{"product_id":"alpers-svetlana-the-art-of-describing-9780226015132","title":"The Art of Describing","description":"\"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\n\u003cp\u003e\"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\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Used - good","offer_id":53828966285654,"sku":"9780226015132-G","price":27.89,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0925\/5829\/5382\/files\/product_image_9780226015132_1.jpg?v=1781828177","url":"https:\/\/www.momoxbooks.com\/products\/alpers-svetlana-the-art-of-describing-9780226015132","provider":"momoxbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}