historian Svetlana Alpers offers an original reading of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Alpers argues that, unlike Italian painting, Dutch painting is not textual but visual in nature, and considers what the possible meanings and purposes of so detailed an imitation of reality might have been.

In her search for answers, Alpers turns to a wide variety of sources, ranging from studies of the eye by Johannes Kepler to Francis Bacon’s theory of knowledge. Dutch painting emerges from Alpers’s study as not simply a reflection of reality, but a way of closely observing the world.

Svetlana Alpers (b. 1936) is an American art historian, professor, writer, and critic. She specialises in Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionised with The Art of Describing in 1984. Alpers is also the author of important works on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others.

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.