{"product_id":"the-art-of-describing-dutch-art-in-the-seventeenth-century-9780226015132","title":"The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"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 Alperss 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 Alperss 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\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45280001785909,"sku":"ByrdShop_0226015130","price":36.57,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780226015132.jpg?v=1780617430","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-art-of-describing-dutch-art-in-the-seventeenth-century-9780226015132","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}