The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century

ALPERS, Svetlana

History

Penguin

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

The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century

Arts & Photography

Univ of Chicago Pr

"The art historian after Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich is not only participating in an activity of great intellectual excitement; he is raising and exploring issues which lie very much at the centre of psychology, of the sciences and of history itself. Svetlana Alpers's study of 17th-century Dutch painting is a splendid example of this excitement and of the centrality of art history among current disciples. Professor Alpers puts forward a vividly argued thesis. There is, she says, a truly fundamental dichotomy between the art of the Italian Renaissance and that of the Dutch masters. . . . Italian art is the primary expression of a 'textual culture,' this is to say of a culture which seeks emblematic, allegorical or philosophical meanings in a serious painting. Alberti, Vasari and the many other theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance teach us to 'read' a painting, and to read it in depth so as to elicit and construe its several levels of signification. The world of Dutch art, by the contrast, arises from and enacts a truly 'visual culture.' It serves and energises a system of values in which meaning is not 'read' but 'seen,' in which new knowledge is visually recorded."—George Steiner, Sunday Times "There is no doubt that thanks to Alpers's highly original book the study of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century will be thoroughly reformed and rejuvenated. . . . She herself has the verve, the knowledge, and the sensitivity to make us see familiar sights in a new light."—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Discusses the implications of the discovery that several major paintings attributed to Rembrandt were painted by his students, and looks at Rembrandt's style, models, studio, and relationship to the art marketplace

Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market

"Singularly interesting and stimulating. . . . A passionate and original work of scholarship."—Richard Wollheim, Times Literary Supplement "With the publication [of Rembrandt's Enterprise], Svetlana Alpers has firmly established herself in the front ranks of art historians at work today. . . . The book is not a long one. Yet, there is more perceptive scholarship packed into its four chapters than is typically found in a whole shelf of the more common outpourings of academic writers. Rembrandt's Enterprise is less a book of archival discoveries than of fresh interpretation of the revered artist and his milieu. . . . Alpers makes us see how Rembrandt's complex and enormously popular art has embedded itself in our ways of thinking about who we are and how we live, even in the late 20th century."—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

Rubens has long been considered a remarkably successful, prolific, and fleshly painter, a frequenter of the courts of the great. He is more admired than loved in our time, in contrast to the troubled figure of Rembrandt. This book takes up basic questions about Rubens's art and life, studies two of his bacchic paintings in detail, and discovers him in a less easy and more identifiably modern predicament.The first problem Alpers addresses is one of the relationship between making art and national consciousness. Why and how did Rubens paint the revelling Flemish peasants in the great Louvre Kermis? The circumstances, tone, and feeling of this picture are investigated and found to involve deep ambivalences that are political, social, and aesthetic.The second problem is that of art and its consumption. Beginning with Watteau, the making of a Rubensian art is traced in the taste for Rubens in the eighteenth century in France, where many of the pictures he had kept for his own collection had found their way. In the writings of Roger de Piles and in the work of the painters to follow, art is made out of the viewing and discussing of art. A binary system of taste emerged for Rubens as contrasted with Poussin, and critical distinctions came to be fashioned in the binary terms of gender.Finally, Alpers considers creativity itself and how, as a man and as a painter, Rubens could have viewed his own generative talent. An analysis of his Munich Silenus - fleshy, intoxicated, and, following Virgil's account, disempowered as a condition of producing his songs - reveals a sense of the creative gift as humanly indeterminate and equivocal.Fully illustrated with many drawings and paintings in color, this book complicates and deepens the interest of Rubens and of his works.

The Making of Rubens

Biographies & Memoirs

Yale University Press

This rich and readable study places Rubens`s art and life in a modern context. In a provocative discussion of Rubens`s bacchic pictures, Svetlana Alpers takes up the relation between making art and national consciousness, the role played by gender in the formation of artistic taste, and the equivocal nature of human creativity.

This study by two brilliant and eminently readable art historians looks at Tiepolo`s works as an example of the specifically pictorial as distinguished from the verbal intelligence. Alpers and Baxandall show that Tiepolo`s greatness lies not in stories told, or in meanings pursued, but in the use of his visual medium-drawing, painting, and natural lighting. They conclude with a study of his best and biggest painting, The Four Continents at Wrzburg, newly photographed for this book. The book ends with an annotated gazetteer for travellers, listing those Tiepolo paintings that can still be seen in the places and conditions for which he painted them.

Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence

Baxandall, Michael

Individual Artists

Velázquez is often considered an artist apart: great, but isolated in a palace/ museum in Spain. This highly original book sets him in conjunction with certain conditions of painting in his time and after.From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, roughly from Rembrandt and Vermeer to Matisse and Picasso, a succession of European painters has taken the studio as the world; that is, the studio is where the worldas it gets into paintingis experienced. Svetlana Alpers first focuses on this retreat into the confines of the studio, then looks at the ways in which the paintings of the Dutch masters and Velázquez acknowledge war and rivalry while offering a way out. The final chapters give a new account of Velázquez’s The Spinners, a ravishing painting which has been eclipsed by interest in the enigmas of Las Meninas. Alpers concentrates on the seventeenth century but also looks back to Velázquez’s predecessors Titian and Rubens and forward to his modern successors. She discusses Velázquez’s resemblance to Manet, whose art also vexes or unsettles, giving us reason to pause and look. The book concludes by asking whether painting continues to do that today.

The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others

A major art historian reflects on a great tradition of European painting.
"The Vexations of Art is an engrossing, passionate attempt to re-engage with painting as a mode of thought at a time when 'it is not clear in what form the resource of painting—for surely painting has been a singular resource of the greater European culture—will continue."—Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times
"[A] fascinating book that will surely generate discussion for some time to come."—Mindy Nancarrow, Renaissance Quarterly

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Books by ALPERS, Svetlana

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by ALPERS, Svetlana. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The art of describing: Dutch art in the seventeenth century

The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century

The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century

Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market

Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market

The Making of Rubens

The Making of Rubens

Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence

The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others

The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others